Shaab Bohar Soraya

The dive

Shaab Bohar Soraya is the smaller half of a pair. Soraya is the diminutive and kebir the augmentative, and both names are real sites: Orca Dive Club, which runs them out of Wadi Lahmy, lists them separately with different descriptions, and TGI Diving, which runs them out of Hamata, does the same. Kebir is the large one, an hour's sail from Hamata port, big enough that operators split it across two dives. Soraya sits opposite it in the northern part of the Fury Shoals group and is small enough to circumnavigate in a single dive — both operators independently put that lap at about fifty minutes.

The dive is the blocks. Orca describes small, densely overgrown coral blocks around the reef; TGI adds a plateau with crevices holding fish and separate pinnacles standing off the reef proper. Orca gives a maximum depth of 20 m, TGI describes a plateau at 24 m; plan for the deeper of the two. Both operators report white-tip reef sharks here, and TGI adds clownfish and nudibranchs, which is the profile of a shallow hard- and soft-coral reef rather than a big-animal site. TGI's own word for it is relaxing, and the fifty-minute lap is the honest measure of the place: it is a second dive on a Bohar day, not the reason you came.

A warning about the position. This pin's coordinates put Shaab Bohar Soraya 130 m from Shaab Bohar Kebir and less than a kilometre from a dozen other named Fury Shoals reefs, which is an artefact of the import — the whole Hamata cluster in our catalogue is stacked near the Wadi Lahmy resort shoreline rather than on the reefs. Do not read the 130 m as evidence that Soraya and Kebir are one dive; the sources are explicit that they are two, and TGI puts them opposite each other, an hour out from Hamata port. For the same reason we have not built a species list for this page out of the occurrence records attached to the pin: those records were gathered at the coast, not at the reef.

• Small enough to circle in one dive — both operators say about fifty minutes
• Densely overgrown coral blocks and outlying pinnacles
• White-tip reef sharks reported by both operators
• Dived on the same boat day as the much larger Shaab Bohar Kebir opposite

Conditions

Offshore Fury Shoals conditions: a boat moored on the sheltered south or south-west side, a lap of the reef inside 20 to 24 m, and a hard- and soft-coral bottom. The southern Red Sea runs roughly 22 C in winter to 30 C in summer with visibility often over 20 to 30 m in the calmer months.

On current: The two operators who run the site disagree on depth: Orca Dive Club gives a maximum of 20 m, TGI Diving describes a plateau at 24 m. We carry 24 m so that nobody plans gas on the shallower number. Neither publishes a current rating for Soraya specifically. Wikivoyage's Fury Shoal article notes that the prevailing current in the group runs from the north-east, which is why boats moor on the south or south-west side of these reefs.

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