Robinson Club Soma Bay House Reef

The dive

Soma Bay is a gated resort peninsula about 45 km south of Hurghada with five hotels on it, a single fringing reef running along its shore and a turquoise lagoon inside that reef which the dive centres use as sheltered training water. This pin is the stretch off ROBINSON Club Soma Bay: a wide, gently shelving sand beach with the reef in front of it, and the club's own dive base sitting on that beach. The base is one of the larger ones on this coast, runs its own try-dives, single dives and courses rather than subcontracting them, and keeps three dive boats; divers report that shallow house-reef diving here is a daytime activity, with early-morning and night dives advertised.

What the dive itself looks like is thinly documented. The dive-spot directory this pin was imported from carries what reads as the centre's own site sheet: a fine light sand bottom with individual coral blocks on it, soft and hard corals, plenty of small reef fish, occasional eagle rays and turtles, about 12 m at the deepest and roughly a 180 m swim out from the beach, and a note that it suits refresher and try-dive work. We could not open that listing to verify it and no dive centre page repeats those figures, so we have left the depth field empty rather than publish a number we cannot stand behind. Treat 12 m as the shape of the thing, not as a plan.

The occurrence records around this pin are dense and thoroughly ordinary in the good sense: daisy parrotfish, blue-spotted ribbontail rays, giant morays, Picasso triggerfish, sailfin tang, blackside hawkfish and devil firefish lead, with sea goldies, blacktail and bluecheek butterflyfish, broomtail wrasse, elegant unicornfish, small giant clams, cornetfish, emperor angelfish, coronation trout and peacock cod behind them. That is a healthy shallow Egyptian fringing reef with a lot of resident fish on it.

One thing to get straight before you book on the strength of Soma Bay's reputation. The reef everybody photographs here is the drop-off at Ras Abu Soma, reached along a jetty several hundred metres long from the dive centre at The Breakers Lodge — and that is about 1.5 km from this pin, at the tip of the peninsula, not off the ROBINSON beach. Guests describe ROBINSON as the hotel that is a bit further from the jetty. This entry is the club's own shore reef: shallower, easier and a walk-in.

• A walk-in shore reef off the club's own beach: fine sand with individual coral blocks on it
• Shallow enough for long dives, and used by the base for refreshers and try-dives
• A dense resident reef-fish assemblage — parrotfish, tangs, butterflyfish, morays, triggerfish, sea goldies
• Blue-spotted ribbontail rays on the sand, with eagle rays and turtles reported
• The club's own base runs early-morning and night dives as well as three boats to the Soma Bay and Safaga sites

Conditions

Sheltered and shallow. The bay is calm and clear, with a lagoon between the beach and the reef that the centres use as training water. Water on this coast runs about 21 to 23 C in winter and up to roughly 30 C at the end of summer, and visibility is at its best in spring and autumn. Air temperature and hot sand are the day-to-day nuisance here more than sea state is.

On current: No dive centre publishes a current or visibility figure for this stretch of the Soma Bay shore. The bay is described as calm and clear with a lagoon inside the reef used for training, which is the opposite of a current site, but that is a description of the sheltered water rather than a measurement of this one. Depth is unresolved too: the only figure anywhere is about 12 m, on the dive-spot directory this pin came from, and we could not open the listing to check it. We have left the depth fields blank rather than carry a number we cannot verify.

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