Yolanda house reef

The dive

This entry is named 'Yolanda house reef', which is misleading: the coordinates it carries (27.7263 N, 34.2612 E) are the ones PADI publishes for Yolanda Reef inside Ras Mohammed National Park, and PADI's own text for that record is the standard Shark and Yolanda description. There is no separate resort house reef at this position - it is roughly 16 km south-west of Sharm El Sheikh, at the tip of the Sinai peninsula, an hour by boat. Treat this page as Shark and Yolanda Reef.

The site is two reefs run as one drift. Shark Reef is a vertical wall dropping into deep water; a saddle connects it to Yolanda Reef, where a small wall from the surface opens into a plateau at roughly 12 to 20 m scattered with pinnacles and soft coral. The usual plan is to start at Shark Reef and drift south onto Yolanda. Current is described as moderate to strong and the dive is normally planned around it rather than against it.

The name comes from the freighter Yolanda, which struck the reef in the 1980s. The hull itself was pushed over the edge by a storm and now lies at about 180 m, far outside any recreational limit, but part of the cargo stayed in the shallows: the bathroom fittings - toilets, bathtubs, sinks - that give the site its nickname sit around 15 to 18 m and are now colonised by coral.

Ras Mohammed is a national park, declared in 1983 and managed by Egypt's Environmental Affairs Agency. Diving is allowed in designated areas only, visitors leave the park by sunset, and a marine-park fee is collected by the dive centre at booking. We hold no OBIS occurrence records for this site, so nothing on this page is drawn from the occurrence data - the species named in the sources are dive-guide reporting.

• Drift from Shark Reef across the saddle onto the Yolanda plateau
• Cargo of bathroom fittings from the wreck at roughly 15-18 m
• Plateau at 12-20 m with pinnacles and soft coral
• Inside Ras Mohammed National Park; park rules and a park fee apply

Conditions

A drift, normally north to south from Shark Reef onto the Yolanda plateau, in moderate to strong current. Area visibility is quoted at 10-40 m and water temperature 20-28 C through the year. The plateau sits at 12-20 m; the walls beside it fall away far deeper.

On current: Dive The World rates the current moderate to strong and says the site is best dived as a drift from Shark Reef to Yolanda. Visibility across the Ras Mohammed area is quoted as a 10-40 m range; we record the conservative lower bound. Water temperature for the area is given as 20-28 C seasonally. PADI lists a 40 m maximum for this record while the Yolanda plateau itself is described at 12-20 m; we record 12-40 m, and a recreational plan should stay on the plateau.

Dives & underwater footage