Kalawy House Reef, South

The dive

Kalawy Bay sits about 30 km south of Safaga, and this pin is the southern of the two dives the resort's dive centre runs on its own fringing reef. Access is off a jetty roughly 250 m long that carries you across the reef flat to a platform at the outer edge; kit goes out on the platform and you enter down a ladder. Directly beneath the entry there is a sandy shelf at about 5 m with a large coral block on it, and the reef immediately either side of the entry is steep enough that a scientific survey team skipped it as unsuitable for transects. From there you turn left for the north dive or right for the south, and which way you go is decided by the current on the day. The reef is worked from the surface down to about 30 m.

This reef has something almost no other Egyptian house reef has: a published survey. Reef Check Germany surveyed both halves in March 2008, a few months after the hotel opened, and the numbers are worth knowing. Live hard coral cover was 32.5 per cent and soft coral 13.9 per cent, with recently killed coral at 0.7 per cent, no coral disease found, and only scattered damage plus some predation by the coral-eating snails Drupella and Coralliophila. Branching Acropora dominated the hard corals and Xeniidae the soft. The survey counted 9,536 fish from 93 species: sea goldies alone were a third of everything counted, followed by bicolor damselfish and Miry's demoiselle, with wrasses the most species-rich family. Butterflyfish were the commonest indicator species and parrotfish next. No large grouper was seen anywhere and exactly one giant moray was counted, which tells you what this reef is and is not. Note that those figures are eighteen years old; we have not put a current reef-condition rating on this page because nobody has published one since.

The honest thing to say about the south side specifically is that it was the thinner of the two. The same survey found the reef area north of the jetty held roughly twice as many fish as the south, while the underwater topography of the two was similar, the northern slope being slightly less steep and less structured than this one. So the south is the steeper, more broken-up half with fewer fish on it. Day to day you can expect blue-spotted rays and morays on the reef, and the dive centre's own regulars have logged turtles, Napoleon wrasse, barracuda, eagle rays and stonefish over the years. The reef flat above is the resort's snorkelling ground, and the survey team specifically flagged guests walking on it as something that damages the reef and cuts feet.

• Sandy shelf at about 5 m directly under the jetty entry, with a large coral block on it
• Steeper and more broken topography than the north half of the same house reef
• One of the very few Egyptian house reefs with a published Reef Check survey behind it
• Blue-spotted rays and moray eels are the day-to-day residents
• Shore entry off a 250 m jetty with a platform and a ladder, no boat needed

Conditions

A normal day is a walk out along the jetty, a ladder entry over the sand shelf at 5 m, and a slope dive south with whatever light current is running. Nobody publishes a visibility figure for this reef; the regional month-by-month figures for the Egyptian Red Sea give 25 to 40 m visibility and water between 21 and 30 C depending on the season.

On current: The one thing operators say about current here is practical: from the bottom of the jetty ladder you go right for the south dive or left for the north depending on which way it is running, so it is a site you match to the conditions rather than fight. Nobody we read publishes a strength or a direction, so we have not recorded a current rating. The survey team did note that the jetty and the nearby wave-breakers changed light and current locally enough to show on the coral near the structure.

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