Fish and Friends

The dive

Fish and Friends is a shore entry on the central bay of Dahab, named after the dive centre of the same name that has sat on that beach since 1997. The pin is roughly 300 m south of the Lighthouse and about 130 m from both Bannerfish Bay and Mashraba, which is to say it is one access point on a continuous strip of town-bay frontage rather than a separate reef. Blue Ocean Dive, a Dahab centre, lists it under its own name as a shore dive graded for beginners with a maximum depth of 30 m. Several other Dahab centres, including Poseidon Divers, Sinai Divers and Deep Blue Divers, do not list the name at all and fold the same water into Bannerfish Bay, Lighthouse and Mashraba, so treat this as a local name for one entry point on the chain of Dahab shore dives.

The dive splits at the entry. Turn north and you follow reef tongues and coral blocks standing on sand. Turn south and the ground is seagrass-covered mounds with the sculpture installation Dahab centres call the underwater museum: metal figures sunk in the town bay from around 2010 onward, put there deliberately to pull divers off the natural reef and to give coral something to grow on. Press coverage of the project places some of the statues at the Lighthouse end of the same frontage, so how much of the installation you see depends on which way the guide turns. Entry is over the beach, described by the centre as one of the few natural beaches left in the bay. The Wikivoyage guide to Dahab notes that coral here sits close to shore and that walk-ins are restricted to selected access points, both to limit reef damage and to keep divers off the coral.

What lives on this stretch is town-bay reef life rather than anything pelagic. The OBIS records around this pin are led by devil firefish, two-band anemonefish, sea goldies, masked puffers, and crown, threadfin and diagonal butterflyfish, with Red Sea bannerfish in numbers, the schooling species that gave the neighbouring bay its name. On the sand there are Red Sea garden eels and small giant clams; for night dives the same records hold Spanish dancer and the striped pyjama nudibranch. This is the water Dahab trains in, so expect other groups on the same line, and expect a shallow, slow dive rather than a profile.

• Reef tongues and coral blocks on sand if you turn north from the entry
• Seagrass mounds and part of Dahab's sunken sculpture installation if you turn south
• Walk-in from the dive centre's beach — no boat, no camel, no transfer
• Schooling Red Sea bannerfish, garden eels on the sand, Spanish dancer at night
• Beginner-graded and shallow: this is where Dahab runs open-water training

Conditions

A calm, shallow bay entry. Sea temperature in Dahab runs from about 21 C in winter to about 28 C in late summer. Nothing we read reports a visibility figure for this entry, so we have left it blank rather than guess.

On current: No source we read rates the current at this entry specifically. Blue Ocean Dive grades it a beginner shore dive, and the centres that describe the same town-bay frontage list these as easy shore entries rather than drift dives; the current-driven Dahab sites are north at the Canyon and the Bells. Because the exit is the same beach you walked in from, fix it visually before you drop.