Location: Red Sea / Egypt / St. John’s
Description: Reef / Coral Garden
Depth: 8 – 26 m
Dangerous reef is the most southerly of the St. John’s reefs dived from Egypt. This is one of the few dive sites in the Southern Red Sea that offer a reasonably shallow flat bottom. This makes it good for an overnight anchorage and night diving. This is a medium sized, diamond shape reef. The hard coral wall drops down to around 18 meters where there is a gently sloping sandy bottom with small coral heads. A family of napoleon wrasse and free-swimming morays are common in this area. The topography here makes for great swim-throughs. There are many breaks in the reef shallows that allow easy and safe penetration.
A long chain of reefs, about 6 km long, with a diversity of bays, wonderful canyons and labyrinth of underwater reefs. Marvelous big and undamaged corals with fantastic colors.
Heading further south to the Sudanese border is an unexplored region which has a few surprises in store for divers. This is the true deep south and this is virgin territory. The charts are fairly inaccurate and many non-marked reefs suddenly appear out of nowhere, making navigation particularly hazardous.
The first immediately noticeable fish are the huge humphead parrotfish.
Among the hard corals are a profusion of brightly coloured chromis and damselfish. Every now and then a huge expanse of hard coral is broken by clumps of red-footed anemones and the attendant clownfish. In deeper water there is the usual Red Sea life, with nothing particularly different. A noticeable exception, however, is the sea bed, where cone shells appear to be thriving.
The main dive sites are about a day’s steam away from St John’s Reef with the season virtually all year round, but the challenge lies in persuading a like-minded group to join you on a trip with so few certainties.
The presence of sharks in this region is unique with encounters of some species not usually seen in the Red Sea such as the Mako. It shows that this unexplored region still has a few surprises in store for divers.
