Red Sea Blues!

I got the blues, the Red Sea blues… cos I’m not still there! The Red Sea is so very blue, and clear and warm, and rich with marine life! What a gorgeous place! At the end of August 2019, we joined a fantastic dive trip in the Red Sea, organised by Girls That Scuba and Insider Divers on a lovely comfortable dive boat, Blue Horizon by Blue O Two.

Egypt is somewhere I definitely want to go back to, and explore in depth and width and time, but this trip was just a quick week’s break, on a diving liveaboard boat, going out of Port Ghalib in the southern Red Sea.

The boat was very comfortable, and the crew did a terrific job of feeding us well!

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We get all sorts of great extras on GTS trips: we had a custom-made itinerary, with some of the best dive sites in the southern Red Sea, we had top pro photographer Simon Lorenz of Insider Divers  taking photos of us and the gorgeous underwater landscape, that we can share for free! (the best photos in this post are Simon’s!) and giving us photography tips, and we had inspirational GTS founder and blogger Sarah Richard, who is loads of fun to be around, and also gave us tips on social media.

We also had the enormous benefit and priviledge of having shark biologist Dr Elke Bojanowski, of Red Sea Sharks on board as cruise director. Elke gave several talks on different shark species, their life cycles and behaviour. Towards the end of the week, when we were at Elphinstone, and there was the possibility of seeing Oceanic white tip sharks (Carcharhinus longimanus) Elke gave us a very detailed presentation on how to behave if we were lucky enough to see one. Oceanic white tips are typically not aggressive, but unlike many other sharks, can be confident and curious, so it’s important to understand how to behave around them (keep calm and carry on!) We were indeed fortunate to see a sub-adult male, who approached us under the boat within about 10 minutes of starting the dive. You can see him in this video:

Yes it’s lots of photos of one shark, yes I’m a bit obsessed, he was a beauty!

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Check out this great video by expert videographer Nico Deutsch.

Dotted amongst the coral are anemones, and where there are anemones, there are usually clownfish, such fun to watch!

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The sea goldie (orange anthias) (Pseudanthias squamipinnis) is one of the most numerous fish throughout the Red Sea. We saw them everywhere, clustered and darting around coral outcrops. So beautiful to see against the contrast of the deep, clear blue water.

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There are pinnacles and swim-throughs

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Sarah is great at taking group selfies, here we are on board:

One day we saw the wreck of a liveaboard dive boat:

thanks for the photo Raoul!

close up of giant clam

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Here are some of Simon’s (the pro photographer!) photos:

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One day we were joined by a very large, very inquisitive Napoleon wrasse!

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Another day, we had the amazing pleasure of meeting a school of dolphins while snorkelling:

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On our last day, Simon organized us into the now-traditional GTS group underwater shot:

The briefing was good, we swam into place, and yeah, it worked!!

We spent our last night moored at Port Ghalib:

I’ll definitely be going back to Egypt – for more diving, and to explore the sights on land. Thank you so much to all the fun divers who joined us on board, to Sarah from  Girls That Scuba, Simon from Insider Divers,  and all the team at Blue O Two, for my first introduction to Egypt!

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