Diving In Sharm El-Sheik and Terrorist Attack Site

  Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt
Thursday, October 6, 2005

We returned to Sharm El Sheik for an overnight dive boat trip to one of the most famous wreck dives in the world, the Thistlegorm. This thing is seriously amazing. It's an old WWII vessel that was sunk about 5 hours outside of Sharm and has an amazing amount of payload still visible in waters between 30 and 15 meters deep. We're talking locomotives, countless motorcycles and trucks, boots, etc. And, you could go inside all the rooms and look at all the stuff without having them silt up. It was unbelievable really. Also on the last dive on the wreck my dive computer for the first time went into a decompression dive as our dive leader took us into a new compartment with 1 minute of no-decompression time left at about 65 feet. My computer is quite conservative so it wasn't a big deal, but since we were all running low on air anyways we got out of there pretty quick to make our safety stop(s). On the way back we dove once more in another very famous place, Ras Mohammed National Park. It had an amazing array of colors and fish, and we would all love to dive there again someday.

Some photos of what it looks like underwater:
Locomotive:


Motorcycles:


Truck:


Trucks:


Finally, we had one night onshore in Sharm, and it felt weird with the bombing having been there just two months prior. We actually got to see one of the hotels that is rebuilding after the blast. Overall, it was very quiet there now, and had a very weird feeling. The story from the bombing can be read here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4709491.stm

At the end of our time in Egypt we started learning that we were being followed by the tourist police most of our travels. We had a undercover police on our bus from Dahab to our dive boat with a gun under his shirt. We didn't even know he was on board to protect us. Our dive boat told us that they had received a call that the owner should be onboard with us to "protect the VIP's" as he told us. He was disappointed to learn that we weren't celebrities after asking us later into our trip. Overall, kinda crazy that we were being tracked like that to keep us safe.