Flashback: Diving the Red Sea

Before diving in (sorry) to the story of the week we spent scuba diving in Sharm el-Sheikh, we just wanted to say how thrilled we are for the people of Egypt now that Mubarak has officially stepped down. There was a strong sense of resignation and apathy when we were there – a feeling of “What’s the point?” that pervaded the few political conversations we had with locals. I remember our guide Mohammed saying that things were never going to change because the corrupt government made all the rules. The contrast behind that defeatism and the images and stories we’re seeing out of Cairo today could not be more stark. We wish them all the best. 

Arrival in Sharm

After spending two sweltering weeks in Egypt’s desert heat shuffling from one ROB (really old building) along the Nile to the next, we were more than ready to jump into the refreshing waters of the Red Sea by the time we arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh. “Sharm” (as most folks refer to it) sits on the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula, sandwiched between the Gulf of Suez (to the west) and the Gulf of Aqaba (to the east), with the Red Sea stretching off to the horizon to the south. We decided to spend a week in Sharm because we’d heard it was home to some of the best dive sites in the world, and we figured it’d be a great place to get our Advanced Diver certification.

Was this really Egypt – or had we been magically transported to Cabo?As we flew into Sharm from Cairo, though, our excitement diminished somewhat as we took in the scene below. As far as the eye could see, we found a long string of beach resort hotels and their unfortunate tourist-driven offspring (yes, even a T.G.I. Friday’s), surrounded by an unforgiving rocky desert landscape. It looked hot, dusty, and touristy – in short, not very different from where we’d just been. Fortunately, nothing on land prepared us for what awaited us once we finally dropped below the surface of the sapphire blue water of the surrounding Red Sea: incredible 100-foot visibility; vibrantly colored hard coral (the healthiest we’d seen on any dive all year) and endless gardens of soft coral swaying gracefully in the watery breeze; thousands of fish of every color and shape; and, on our last dive in Sharm, one incredibly strong current that led to my scariest dive all year (more on that in a bit). We’ve uploaded a Sharm photo album (with captions!) that includes a bunch of the photos we took underwater, and below we’ve posted a (very) short video that Dustin made of yours truly deep in the Red Sea.

Emperor Divers

Denny giving the pre-dive briefing – he knew these reefs like the back of his hand.After doing some homework and realizing that we wouldn’t be able to do a live-aboard on the Red Sea as we’d hoped (besides their exorbitant cost, Egyptian live-aboards apparently need to be booked months in advance), we spent a day checking out various dive operators in Sharm to find the best fit for us. We ended up choosing Emperor Divers, and we signed up for their Advanced Diver certification course which would allow us to do our three remaining certification dives with an instructor. (Thanks to the somewhat shady practices of the dive company we’d used in Vanuatu, we’d already gotten an instructor to sign off on our required Deep dive and Wreck dive for the advanced certification.) In addition to the three certification dives, we’d have plenty of time over the course of three days to do some fun dives when, among other things, we planned to test out our new underwater camera. 

No sharks for us — but this guy didn’t seem especially friendly.Because most of the dive sites around Sharm are “drift dives” in strong currents (you start the dive in one spot and swim with the current until the dive boat picks you up at another spot down-current), most dive companies (including ours) require divers to do an “orientation dive” close to shore before heading out to the more dramatic dive sites in the marine national parks. I was glad we did the orientation dive in part because it helped me realize that, despite diving in waters that bake in the hot desert sun every day, the Red Sea’s temps are actually much colder than any of the tropical diving we’d done previously. After shivering my way through the orientation dive wearing only my swimsuit, I vowed in my goose-bumpy state to rent a “shortie” wetsuit for the rest of my dives that week – a decision I never regretted. (Of course Dustin, who seems to be powered by some kind of heat-producing internal combustion engine, had no problem diving without a wetsuit all week.) The other memorable thing about our orientation dive was that it took place in the coral gardens just offshore from the Hyatt in Sharm. It seemed like a pretty benign spot at the time (the only “danger” was being kicked in the head by the oblivious snorkelers who’d entered the water from the Hyatt’s beach), but it turns out that this is the same site where a German snorkeler was attacked and killed by a shark just a few months later. Yikes!

Once we’d completed our orientation dive, most of the rest of our dives that week were well offshore, including a couple in the world-famous Ras Muhammed National Park. With each dive, we continued to be astounded by the visibility of the water and the health of the hard and soft corals, especially after our dives in Thailand, where we’d found discolored coral that was clearly suffering from the effects of too many divers. We completed all of our Advanced Diver certification dives with our instructor Denny, who proved to be a very patient and helpful guide for us. Dustin and I (or maybe just I) were especially nervous about the Underwater Navigation dive where you basically have to rely on a compass and the number of times you kick your fins in order to swim a perfect 100 foot square and return to the spot where you started, without any visual aids. Dustin and I both passed this “test” on our first try – a minor miracle when you consider that I didn’t even know how to hold a compass properly before we got to Sharm. :)

Currents & Corals & Toilets, Oh My!

Our final dive on our last day of diving in the Red Sea took us to the Shark and Yolanda reefs in Ras Muhhamed NP. By this point, we’d done a number of drift dives throughout the week, and I was feeling pretty comfortable with the notion of jumping in and letting the current do most of the work. Denny did a pre-dive briefing for our group of 10 divers and pointed out that we’d probably jump in to the east of Shark reef (i.e., to the right of the reef on the right in this drawing). As you can see in the drawing, the current (the red lines with arrows) typically hits Shark reef from the east and then splits to flow along both the north and south side of the reef. Denny told us that once we gathered everyone together, we’d follow the current clockwise along the southern edge of the reef and then continue to follow it along nearby Yolanda reef, to end up at the site of a rather strange shipwreck. Seemed straightforward enough, so Dustin and I jumped in first, let the air out of our BCDs, and prepared to wait underwater for the rest of the divers in our group to assemble.

I’m not sure whether I misjudged where we jumped in to the water in relation to the reef or if I misunderstood which direction we’d be following the current around the reef, but things started to go badly almost as soon as we were in the water. The first thing we noticed was that the current was very strong – stronger than any we’d encountered that week or on any previous dive. Dustin and I ended up letting the current carry us a little after we jumped in (roughly to the red dot on the drawing) and then holding our position to wait for the rest of the group to join us. What we didn’t realize was that the group was assembling at the eastern tip of the reef and would be following the current around the other (i.e., south) side of the reef. It finally dawned on us that we were in the wrong spot, and we started trying to swim up-current to rejoin the group which, it turns out, isn’t quite as much fun as swimming with the current. In fact, it’s nearly impossible in a current that strong. We were kicking and kicking, but we didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Between the exertion of kicking and my now increasingly-anxious frame of mind, I could feel my heart rate going faster and faster as I sucked down more and more air – exactly what you’re not supposed to do when diving.

This pic was taken on another dive when I was actually enjoying myself :)I realized we weren’t going to be able to make it to the group and that I was too stressed to continue the dive even if we did, so I signaled to Dustin (who thankfully was right with me the entire time) that I wanted to go up. Normally with diving, going up is the easy part. Other than having to worry about decompressing too quickly (which wasn’t an issue in this case because we weren’t very deep), usually you can rise to the surface pretty quickly thanks to the fact that the air in your body and BCD vest expands (and thus gets more “floaty”) the shallower you get due to the lessening pressure. It’s a nice kind of self-perpetuating process – the more you go up, the faster you go up.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. Unfortunately for Dustin and me, we didn’t realize that, in addition to the strong current sweeping along the side of the reef, there was also a “down current” pushing down on us from overhead. We tried to kick upward, but the current was keeping us from going up. You can imagine how this played out for me. I’m already exhausted, sucking down air, and a little freaked out that we can’t get back to the group… and then, the one thing I always count on – that YOU CAN ALWAYS GO UP – suddenly doesn’t work. It was now officially time to freak out. The other thing I realized in the midst of all of this is how my anxiety was exacerbated by the fact that I couldn’t talk to anyone about what was going on. Normally I love the almost meditative state of being underwater and being able to hear only the sound of my own breathing, but in this case, my inability to talk to Dustin about what was going on only increased my anxiety. In that silent, underwater state, I became hyper-aware of my rapid breathing: the more I heard myself breathe too quickly, the more stressed I got, and the faster I breathed. A vicious cycle, to be sure.

Fortunately, Dustin realized what was happening and managed to catch Denny’s eye in the distance and call him over to us. When Denny arrived, I put my hand on my heart and moved it up and down quickly to let him know that I was both exerting myself too much AND freaking out. I motioned that I wanted to go up but shook my head to try to show him that I was having trouble doing it due to the down current. Denny quickly surmised what was going on and, understanding the nature of currents much better than we did, he linked arms with Dustin and me, and the three of us swam away from the reef maintaining roughly the same depth. Swimming away from the reef meant swimming away from the currents, and as soon as we got about 10 meters from the reef, we suddenly found we could swim up or back toward the group with little effort. Later, once we were back on the dive boat, Denny explained what had been going on down there. Although the typical rule of thumb when diving is to swim closer to the reef to get out of a current, in this particular case, both the horizontal and the down currents were hugging the reef. 

Orange anthia and fuchsia soft coral made for a stunning color displayOnce I realized that we were no longer battling multiple currents, my anxiety finally started to dissipate. Denny let me collect myself and get my breathing regulated again (by now, I’d already burned through a ton of air in my tank), and he motioned to ask if I wanted to go up. Although still not totally back to normal, I felt calm enough to continue the dive, and off we went. Once we joined the rest of the group and got on the correct side of the reef with the current at our backs, I actually started enjoying myself again. It didn’t hurt that we were surrounded by perhaps the most beautiful soft coral gardens we’d ever seen. Looking around me, I was reminded again that there is really no recreational equivalent to diving in terms of the new worlds it opens up to you.

Is this the ladies’ room or the men’s?Despite my rather depleted oxygen supply, I managed to have enough air in my tank to make it to the remains of the strange shipwreck that Denny alluded to in the dive briefing. At some point in the last century, a ship carrying a large supply of plumbing cargo had crashed on the reef and slipped to the shallow, coral-laden seafloor. In the midst of the crash, the cargo hold on the ship had broken open and its contents had poured out into the ocean. The wreck had long since broken up, but the contents of the cargo hold remained on the reef. As improbable as it seemed, we found ourselves suddenly surrounded by hundreds of porcelain toilets – the world’s largest ocean latrine. But even in the case of this apparent underwater practical joke, nature still managed to assert herself. Delicate soft corals had attached themselves to the toilets and converted the scene into a living porcelain garden, while brilliantly colored fish moved gracefully from john to john. As we took in the absurdly lovely scene, I was grateful I hadn’t given up on the dive but also grateful that it would be our last dive for awhile. The currents saga had reminded me that things can and do go wrong when diving. Fortunately in this case, the situation was never very serious or life-threatening, but it was a good lesson nonetheless.

Comments

[Donna]

I felt your anxiety when reading your commentary about the drift dive and heavy currents. A great example of why having a buddy is so very important! Thank you Dustin. A similar event occured with Dad and I while diving in Palau years ago. Underwater is truly amazing and beautiful.