Naama Bay Jolie Ville

The dive

This is a hotel house reef in Naama Bay, in the centre of the Sharm El Sheikh resort strip, and it is worth being plain about what that means: it is a training and check-dive site, not a destination dive. Several dive centres on the bay - the Jolie Ville among them - run shore diving straight off the beach here, and the same water is used for everything from first breaths in confined water up to instructor training.

The bay shelves gently away from the beach over large patches of soft sand, with coral pinnacles and a coral garden scattered across it and beds of seagrass between. It is not a wall. Red Sea Diving College, which uses this reef as its primary training site, gives a 30 m maximum and describes no drift diving and no habitual strong current; entry is a walk-in from the beach and there is normally a buoyed area where divers can kit up and descend clear of swimmers and boat traffic.

What you see is small and close-up rather than big and blue: glassfish, moray eels, rays grazing the sand, the occasional turtle. The occurrence records we hold for this stretch of coast are consistent with that - sohal surgeonfish, Red Sea sailfin tang, common lionfish, Picasso triggerfish, masked butterflyfish, rusty parrotfish, sergeant majors, bluespotted ribbontail rays, twoband anemonefish and a handful of humphead wrasse records. If you are in Sharm for a week, this is the reef you dive on arrival afternoon and the one you come back to when the boats are cancelled.

• Beach walk-in in the middle of Naama Bay; no boat needed
• Gentle sandy incline with coral pinnacles and seagrass, used for training up to instructor level
• Small-critter diving: glassfish, morays, rays, occasional turtle
• The reliable fallback when wind cancels the day boats

Conditions

A sheltered resort bay. Walk in from the beach, follow a gentle sandy slope past coral pinnacles and seagrass. The operator that trains here describes it as a non-drift site without habitual strong current, which is exactly why every course in Naama Bay ends up in this water.

On current: Red Sea Diving College, which trains on this reef, states it is not a drift dive and does not report habitual strong currents; a directory listing quotes around 1 knot. Depth figures differ by where you go in the bay: the College gives a 30 m maximum (less for junior divers), while third-party listings quote coral blocks from 2 m to 40 m. We record the conservative 5-30 m band from the operator's own page. We found no sourced visibility figure for this specific reef, so it is left blank.

Dives & underwater footage