Sha’ab Marsa Alam

The dive

Sha'ab Marsa Alam is the offshore reef lying a few kilometres out from Marsa Alam town, reached by day boat in about 25 to 30 minutes from the local marina or an hour from the bays further north. Operators describe its shape variously as an inverted L, a semicircle, a horseshoe and a kidney, but they agree on the structure that matters: a reef enclosing a lagoon in the middle, with ergs and coral pillars on the sandy ground outside it and a wall on the northern side that takes the weather. Length is given as 350 to 400 m by one operator and 790 m by another, so the pin covers a reef system rather than a single feature, and which part you dive depends on the boat and the day.

Inside, the lagoon runs about 12 to 15 m over sand with two coral blocks standing in it, one roughly 20 m long and one much smaller, and a small cavern system in the middle of the reef that is narrow in places, up to about three metres high and open enough to stay lit. There is a wreck too, though the operators do not place it consistently: one puts the remains of a sunken safari boat in the north-east, another has a small wreck at 11 m by the central pinnacle with toilets scattered on the sand beside it, and a third describes the wreck of the Legend, a sunken cruise ship, on the south side. Outside the lagoon the ground is 20 to 30 m and the reef is worked as a drift, with the deepest published figure for the site being 40 m.

Spinner dolphins are the reason a lot of boats come: they use the lagoon, and they are the most-recorded marine mammal around this pin. That is not the same thing as the dolphin house at Samadai, 7 to 10 km away, which is a managed dolphin site with its own rules and quotas — here they turn up or they do not. The rest of the life is a healthy offshore reef: Red Sea bannerfish, coral hind and greasy grouper, giant moray, titan triggerfish, blue-spotted ribbontail rays and humpnose big-eye bream in the records, with operators adding barracuda and tuna, garden eels and snappers on the sand, crocodilefish, octopus, and whitetip reef sharks resting under the coral. Fire coral is common here, which is worth knowing before you steady yourself on anything.

• An enclosed lagoon at 12 to 15 m with two coral blocks standing in the sand
• A small lit cavern system through the middle of the reef
• A wreck inside the reef — described as a safari boat at about 11 m, or as the cruise ship Legend, depending on the operator
• Ergs and coral pillars on the sand outside, worked as a drift
• Spinner dolphins, the most-recorded marine mammal at this pin

Conditions

An offshore day-boat reef with a sheltered inside and an exposed north side. Current is rated low to medium and runs predominantly from the north, swinging north-east through the afternoon. No source we read publishes a visibility figure for the site, so we have left it blank.

On current: SeaHorse Diving Club rates the current low to medium and notes it can run across the whole site. Seawolf gives it as northerly in the morning and at midday and north-easterly in the afternoon, and Blue Submarine singles out the northern wall as the side exposed to waves and current. The lagoon is the sheltered part; the outside is a drift. On depth the operators differ, 30 m from two and 40 m from a third, and we have carried the deeper figure as the planning number.