Shaab Nakari

The dive

Shaab Nakari is an offshore bank reef roughly 5 km off the coast south of Marsa Alam town, a few kilometres north of the Samadai lagoon. It is a boat dive with no shore access, worked by day boats and zodiacs out of Marsa Alam and El Quseir as a two or three dive day with the marine park fee folded into the price. It is not the same place as Marsa Nakari, the bay about 3 km inshore whose house reef belongs to a dive village and has to be booked in advance; divers looking for that shore entry are in the wrong entry.

The operators who sell it are unusually direct about which part earns the trip. Omneia's dive-site page says only the northwest side of Shaab Nakari is an interesting dive and treats the rest as ordinary reef. The northwest is where the wall runs, built up in porites formations, and the coral concentrates at intervals along it into larger gardens. Boats normally moor in the southern inner-reef area, where the sand slopes away from about 15 m to past 25 m, and 30 m is the working maximum operators quote for the site.

The schools are the point here rather than a big animal. Yellow fish dominate the descriptions: single-spot snappers, sweetlips, bannerfish and butterflyfish, goatfish and trumpetfish, with groupers, moray eels and scorpionfish on the reef itself and nudibranchs for anyone working slowly. Out on the sand, the OBIS records for this pin add a tentacled flathead, a bluespotted ribbontail ray and a yellowfin hind. Spinner and Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins are both on record within 1.5 km of the pin, but the lagoon they actually use is Samadai a few kilometres south, and that is a separate site with its own arrangements. Do not book Nakari expecting them.

• Wall diving along the northwest side, built up in porites formations
• Sand in the southern inner-reef area sloping from about 15 m past 25 m
• Schools of single-spot snappers, sweetlips, bannerfish and butterflyfish
• Crocodilefish and bluespotted ribbontail rays out on the sand

Conditions

An offshore bank reef reached by boat, so a normal day is decided by wind and by which side the skipper can work. The inner-reef sand runs from about 15 m to past 25 m and 30 m is the quoted maximum. We have no logged dives here and no independent visibility measurement; a day-trip operator advertises 20 to 30 m, which is a sales figure rather than a record, so we have not set a typical value.

On current: Two operators rate this differently in emphasis rather than in substance. Scuba World Divers, which sells it as a beginner site, still says that understanding the current here is the thing that matters most, which is what you would expect on a reef standing 5 km out in open water with nothing upstream of it. Nobody publishes a strength, and we have no logged dives here, so we have called it moderate on the strength of the operator warning rather than a measurement. The practical consequence is that which side you dive is the boat's call on the day, and the northwest wall, the part worth diving, is the exposed one.