Coral Garden / Gassous Bay

The dive

Gassous Bay - dived and marketed as Coral Garden after the resort that sits on it - is a sheltered bay about 22 km south of Safaga, and one of the easiest shore-diving sites on the Safaga to El Quseir coast. The ORCA dive base is on the beach and the water is a short walk away; one long-standing visitor account puts it at thirty steps from the base. There is no boat traffic in the bay, so night and early-morning dives run daily.

The reef runs from the shallows down to about 30 m, with a north and a south side and coral gardens on both flanks. Entry is over the reef top and the standard route drops through a gap in the reef into a canyon before opening onto the gardens. Coral blocks stand in the middle of the bay at around 20 m and are the reliable spot for white morays and shrimp; the bay is also a known macro site, with ghost pipefish among the residents regulars come back for. Directories describe Red Sea reef fauna generally, with dolphins and turtles occasionally and no sharks.

One caveat travels with every description: the channel through the reef can run a stronger current, and when it does you may not get through it at all and are limited to the inner bay. That is a bad-day inconvenience rather than a hazard, because the inner bay is itself a full dive.

Our OBIS records for this position are the second-richest of this batch and are entirely reef fauna: cheeklined wrasse, coral hind, Forsskal's goatfish, clown coris, domino damselfish, tentacled flathead (crocodilefish), threadfin butterflyfish, Red Sea bannerfish, common lionfish, yellow-edged lyretail, lyretail hogfish, purple-brown parrotfish, Indian damsel, two-band anemonefish, white-spotted pufferfish, hermit crab, cornetfish and crescent-tail bigeye.

• Shore dive straight off the beach - about thirty steps from the dive base
• No boat traffic in the bay; night and early-morning dives run daily
• Reef from the shallows to about 30 m with gardens on the north and south sides
• Coral blocks at around 20 m mid-bay with white morays and shrimp
• A macro site: ghost pipefish among the residents

Conditions

A sheltered bay with easy beach entry, no boat traffic and no current inside, divable in essentially any weather. Reef from the shallows to about 30 m, with coral blocks mid-bay at around 20 m. The channel through the reef is the exception: current there can be strong enough to stop you passing. No published visibility figure, so none is recorded.

On current: Directories describe the bay itself as having no current and being divable in any weather. The exception is the channel through the reef, where the current can be stronger - sometimes strong enough that you cannot get through it and are limited to the inner bay. Depth is quoted as 1-30 m with the bottom of the bay at 14-30 m. No source publishes a visibility figure, so none is recorded.

Dives & underwater footage