Sataya Reef West

The dive

Sataya Reef West is the western end of one very large reef, not a reef of its own. Sataya, which liveaboards and day boats also call Dolphin House, is the biggest structure in the Fury Shoals and its southernmost limit, a horseshoe roughly 4,700 m across sitting some 10 to 15 km off the coast at Hamata. The catalogue carries three pins on it, and they are three arms of the same horseshoe: this one on the west, Sataya Reef South on the eastern side of the southern arm about 3 km away, and Dolphin House Sataya Reef North about 2.5 km to the northeast. The lagoon they enclose is where the resident spinner dolphins rest through the day after feeding offshore at night.

What the western arm gets is the hard coral garden. Operators running the reef describe the west side as a hard coral garden backed by a sandy area beside the reef carrying a high number of coral blocks, and the point of diving it is to work those blocks slowly rather than to cover ground: octopus and stonefish are the animals they name for it, and the OBIS record around this pin fits, with sand-dwellers like quakerfish, speckled sandperch and several shrimp gobies alongside the reef fish. Most recreational diving on Sataya runs between about 4 and 20 m, with roughly 40 m as the practical maximum, while the outer faces of the horseshoe keep dropping past ledges well beyond sport-diving depth and are where pelagics turn up.

The dolphins are the reason most boats come, and they are the reason the site carries obligations rather than just a briefing. The resident pod is usually put at 40 to 60 animals. Egypt's dolphin code of conduct, developed by HEPCA and since given force through a Red Sea Governorate decree, requires vessels to keep at least 30 m off the animals, to slow to 4 knots or the speed of the slowest dolphin once they are sighted, to approach only parallel to their direction of travel in open water, and never to follow dolphins into a lagoon or resting area. Swimmers must be in fins, mask, snorkel and a lifejacket, must not touch, chase or dive down on the pod, and breaches are punishable by fine. A zoning plan for Sataya modelled on Samadai was announced in 2018, but reporting from December 2025 says no formal zoning is actually in place here and describes the reef as surrounded daily by dozens of motorboats and inflatables, so treat the code of conduct as the only real constraint and assume nobody else is enforcing it for you.

• Hard coral garden along the western arm
• Sand field beside the reef dense with coral blocks, good for a slow critter dive
• Resident spinner dolphin pod of roughly 40 to 60 animals in the lagoon
• Outer faces dropping past ledges toward the blue
• Part of the largest reef in the Fury Shoals, about 4,700 m across

Conditions

An offshore reef reached after an hour or more on a boat, generally calm inside the horseshoe and more exposed on the outer faces. Water runs roughly 22 to 30°C across the year. The western arm is worked shallow, mostly between 4 and 20 m over coral garden and sand.

On current: Inside the horseshoe and along the arms the water is generally sheltered, which is why the lagoon works as a dolphin resting area and as easy shallow diving. The exposed outer faces are a different proposition: they drop past ledges into open water and are where the pelagic sightings happen, and the sources that describe them do so in the language of an offshore drop-off rather than a bay. No operator publishes a current rating for the western arm specifically, so plan the outside as if it can run and stay inside the coral garden and the sand if it does.

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