Oberoi House Reed

The dive

Oberoi House Reef is the reef in front of The Oberoi Beach Resort at Sahl Hasheesh, south of Hurghada. Our catalogue carries it as 'Oberoi House Reed', which is the spelling PADI publishes; the word is reef. Everything written about the site comes from the resort and from Dive Pro Academy, the PADI five-star centre based in the hotel, so read what follows as the house's own account of its own reef rather than an independent one. What both describe is about a kilometre of reef worked as more than five separate routes rather than as a single dive.

Entry is from the resort's private jetty, with the equipment set up before you walk in. Dive Pro Academy describe the reef starting to the right and left in front of the jetty, a sandy bottom dropping to a large seagrass area at around 10 m, and a coral garden to the east at 28 m. Their published working range is 5 to 27 m; the site entry the centre contributed to PADI gives 30 m as the maximum. Along its length the reef is a mix of wall, sandy plateau and coral garden, with coral heads, small walls and caves. The centre calls the northern route the quiet one and the southern ones the coral routes, and runs dives with the current along the wall as a way of covering the distance rather than as a drift proper.

The water is described as calm and sheltered with barely any current, which is why the centre uses the reef for course work as well as guided dives and rates it for divers of all levels. PADI lists Dive Pro Academy as a five-star instructor development resort offering freediving and snorkelling alongside scuba and TecRec, with nitrox and rental gear on site, and the resort advertises night dives and private dives on top of the standard ones. Diving is supervised by a PADI professional and priced from USD 110 with equipment.

For life, the operator's own list for the reef is seahorses, boxfish, triggerfish and eagle rays. The OBIS occurrence records inside 1.5 km of this pin match a sheltered shallow shore reef rather than a big-animal site: banded pipefish, blacktail and diagonal butterflyfish, Rueppell's wrasse, rusty and candelamoa parrotfish, day octopus, small giant clams, blue-spotted ribbontail ray, Red Sea goatfish, broomtail wrasse, leopard and bluebelly blennies, upside-down jellyfish on the sand, and devil firefish. Nothing published dates the state of the coral, so we record none. The operator calls this the only and exclusive dive site in Sahl Hasheesh; what that means in practice is that the frontage is private, not that the bay has no other reef.

• About a kilometre of reef worked as more than five separate north and south routes
• Walk-in from the resort's own jetty with the gear already set up
• Sandy bottom dropping to a large seagrass area at around 10 m
• A coral garden to the east at 28 m, and coral heads, small walls and caves along the wall
• Calm sheltered water with barely any current, used for course work at every level

Conditions

A normal day is a walk from the dive centre to the jetty with the equipment already laid out, a step-in entry into sheltered water with barely any current, and a choice between the shallow sand and seagrass or a route along the wall. Nothing published records a season, a swell pattern or a visibility range beyond the centre's own 30 m claim.

On current: Dive Pro Academy, the centre on the site, describe barely any current and a calm sheltered sea, and use that as the reason the reef works for training. The same house contributed the PADI entry, which lists drift among the dive types and describes dives with the current; read together, that means the guides use whatever water movement there is to cover the reef's length rather than that this is a drift site. Depth is where the two operator figures part: the centre publishes a 5 to 27 m working range with a coral garden at 28 m to the east, while the PADI entry gives 30 m as the maximum. We record 30 m because it is the deeper of the two and because a shore entry onto a wall makes depth a decision rather than a limit the site imposes. Visibility is left unset: the only published number is the centre's own 30 m for its own house reef, and no independent figure exists.