Habili Ganna

The dive

Habili Ganna — Orca Dive Club writes it Habili Gannah, Wikivoyage transliterates it Ḥabīlī Gināḥ — is a habili, the local word for a reef whose top stays under the surface. That matters practically: there is nothing to see from the boat, nothing to shelter behind, and a swell that a surface reef would break simply rolls over it, so these sites get dived on flat days and skipped on rough ones.

Orca Dive Club, which runs it from Wadi Lahmy, describes the dive as four large blocks forming the centre of the site with smaller coral blocks around the edges, all heavily overgrown, and gives a maximum depth of 26 m. The operator rates it fish-rich and grades it above its shallow beginner sites. That is the whole published description: no source we found gives a visibility figure, a current measurement or a dated assessment of the coral at this reef, so those fields are blank rather than guessed.

The position in our catalogue is wrong and we can say by how much. Wikivoyage's Fury Shoal article places Ḥabīlī Gināḥ at 24°13'2"N, 35°36'31"E — roughly 24.2172, 35.6086 — which puts it about 600 m south-south-west of Sha'ab Claudio at 24°13'21"N, 35°36'36"E, and about 1.1 km east of Sha'ab Ini. Our pin sits at 24.2248, 35.4387, some 17 km west of that, on the Wadi Lahmy resort shoreline along with a dozen other Fury Shoals names from the same import. The Wikivoyage coordinate is independently consistent with the way operators describe the site, which is always by its closeness to Sha'ab Claudio, the cave-and-canyon reef that is the best-known dive in this part of the group.

For the same reason we have not written a species list for this page. The occurrence records attached to this pin were collected at the coast, not at the reef, and Orca's description names habitat rather than animals. Whatever the sand-and-block community here actually is, we do not yet hold a record of it from the right position.

• Four large coral blocks forming the centre of the site, with smaller blocks around the edge
• A submerged reef — the dive starts as soon as you leave the surface
• About 600 m from Sha'ab Claudio, so usually dived on the same boat day

Conditions

Open-water Fury Shoals conditions with no shelter: the boat moors on the south or south-west side, the reef sits entirely below the surface, and the dive works four large blocks down to 26 m. Regionally the southern Red Sea runs about 22 C in winter to 30 C in summer, with visibility often over 20 to 30 m in the calmer months.

On current: No source publishes a current rating for Habili Ganna itself. Wikivoyage's Fury Shoal article notes the prevailing current in the group runs from the north-east, which is why boats moor on the south or south-west side of these reefs. Because the reef is submerged it offers no surface shelter, so sea state rather than current is what decides whether the dive runs.

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