Shaab Taminah

The dive

Shaab Taminah sits in Safaga Bay, in the middle of the cluster of small reefs that Safaga day boats work: our own catalogue puts Safaga Soraya 1.3 km away, Gamul Kebir 2.7 km, Gamul Soraya 3.7 km and the Tobia group 4.5 km further out. It is a Safaga day-boat reef by position, and that is the strongest thing we can say about it.

Beyond that, the site is essentially undocumented. The regional dive-site listings that carry depth, boat time and dive-plan detail for its neighbours - Gamul Kebir, Tobia Arbaa, Tobia Hamra, Ras Abu Soma - do not carry an entry for it. One German operator page for 'Shaab Tamina' places it about 20 minutes by boat from its Safaga dive centre; we could not load that page directly to verify the figure, so we have not recorded it as a number and we leave depth, visibility, current, certification and difficulty null.

OBIS has recorded two species here, one occurrence each: royal angelfish and Red Sea bannerfish. Both are common on every reef in this bay. Two records is a statement about survey effort, not about the reef - the neighbouring reefs a couple of kilometres away carry sixty species each in the same dataset.

In practice, if this name appears on a day-boat schedule out of Safaga, expect the same kind of dive as the reefs around it: a small hard-coral reef in a sheltered bay, worked shallow, half an hour or less from port. But that is an inference from its neighbours, and we are labelling it as one rather than writing it up as fact.

• A small reef in the Safaga Bay day-boat cluster
• Safaga Soraya 1.3 km away, Gamul Kebir 2.7 km, the Tobia group about 4.5 km
• Effectively undocumented - the regional dive guides that cover its neighbours have no entry for it

Conditions

On current: No source publishes a depth, current or visibility figure for this reef. One operator page gives a boat time of about 20 minutes from a Safaga dive centre, but we could not load that page to verify it, so no number is recorded.