El Malek

The dive

El Malek is an offshore reef site between Hurghada and Makadi Bay, worked as a day-boat dive of roughly 30 to 40 minutes from either end. The three operators that publish a description agree on the shape of it: a coral plateau running from about 8 to 20 m, a drop-off falling away past that to around 40 m, and a coral garden alongside a sandy slope. Extra Fun Divers grades it medium and puts it about 30 minutes north of Makadi Bay; DiveRED, which runs bases at Hurghada Marina, Makadi Bay and Sahl Hasheesh, grades it intermediate, gives a 40-minute boat ride and quotes roughly 20 m of visibility and mild current.

Where they part company is the wreck. DiveRED describes "the remains of the El Malek tug" on a sandy slope at 28 m next to the coral garden. Scuba World Divers describes something else under the same name: the El Malek El Saghier, "The Little King", a small fishing trawler deliberately sunk as a dive attraction, sitting upright on sand at a maximum of 18 m, complete enough to circle the propeller and rudder, look into a cargo hold full of glassfish and swim through an open wheelhouse. Extra Fun Divers describes the plateau and the drop-off and mentions no wreck at all. We have not found a source that settles it, so treat the wreck as probable but its identity and depth as unresolved, and get the briefing before you plan the dive around it.

The fish list is consistent across the operators even when the topography is not: tuna and mackerel in the blue, reef sharks and turtles as the good-day sightings, and moray eels, scorpionfish and nudibranchs on the reef itself, with lionfish hunting at dusk. Occurrence records near this pin are thin because the area is barely sampled — 21 taxa, almost all single records — but they do include great barracuda, Indian mackerel and Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin, which fits the open-water character of the site. We have left the reef-state and life-variety judgements blank rather than infer them from a sample that small.

• A coral plateau at 8 to 20 m with a drop-off falling to about 40 m
• A small sunken vessel reported by two of the three operators who dive the site
• Tuna and mackerel in the blue, reef sharks and turtles on a good day
• Glassfish in the hold and an open wheelhouse, if you get the wreck version of the dive
• About 30 to 40 minutes by boat from Makadi Bay or Hurghada Marina

Conditions

An offshore day-boat dive with, on the one operator figure we have, around 20 m of visibility and mild current. Open water on the drop-off side, so it is more exposed than the sheltered lagoons and house reefs closer in.

On current: DiveRED calls the current here mild and accepts open-water as well as advanced divers. Nothing else we read rates it. The real disagreement is depth, not current: the plateau is 8 to 20 m in every description, but the reported bottom of the dive is 18 m (Scuba World Divers, on the wreck), 28 m (DiveRED, on the tug and the sandy slope) and about 40 m (the drop-off, given by both Extra Fun Divers and Scuba World Divers as the site maximum). We have carried the deepest as the planning figure. If you are open-water certified, the plateau is the dive and the wreck may not be inside your limits.