Shark divers house reef

The dive

This entry is a dive centre's label rather than a reef name. Shark Divers is a PADI five-star club in Hadaba, at the Desert View Hotel on Motels Street in Hadabet Um El Sid, and the catalogue record we imported carries its name on a point of the Sharm fringing wall about ten minutes north of El Fanar beach at Ras Um Sid. The centre's own published price list sells boat diving to Ras Mohammed, Tiran and the Thistlegorm plus a shore dive at Ras Nasrani and a night shore dive, and does not advertise a house reef at all, so treat the label here as an internal one and ask the centre what it actually means before planning around it.

What the centre wrote about the place when it submitted the entry is short and specific: access is easy, through a jetty, and the same jetty has a roped-off area used for snorkelling and watersports alongside the diving. The reef itself is a coral wall facing the open sea, which is the reason given for it getting more current than the sheltered corners nearby and for bigger animals passing along it. Dolphins, turtles and large moray eels are the three it names. Nobody publishes a depth profile, a visibility figure or a season for it, and no SeaLog diver has logged it, so all of those are empty here rather than borrowed from a neighbour.

On the geography, be clear about what this pin is. It sits on the continuous fringing wall of the Hadaba headland, 460 m from Ras Um Sid, 710 m from Paradise, 930 m from Temple and 1.2 km from Turtle Bay, and SeaLog holds every one of those separately. It is a named entry point on a reef, not a reef of its own. The OBIS record within 1.5 km is correspondingly full and well surveyed, around sixty taxa recorded repeatedly: daisy and rusty parrotfish, Indo-Pacific sergeants, diagonal and bluecheek butterflyfish, sohal surgeonfish, royal and emperor angelfish, sea goldies, giant clams, bluespotted ribbontail rays, giant morays, titan triggerfish and fire coral. That is the standard Sharm assemblage in good numbers, which is what this wall is genuinely known for.

• Jetty entry straight onto a wall rather than a wade over reef flat
• A roped area at the same jetty for snorkelling, so non-divers are catered for
• Sits on the same continuous wall as Ras Um Sid, Paradise and Temple
• One of the better-surveyed reefs in this catalogue, with around sixty taxa on record nearby

Conditions

A jetty entry onto a coral wall on the seaward side of the Hadaba headland. No source publishes a depth profile, a typical visibility or a water temperature for this specific entry, and we have no logged dives here, so none of those are set. What is documented is exposure: the wall faces the open sea and gets the current that comes with that.

On current: The one thing the centre says about conditions is structural: the reef here is a wall facing the open sea, which exposes it to more current than the sheltered pockets along the same coast, and that is given as the reason bigger animals come past. Nobody publishes a strength or a direction, and we have no logged dives here, so moderate is inferred from that description rather than measured. On the neighbouring stretch at Ras Um Sid the current is reported as noticeably stronger on one side of the jetty than the other, which is the kind of local detail worth asking about on the day.