El Sakhwa

The dive

El Sakhwa, written by operators as Sakhwat Abu Galawa, Sachwa Abu Galawa or El Sachwa, is one dive on the Abu Galawa reef, a shallow reef complex lying south of El Gouna and north of Hurghada. The reef is not a single dive: local guides count it as four to six named sites, and Marsa Abu Galawa with its lagoon and seagrass, the round Gota Abu Galawa, Shaab Abu Galawa and the more exposed Erg Abu Galawa are all separate entries in this catalogue. El Sakhwa is described by one Hurghada guide as the northernmost of them, and our pin sits about 1.4 km north of the gota.

The operator account with a published position and a dive plan runs it as a drift. Swiss Wellness Dive Club puts it at 27 degrees 19.39 minutes north, 33 degrees 47.44 minutes east, about 50 minutes out of El Gouna, and describes dropping in a few hundred metres to the north along the wall and following it with the wall on your right shoulder; you can push out over the plateau for a few minutes but the shallow side is the better half, and where the reef reaches the small plateau it makes a sharp right turn and eventually swings back north. A second El Gouna centre describes the same place as free-standing coral towers rising from white sand, each one circled from a base at around 15 m up to a reef top a few metres below the surface, with glassfish and orange anthias massed around them.

What you actually see is small-reef material rather than anything pelagic. Logged dives on this spot record green moray, shrimp, pufferfish, scorpionfish and nudibranchs; operators add clownfish, octopus, snake eel, stonefish, lionfish, bluespotted and fantail stingrays, eagle rays and occasional dolphins on the reef. The occurrence records around the pin are thin and mostly single sightings, which is consistent with a lightly sampled site rather than a poor one: twoband anemonefish and sea goldie lead the list, with bluespotted ribbontail ray, giant moray, coronation trout, hooded butterflyfish and a scattering of wrasse and sponges behind them.

The reef's real function for El Gouna and Hurghada boats is that it is close, shallow and forgiving, and the moorings behind it stay usable when the wind has closed better sites. The cost of that position is the crossing: the reef sits in open, unprotected water and the sail out is reported as bumpy in wind.

• Drift along the reef wall onto a small plateau where the reef turns sharply and swings back north
• Free-standing coral towers on white sand, circled from about 15 m to a top a few metres under the surface
• Dense glassfish and anthias on the towers, with moray, octopus, scorpionfish and nudibranchs as the working list
• One of the reefs El Gouna and Hurghada boats fall back on when wind closes the better sites

Conditions

Boat dive on a shallow reef with sand between the coral, visibility averaging around 20 m and reaching 30 on good days, with the northern end of the Abu Galawa reef clearer than the southern. Water runs roughly 22 to 29 C across the year on the logged dives for this reef. Enough current to drift.

On current: Sources disagree on depth and we have not resolved it, so plan for the deeper figure and expect the shallower one. Swiss Wellness Dive Club gives a maximum of 22 m and dives the site as a drift; Scuba World Divers publishes 8 to 15 m for the same name; Divers Guide records 18 m for the spot and its logged dives sit around 15 m. The current is the same story in miniature: Divers Guide labels the Abu Galawa reef limited-current and then calls El Sachwa itself moderate, while the operator that publishes a plan for it treats it as a drift dive. Assume enough flow to drift and enough that a group can separate over the sand.