Three Pools

The dive

Three Pools is one of the shore dives on the strip of coast south of Dahab, a few hundred metres from Moray Garden and Golden Blocks and about ten minutes by road from town. The name is literal: three sandy pools sit in the reef plate, each three to four metres deep, linked to each other by saddles of coral. They are the entry and the exit. You walk in at the first pool, cross the saddles, and come out of the third into open water at the reef edge.

Outside the pools the ground is sand with single coral blocks, and from about 18 m it closes into continuous reef cut by sand roads. Operators publish a site depth of 40 m, which is the wall and not a recreational plan; the useful range is the pools at 3 to 4 m out to around 30 m on the sand and coral outside. There is a coral garden with pinnacles that hold glassfish, and from the reef edge you can turn north along the drop-off or run the shallow lagoon back towards Moray Garden, which is how most centres link the two sites.

The tide runs the dive. At low water the saddles between the pools are shallow enough to be awkward, so centres start on a rising or high tide; H2O Divers rates the current itself at the bottom of its scale, so what makes this dive tricky is depth over the reef plate rather than water movement. Buoyancy in the pools matters more than anything else you will do here.

What you see is Dahab reef life rather than anything rare: a resident Napoleon wrasse, moray eels, bluespotted ribbontail rays on the sand, and crocodilefish, scorpionfish and octopus for people who look carefully. Dahab Divers Lodge reports turtles patrolling the coral garden and Wadi Tribe calls this one of the better local stretches for spotting them. One dive-centre write-up is candid that the site is enjoyable rather than remarkable, and that is a fair summary: it is a good second or third dive of the day and a genuinely good snorkel, not the reason you came to Dahab.

• Three sandy lagoons, 3 to 4 m deep, linked by coral saddles and used as the entry and exit
• Coral garden with pinnacles holding glassfish just outside the third pool
• A resident Napoleon wrasse, and one of the better local stretches for turtles
• Links north to Moray Garden along the shallow lagoon, so the two are often dived as one

Conditions

Dahab water sits between 20 and 26 C through the year according to Poseidon Divers, coldest in February and warmest in August, with a 3 mm suit adequate in summer and 5 mm sensible in winter. The pools are shallow and sheltered, so this is one of the sites that stays diveable when wind shuts down the boat trips. The one thing to check before you go is the tide table.

On current: H2O Divers rates the current here at one star, the bottom of its scale, and no source describes it as a drift site in its own right. The variable that actually changes the dive is tide, not current: at low water the coral saddles between the three pools are shallow enough that getting from one to the next is difficult, so centres plan the entry for high tide. When it is run as a drift, that is a deliberate one-way profile north to Moray Garden through the shallow lagoon, not the current making the decision.

Dives & underwater footage