Fayrouz Hous Reef North

The dive

Fayrouz Reef is the house reef of the Three Corners Fayrouz Plaza Beach Resort, just south of the Port Ghalib marina and a few kilometres from Marsa Alam airport. It runs along the resort's beach, and the catalogue holds it as two pins 470 m apart, this northern one and Fayrouz House Reef South. Be aware of what that means in practice: every source we found describes the reef as one house reef with several entry points, and none of them describes the north end separately from the south end. Read this page as the north end of a reef that is documented as a whole, and set your expectations for the detail accordingly.

The layout, from Snorkeling Report, is a sheltered lagoon of roughly 0.6 to 6 m behind a reef flat, and outside it an almost vertical drop-off; the reef flat is too shallow to walk across, so you get past it on a pontoon with two platforms and stairs into the water. Extra Divers, the dive centre on the resort beach, describes the same thing from the diving side: the reef is directly in front of the hotel, reached by a long jetty a few metres from the centre, and the entry and exit are sheltered enough that the house reef stays diveable in almost any weather. A first-hand snorkelling account adds that the water at the far end of the jetty is deep and that the stairs partway along it drop you into the shallow lagoon instead — the two options are genuinely different dives.

What lives here is the reason the reef gets dived several times a day rather than once. Extra Divers lists octopus, moray eels, rays, and regular barracuda and turtles, with occasional manta rays and whitetip reef sharks. Snorkeling Report adds butterflyfish, pufferfish, wrasse, lionfish, surgeonfish and bannerfish, and rays in the sandy patches inside the lagoon; the same account notes seagrass beds visited by green turtles. The OBIS occurrence data around this pin is unusually dense for the Red Sea coast and matches that: blue-spotted ribbontail ray, spotted eagle ray, giant moray, titan triggerfish, coral hind, live sharksucker, banded pipefish and a long list of butterflyfish, wrasse and parrotfish.

Two constraints are worth knowing before you go. Snorkeling Report states that access to the reef requires staying at the resort, and that swimming along the house reef from Fayrouz to Marsa Mubarak is no longer permitted. It also reports a slight north-south current along the outer wall and warns against drifting too far from the pontoon, and notes that the exposed outer section can be closed in strong wind even when the lagoon is fine.

• Near-vertical drop-off immediately outside a shallow, sheltered lagoon
• Pontoon and jetty entry that works in almost any weather
• Green turtles over the seagrass, blue-spotted and eagle rays on the sand
• One of the densest OBIS species records of any pin on this coast

Conditions

A normal day is flat water inside the lagoon whatever the weather is doing, because the entry is sheltered by design, with a little along-shore current once you are outside on the wall. No source publishes a visibility figure for this reef, so we record none. Water temperature follows the regional pattern Emperor Divers gives for the Egyptian Red Sea: around 22 degrees in winter, up to about 30 at the height of summer.

On current: Snorkeling Report describes a slight north-south dominant current along the outer reef wall and advises not to venture too far from the pontoon along it, which is the practical limit on this dive rather than any depth. Extra Divers separately says the entry and exit are sheltered enough to dive the house reef in almost any weather; those two are compatible — the entry is protected, the outer wall is not, and Snorkeling Report notes the exposed section can be closed in strong wind while the lagoon stays usable. We record no maximum depth: no operator publishes one for the outer wall, and the only depth figures we could source are the lagoon at roughly 0.6 to 6 m and the snorkellable face of the drop-off at about 9 to 11 m.

Best months: Mar, Apr, May, Sep, Oct, Nov