Halg El Shouni

The dive

Halg El Shouni is a halg rather than a marsa - on this stretch of the Marsa Alam coast that word means a narrow inlet cut into the reef rather than the wide sandy bay a marsa gives you. Wannadive's entry for the neighbouring Halg Salmaan spells out the distinction and the shape it implies: a small inlet with reef walls on the north and south sides, rarely visited compared with the marsas around it. Halg El Shouni sits south of Port Ghalib among that string of inlets and bays, roughly a kilometre from Marsa Mourain and 1.7 km from Marsa Shoni Bay, all of them separate shore dives worked by the same road-transfer operators.

SeaHorse Diving Club, who run the site, describe the entry as a small pool inside the back reef table about 25 m from the shore, from which you pass through a small channel and a tunnel to reach the open reef. Outside, the dive splits. The south side is a wall grown over with hard and soft corals that slopes down past 30 m and leads to two eel gardens on the sand. The north side has a large coral block with cleaning stations on it and a second wall covered in hard coral. They give 40 m as the maximum depth, rate the current low and the dive easy to medium for certified divers, and say to do it at high tide with low wind. They also mark it as not suitable for snorkelling, which the entry alone would tell you.

The biological record here is thin: OBIS holds 49 taxa within 1.5 km of the pin, and every one of them sits at four occurrences or fewer, so this is a lightly surveyed piece of coast rather than a well-documented one. What is recorded is consistent with the topography - sand-dwellers like Steinitz' shrimpgoby and blackfin dartfish out where the eel gardens are, giant moray and bluespotted ribbontail ray on the reef, sea goldies, twoband anemonefish, lionfish and fire coral, and a single dugong occurrence. Treat that last one as what it is: one record in the area, not a reason to come.

• Entry through a pool inside the back reef table, then a small channel and a tunnel out to the open reef
• South: a hard- and soft-coral wall sloping past 30 m onto two eel gardens
• North: a large coral block with cleaning stations and a second hard-coral wall
• A halg, a narrow inlet rather than a bay, on a coast where most shore dives are marsas

Conditions

An undeveloped inlet on a road-transfer shore-diving coast: you arrive by vehicle with an operator, walk in, and cross the back reef table to the entry pool. SeaHorse Diving Club rate the current low and prescribe high tide and low wind, which is the honest summary of a normal day here - it works when the sea is down and it does not when it is not. No source read gives visibility or water temperature for this pin.

On current: SeaHorse Diving Club rate the current at this site low, and that is the only measurement any source read offers. The variable that actually decides the dive here is not current but tide and wind: they specify diving it at high tide with low wind, which is what makes the pool, channel and tunnel entry workable. No source gives a direction, a seasonal pattern, or conditions on the outside walls.