The dive
The Grand Makadi house reef is the northern end of a fringing reef that runs about a mile along the northern shore of Makadi Bay, some 40 km south of Hurghada. Five resorts sit on that shore and each has its own way onto the same reef: the Sunrise, Fort Arabesque, the Grand Waterworld Makadi, the Makadi Spa Hotel and the Grand Makadi itself. This pin is the Grand Makadi end of it. The hotel's own page describes a long beach and a jetty that puts guests straight over the house reef, and it has no dive centre of its own; the diving on this stretch is run by Aquarius Diving Club, a PADI five-star centre on the beach at the Grand Waterworld next door, inside the same Red Sea Hotels complex.
What separates this end from the Fort Arabesque end 1.6 km to the south is the reef flat. At Fort Arabesque you cross a 40 m flat on foot through gaps in the reef marked by buoys, which the beach staff enforce. Here the reef is wider and Snorkeling Report is blunt that the flat cannot be snorkelled at all because it is too shallow, so the jetty is the way in. Marked Makadi Moelo on that map, it opens 10:00 to 16:00 and drops you on the reef edge; you then follow the drop-off with it on your right. From the jetty an experienced snorkeller can drift the whole 1.6 km south to the Fort Arabesque beach, a one-way run with no exit in between, which is why the same page grades that itinerary for advanced snorkellers while rating the spot as a whole beginner with a 7 m maximum.
For scuba, nobody publishes a profile for this specific entry. Aquarius lists its house reef generically as a beach-entry shore dive of 0 to 30 m, calm, open to all levels, and uses it for Discover Scuba intro dives, course work and night dives; the PADI pin, which Aquarius itself contributed, declares shore entry and beach and drift dive types. Take those as the operator's own framing of the stretch rather than as a surveyed profile. The occurrence record within 1.5 km of the pin is a dense, ordinary northern Red Sea fringing-reef community and one of the richest we hold in the bay: ringed and purple tang, Rueppell's and broomtail wrasse, rusty, daisy and dusky parrotfish, Red Sea and striated surgeonfish, brown unicornfish, threadfin, diagonal, bluecheek and crown butterflyfish, masked and stripebelly puffer, twoband anemonefish, royal angelfish, Picasso triggerfish, blue-spotted ribbontail rays on the sand, common lionfish and small giant clams. Aquarius adds turtles, moray eels and anemonefish to that list from its own dives.
One caution about the paperwork. The PADI entry for this pin carries word for word the same marine-life sentence as the PADI entry for the neighbouring Makadi house reef, where it opens "The house reef at IDive Makadi Bay in front of Fort Arabesque Resort": one dive centre's copy pasted onto a second pin a kilometre up the beach. We have used the PADI page only for the position and for the entry and dive types the contributing centre declared, and nothing in the prose above rests on that borrowed sentence. No Makadi operator dive-site list we read publishes Grand Makadi as a named site at all; the house-reef entries they do name along this bay are Fort Arabesque, Grand Coral and Royal Azur.
- Jetty entry that puts you straight on the drop-off, no reef flat to cross
- 1.6 km of continuous fringing reef running south to Fort Arabesque
- One of the densest species records we hold anywhere in Makadi Bay
- Run as a training and night-dive site by the centre next door
Please note before you go
- The reef flat at this end is too shallow to cross on foot or by snorkel; the jetty is the entry, and wading out over the flat damages the coral and does not work
- The drift from the jetty to Fort Arabesque beach is 1.6 km one way with no exit in between
- Common lionfish are recorded on this reef and named by the operator
SeaLog
