Marsa Nakari North Reef

The dive

Marsa Nakari is a sandy-bottomed bay about 18 km south of Marsa Alam, and the whole of it is the house reef of Red Sea Diving Safari's Marsa Nakari Village. The operator describes the bay as being formed where a north reef and a south reef come together, so this entry and the catalogue's Marsa Nakari House Reef South, 210 m away, are the two arms of one bay reached from one beach. You walk in at a marked entry point a couple of metres from the dive shade and turn north; Bluewater Dive Travel notes the north and south entry points are marked and staffed by the dive team.

Red Sea Diving Safari gives the bay as 1 to 10 m inside, sloping until it meets the outside walls at 40 to 50 m at the mouth. In practice the north route is worked shallow. What the operator picks out for this arm specifically is hard coral, fish life and what it calls anemone city — a patch of anemones with their resident anemonefish; twoband anemonefish, the Red Sea's clownfish, is in the OBIS record for this pin. The south arm is the one described for pinnacles and swim-throughs, so if you are choosing a direction, north is the coral-and-fish side and south is the topography side.

The reason people come back to this bay is small animals rather than big ones. The operator and its resellers list nudibranchs, shrimps, velvetfish, ghost pipefish and seamoths, and a school of Indian mackerel that patrols the inside of the bay constantly — mackerel that also show up in the OBIS occurrence data here. Turtles and dolphins are described as not uncommon. The OBIS records within 1.5 km add blue-spotted ribbontail ray, devil firefish, porcupinefish, giant moray, tentacled flathead and whitetip reef shark.

Diving here is unusually unsupervised for Egypt. Every guest does one guided orientation dive on arrival, after which certified divers may dive the house reef with a buddy, unguided, within their own certification limits, any time between 6am and 8pm and with no booking. The dive centre requires a computer, a delayed surface marker buoy and an alternate air source on every diver before entry.

• Anemone patch on the north arm that the dive centre calls anemone city
• Hard coral and reef fish, as against the pinnacles and swim-throughs of the south arm
• Macro: nudibranchs, shrimps, ghost pipefish, seamoths, velvetfish
• A school of Indian mackerel that works the inside of the bay
• Unguided buddy-pair diving from the beach, 6am to 8pm, no booking

Conditions

A sheltered bay you walk into, with the reef on your right as you head north and sand under you. No operator publishes a visibility figure for Marsa Nakari, so we record none. On water temperature the sources conflict: Red Sea Diving Safari's own diving page states 28 degrees year-round, which Emperor Divers' regional seasonal guide contradicts with about 22 degrees in winter, warming to as much as 30 degrees in summer. We take the colder figure — packing for 28 degrees in January would be a mistake.

On current: No operator publishes a current figure for this bay. What we can say from sourced facts is that Red Sea Diving Safari lets certified guests dive it unguided in buddy pairs from a beach entry for fourteen hours a day, and describes the entry as a wide, convenient one — which is not how a site with meaningful current gets run. The bay geometry, two reef arms closing around a sand floor, shelters it further. The 40 m in depth_max_m is the operator's own figure for the outside walls at the mouth of the bay, not the depth of the north route, which is worked shallow; the Egyptian CDWS recreational limit is 30 m or your certification limit, whichever is less.

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