Ras Katy

The dive

Ras Katy is the first dive site outside the marina at Sharm el Maya and the most southerly of Sharm el Sheikh's local reefs, roughly fifteen minutes by boat from Travco Marina. The name is anecdotal rather than topographic: Sharm operators say it comes from a woman who used to sunbathe on the beach here, and the boat crews named the corner after her. Because it sits inside a bay rather than on an exposed headland, it is the site local centres fall back to for check dives, open-water training and night dives, and it is distinct from the Ras Umm Sid lighthouse promontory about a kilometre to the east and from the Temple bay immediately north of it.

The dive is built around a line of coral pinnacles standing in sand parallel to the fringing reef plate. The main pinnacle sits about 30 m off the reef and runs from the surface down to roughly 18 m, and boats moor in the channel between it and the reef. Landward the sand shallows to 3 to 5 m against the fringing reef; seaward it falls away past a ridge at about 22 m carrying gorgonians, and beyond that the drop-off continues well past sport-diving depth. Published limits disagree, from a 16 m pinnacle cap to a 25 m or 30 m ceiling depending on which centre wrote the page, but every source describes the same dive: shallow work around the blocks with the sand as the return route.

The life is ordinary Red Sea reef assemblage rather than anything rare, which is part of why the site works for training. Gorgonians and fire coral cover the pinnacle faces, sea goldies and striated fusiliers hold over the tops, twoband anemonefish sit in the anemones, and the open sand between the blocks holds goby-and-shrimp pairs. Circle Divers describes Red Sea bannerfish and redtooth triggerfish massing over the reef at the southern corner and glassfish packed under the fan corals, and both Circle Divers and Red Sea Marine mention a resident whitetip reef shark that circles off the reef at around 28 m, deeper than the main dive. Red Sea Diving College is blunt that pelagic sightings here are rare.

• Main pinnacle rising from the surface to about 18 m, 30 m off the fringing reef
• Gorgonian ridge at around 22 m
• Goby and shrimp pairs in the sand between the blocks
• Bannerfish and redtooth triggerfish at the southern corner
• One of Sharm's standard night dives

Conditions

A sheltered bay dive: normally calm at the surface, little or no current on the moored side, and the shallow sand plateau gives an easy reference for anyone still working out their buoyancy. Depths worked are mostly 5 to 18 m around the pinnacles.

On current: Sources disagree on how much water moves here. Red Sea Diving College states the site is not dived as a drift and normally has no strong current, with the exception that it can pick up towards the corner in the direction of Temple; Circle Divers runs it off the mooring as a semi-drift and Red Sea Marine calls it a good drift dive. The conservative reading, and the one that matches the bay setting, is that it is usually slack to light with an occasional running corner, so brief for both and stay on the moored side if the crew says the corner is moving.