Swiss Inn Beach

The dive

This pin is the beach of the Swiss Inn Resort at the southern end of Dahab, on the long shoreline of Qura Bay in the Lagoona district, about 3 km from the town centre. Extra Divers run the base on the hotel beach, and the house reef is theirs in the sense that it is what you can walk into rather than in the sense that it is a named feature of the Dahab coast. Everything below comes from that base, from a German dive site record for the same entry, and from divers who wrote about it; there is very little independent writing about this stretch of bay.

The terrain is the point. Taucher.net's record for this entry describes a sand bottom with patchy seagrass, and on it coral blocks of varying size spaced every few metres, individually well populated but never joining up into a reef. The base's own description matches: a small house reef in the bay with seagrass, coral blocks and a lot of small rarities. There is also a short training course somewhere on the site where divers practise swimming through arches and tunnels, which tells you what the reef is mainly used for.

What lives there fits the habitat rather than the postcard. Divers report lionfish in numbers, enough that the record warns you to look at the bottom before you settle down to photograph anything, plus grey moray and the occasional seahorse. The taxa recorded at this pin are the sand and seagrass set: Michel's goby and beaky ghostgoby on their host invertebrates, banded pipefish, striped eel catfish, Moses sole, leopard flounder, day octopus, spotbase burrfish, flashlight fish, twoband anemonefish and both Tridacna maxima and the Red Sea giant clam Tridacna squamosina.

Opinions on whether it is worth a dedicated dive are split and worth knowing before you go. A 2011 forum thread called it only some blocks with a fair amount of litter, few fish, and a site for an afternoon or evening dive rather than a destination, with kitesurfing traffic to keep clear of. The dive site record is warmer and says a dive is always worth it for training, for a check dive, or at night. The 190 m neighbour on the same bay, the Circle Divers house reef at the Jaz Dahabeya, is a different entry with a buoyancy park and a small sculpture installation; this one has neither.

• Sand and patchy seagrass with well populated coral blocks every few metres, rather than a continuous reef
• A short training course of arches and tunnels used for navigation practice
• Named by divers as a night dive and a check dive rather than a destination
• Sand and seagrass specialists: pipefish, gobies on their hosts, Moses sole, leopard flounder, day octopus
• Walk in entry from the hotel beach, a few steps from the dive centre

Conditions

A walk in from a sandy hotel beach into shallow water, then sand and seagrass with coral blocks spaced across it. Divers describe it as calm and easy work, which is why the base uses it for training and night dives. No source publishes a current or visibility figure for the site.

On current: No source we read publishes a depth range, a visibility figure or a current rating for this entry, so none is recorded. The base gives 30 m as its recreational limit, which is a rule for its divers and not a description of the site: the terrain described is a shallow sand and seagrass bottom with coral blocks on it. A 2011 forum post refers to conditions improving out at the tip of the lagoon and warns about kitesurfers working the water. Treat the absence of numbers as an absence of information and ask at the base.

Best months: Mar, Apr, May, Sep, Oct, Nov