Pro Master - House Reef

The dive

This is a dive centre's own beach rather than a reef with a history. Pro Master Hurghada, a PADI 5 Star centre founded in 2010, operates from the Seagull Hotel on the Hurghada coast, and the pin marks the shore entry it uses. The centre runs house reef dives from the beach twice a day, morning and afternoon, alongside its boat trips, so most of the diving logged here is either training or a second dive of the day rather than a destination trip.

The entry is a sandy beach, which is the whole reason the site works: you walk in, and the ground is soft and shallow rather than a reef table to clamber over. The centre describes coral spread out on both sides of the entry, most of it young growth, and the feature the dive is built around is an old wooden boat lying on the bottom at 19 m directly in front of the centre. It is used as a training objective. The stated maximum for the site is 30 m. Note that 19 m is just past the 18 m limit an Open Water certification carries, so the wreck itself belongs to an Advanced or deep-adventure dive even though the reef around it is beginner ground.

Everything above comes from Pro Master itself, through its own pages and the listing it contributed to padi.com. No independent description of this stretch of beach exists that we could find, and no source gives a current, a visibility figure or a seasonal preference for it, so those are left blank rather than borrowed from the Hurghada offshore reefs, which behave nothing like a sheltered hotel beach.

The occurrence records around this pin are worth reading on their own terms. They are dominated by nudibranchs to a degree no other Hurghada pin in our catalogue is: the striped pyjama nudibranch is the most-recorded animal here, followed by Pikachu nudibranch, Spanish dancer, African and spectacled rainbow dorids, Nembrotha megalocera and half a dozen more. Alongside them sit a long run of emperors, spangled, yellowlip, smalltooth, sky, snubnose, slender and redspot, plus several parrotfish, blackspotted rubberlip, banded pipefish and devil firefish. That profile is what a shallow, sandy, heavily and repeatedly dived shore site produces: a lot of small things found by people with cameras and time, rather than one big encounter.

• Walk-in sandy beach entry directly from the dive centre, with no boat day required
• An old wooden boat wreck at 19 m lying in front of the centre, used as a training objective
• Young coral growth spreading either side of the entry
• House reef dives run morning and afternoon, so it works as a second or third dive of the day
• An unusually deep nudibranch record for a Hurghada pin, from years of repeat shore dives

Conditions

A sheltered hotel beach on the Hurghada strip: shallow sand, young coral either side of the entry, and a short swim out to the wreck. No published figures for visibility or current.

On current: No source gives a current, a visibility figure or a seasonal window for this beach, and we have not carried one across from the Hurghada offshore reefs, which are a different kind of water. The two depths that are sourced come from the operator: the old wooden boat sits at 19 m, and the stated maximum for the site is 30 m. The gap between those numbers and the beginner grading is the thing to plan around, because 19 m is beyond the 18 m depth limit of an Open Water certification even though the shallow coral either side of the entry is straightforward.