Shaab Said

The dive

Sha'ab Said is an offshore reef in the Fury Shoals, dived on a full-day boat out of Hamata port. The German operator sun+fun, which publishes the dive-site list for the Hamata resorts, gives it a fifty-minute run from the harbour and a working range of 1 to 40 m. The main reef is split by a canyon, and the canyon is the part people describe first: a garden of soft and hard corals along its length. The east side of the reef falls away quickly and passes the 40 m mark almost at once, so depth here is something you have to manage rather than something the reef limits for you.

The north plateau is the other half of the dive and the reason it is not a beginner's site every day. It carries rich coral growth and draws fish in numbers, and grey reef sharks and whitetip reef sharks patrol its drop-off along with turtles and schooling fish. sun+fun is explicit that the plateau can only be dived in calm seas, or else worked as a drift. On a rougher day the sheltered side of the reef and the canyon are what you get, which is still a full dive but a different one.

Two cautions about the name and the position. There is a second Sha'ab Said in Egypt, on the Sinai side, and it is a different dive entirely with different sources. And our pin for this one is wrong: it sits on the Hamata resort strip because the whole Hamata block of this catalogue was imported with resort coordinates. The reef itself is fifty minutes out by day boat, offshore in the Fury Shoals, and should be repositioned there.

• A canyon splitting the main reef, lined with soft and hard coral
• A north plateau with heavy coral growth that concentrates fish
• Grey reef and whitetip reef sharks along the plateau drop-off
• Turtles and schooling fish over the reef top

Conditions

A normal day is a fifty-minute boat run from Hamata, a mooring on the sheltered side of the reef, and a choice made on the spot about whether the north plateau is workable. sun+fun describes the fish population over the whole reef as very heavy, concentrated on the north plateau. No source we read gives visibility figures or water temperatures for this reef specifically.

On current: sun+fun rates the reef for beginners and experienced divers alike, but only because the sheltered parts are gentle. The north plateau is conditions-dependent: divable in calm seas, otherwise run as a drift, which is the operator's own wording. The east side drops past 40 m fast enough that an inattentive descent will take you deeper than planned. We have only one operator description of this reef, so treat the numbers as one source rather than a consensus.