Final Dive at Marsa Shagra House Reef South
Trip Start
Aug 25, 2008
1
16
Trip End
Sep 01, 2008
Marsa Shagra, Red Sea and Sinai, Egypt
Sunday, August 31, 2008
We shared a zodiac with 5 more divers. Kenneth and I stayed on the zodiac, though, while the others jumped in the water on the north reef. We wanted to do the south reef one last time before going home, and we were also kind of looking forward to diving without anyone else for a change.
The zodiac set us off a good ways down on the south reef. Surely I had to do the back drop on the side of the boat where the current moved towards! So, yet again I got pushed around by the boat a little bit before we descended. To begin with we thought that we might have chosen the wrong part of the reef to dive, because we sure had to fight a little against the significantly strong current. Consequently I sometimes felt that I had to kick really hard to move even just a little bit, and naturally that made me worry about my air consumption.
Fortunately the current hadn't scared off the beauty at the south reef. The water was incredibly clear still, and the various fish were plentiful in both amounts and colours. It was almost as if the rare creatures knew that this was our last dive, so they thought they would stop by and say goodbye...! Kenneth had the pleasure of playing with a baby clown fish and its mother. In addition he also got to come face to face with a yellow-edged moray eel. Resulting, he had had the perfect day already before 7 am! :) Even the trigger-fish family seemed to have send out their largest titan relative to greet us. Though aggressive, and sometimes dangerous, I am incredibly fascinated by those colourful species and the way they move in the water.
Blue-spotted stingrays are an abundant species at the Marsa Shagra House Reef. And sure enough, this time three of them hung out together as we passed. They do what they can to hide, but those bright blue spots are mostly quite easy to pick out in the sand. The giant stonefish we saw had more luck in hiding. I would have missed it completely if my brother hadn't pointed it out to me.
When we reached the entrance to the house reef (where the northern reef meets the southern reef) we came across the group, which we had started out with. At first we wondered why they were standing around in the cold current (it felt super cold even though both our computers said 28 degrees Celsius! Usually the water was 30 degrees everywhere else we had been!), but then we noticed the reason: the House Reef has two unbelievably majestic residents; a pair of eagle rays. We had met them almost every time we had either dived or snorkelled the house reef. This time, however, they were really putting on a show for us all. The 7 of us stood around for a good five minutes enjoying these two enchanting species and their graceful "flight" in the area surrounding us.
Eventually it got too cold to keep still in the water, and we had a little ways to go yet, so we left the eagle rays to themselves and continued our dive. We hadn't gone far before we came across two crocodile fish. They were almost successful in hiding from us, but their oddly shaped bodies doesn't really look like the average rock.
The water was colder inside the house reef than it had been on the outer reef. My brother demonstrated several times during the dive that he was cold, but when we were almost at the end of our dive he once more rubbed his arms and pretended to be quivering. I had tried hard the entire dive not to start laughing whenever he did that, but this time there was no avoiding it: I instantly burst out laughing. Laughing underwater is not easy. I was bound to get water in my mouth and nose. The worst part was when my mask started filling with water so fast that my eyes were almost covered. At that point Kenneth made the mistake of looking at me, and consequently he started laughing too. Luckily we were only 2½ meters below the surface. I could easily have kicked the sandy bottom and then exited the water. However, my stubborn nature told me to try and fix the problem where I was, mostly because it would be handy to know how to do it, if I one day should find myself in deep water while laughing this hard. It took a while, though, but ultimately I did manage to clear my mask and regulator of water. Needless to say, we both started laughing again once we exited the water two minutes later. Firstly, we just had to say hello to the masked puffer we kept running into close to the beach, though.
This dive had been a perfect way of ending a fantastic scuba diving trip. Despite the strong current it had been a calm and marvellously beautiful dive. I had even accomplished to still have some air left. Just 25 bar though, but in consideration of the current, the fairly long distance we had gone in 51 minutes, and the massive attack of the giggles, I thought I had done pretty darn well! Frog-style kicks are definitely the way to go!
Oh my, do I ever love diving! I should probably never have started... ;)
