Port Ghalib Palace

The dive

Port Ghalib is a purpose-built marina and resort strip about 5 km north of Marsa Alam airport, and one continuous fringing reef runs along its seafront. This pin is one of the entries onto it: the jetty in front of the Palace resort. The German dive-site database Taucher.net records the reef as being dived from two jetties, the Palace and the Siva next door, with divers going either north or south from each, and gives a maximum of roughly 30 m on those routes. Two independent contributors there, writing in January 2016 and July 2018, both describe the same thing — a species-rich reef with large fish, moray eels, turtles and schools of small fish, and both say every direction from the jetties is worth swimming.

What distinguishes this pin from its neighbours is the access, not the geology. Dive Club, the PADI centre at the Albatros Palace and Siva Oasis resorts, has its house reef a few steps from the door and its boats moored at the Port Ghalib jetty; it recommends the reef for beginners and snorkellers and reports giant green turtles on it. Port Ghalib's own site describes a sheltered house reef reached directly from the dive centre, with day boats leaving from the pier and courses from children's programmes upwards. Entry is by stairs off the jetty rather than a beach wade.

Be careful with this page's boundaries. Our catalogue holds two further pins on the same shoreline, one about 700 m north and one about 900 m south, and no source we could read describes either of them as a distinct dive — they appear to be direction labels for the same wall. Nobody publishes a visibility figure, a current rating or a dated assessment of the reef's condition at the Palace jetty specifically, so those fields are blank. The occurrence records around the pin are the ordinary residents of a Red Sea fringing reef: blue-spotted ribbontail rays, ringed and purple tangs, Red Sea surgeonfish, Rueppell's and broomtail wrasse, threadfin and diagonal butterflyfish, giant moray, titan triggerfish, lionfish, twoband anemonefish and small giant clams.

• Stair entry off the Palace jetty, with the Siva jetty a few hundred metres along the same reef
• North or south along the same wall, which reaches about 30 m
• Green turtles reported on the house reef by the resident dive centre
• Shallow enough at the top to work as a snorkelling reef

Conditions

A sheltered marina-front fringing reef entered by stairs from a resort jetty, with the reef top shallow and a wall falling to about 30 m on the routes north and south. Diveable through the day, since access is the resort's rather than a boat's.

On current: No source publishes a current rating, a visibility figure or a seasonal wind assessment for the Palace jetty. Taucher.net's contributors describe the reef as worth swimming in either direction from the jetty without mentioning current at all, which is weak evidence of a benign site rather than a measurement. Treat the 30 m as the depth the wall reaches on these routes, not as a recommended profile.