Shaab Said

The dive

Shaab Said is one of the sites on the boat run down the coast south of Dahab, lying north of Gabr el Bint and close to El Shugarat. Sea Dancer put the whole area about an hour by boat from Dahab and list Shaab Said as a drift; Scuba Seekers, who guide it, describe large coral pinnacles, small caves, swim-throughs and two shallow lagoons, with a maximum depth of around 15 m. That is the site: shallow, structural, and worked in one direction from a moving boat.

It is easy to end up reading about the wrong dive here. The steep wall dropping to about 60 m, the deep canyon and the forest of giant gorgonian fans that appear in most descriptions of this stretch of coast belong to Gabr el Bint and to Shogharat, the site our catalogue holds as El Shugarath about 1.4 km away. Sea Dancer list all three separately on the same trip. Shaab Said is the shallow one.

Scuba Seekers rate it as arguably the best preserved site in Dahab and compare it to the Islands, another Dahab lagoon-and-coral-head dive, on a larger scale. They also say plainly that it depends heavily on timing and on very good weather, which is the main reason it is not dived often; Poseidon Divers say the same of this part of the coast generally, that it is dived less than the town sites and that you are likely to have it to yourselves.

One caution about what follows. Scientific records at this exact pin are almost non-existent, a single logged observation of a checkerboard wrasse, which reflects that nobody has surveyed this water rather than that nothing lives here. Operators who dive it describe the marine life as varied and abundant, and the wider Gabr el Bint area is credited with schools of snapper, milkfish and turtles. We have not been able to source a species list for the site itself.

• Large coral pinnacles with small caves and swim-throughs between them
• Two shallow lagoons on a site that tops out around 15 m
• Rarely visited: the boat run is long and weather-gated, so you are often the only group
• Part of the same boat trip as Gabr el Bint and Shogharat, so it pairs with a deeper dive

Conditions

Around an hour by boat south from Dahab, dropped in on a drift, in water that Poseidon Divers put at 20 to 26 C across the year for Dahab, coldest in February and warmest in August, with a 3 mm suit in summer and up to 5 mm in winter. We have no visibility figure for this site from any source we would trust, so we have left that field empty rather than borrow a number from a neighbouring dive.

On current: No source we found puts a number on it. Scuba Seekers list Shaab Said among Dahab's drift dives and Sea Dancer also describe it as a drift, so expect to be dropped from a moving boat and worked in one direction rather than swimming a circuit. The site's real dependence is on weather rather than current: Scuba Seekers say it relies heavily on timing and on very good conditions, and neighbouring sites on the same run are only diveable when it is calm.

Dives & underwater footage