Trip report: Hurghada Egypt, September 2005
by Amy
Posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 8:58 pm CET
Tuesday 20 September
We ended up diving with Colona for the rest of the week, five days in all. So the agenda for these days pretty much matches Monday: Get up at 6:30 and get ready. Wait in the lobby for the Colona bus, and watch the poor Emperor Divers guy look in vain for his party before taking off without them (really, this happened every day). Take the bus to Colona, get our stuff and put it “on the donkey”, get on the boat. Gear up, dive, set up gear for second dive, eat a delicious, freshly prepared warm lunch, dive again, back to Colona and on the bus back to Les Rois, where we arrived at about 5:30 each evening.
The boat Calypson brought us to our first site for Tuesday, El Desha. We joined five other divers with DM Bart for this dive over a coral garden and along a reef wall. There was a bit of difficult current on the way back to the boat. I used the camera again. This was my least favorite dive. Arthur and I were a bit chaotic in our buddy check and entered the water hastily, as all of the other divers were already in the water and waiting for us. We both started our descent with our snorkels in our mouths and resurfaced after choking on the extremely salty water. During the dive I had a lot of trouble with my buoyancy and thus saw hardly anything, but I also didn�t miss much, as on this dive there were the least fish to see. We did see our first Diadem Sea Urchin and a very big Batfish towards the end of the dive.
El Desha dive siteOn the second dive, two of the divers from our first group were in a class, so they did a course dive. Bart told the other three to buddy up together and swim around the site, El Helous. So it was just me and Arthur with Bart. I felt kind of bad about this, but we didn�t show Bart a lot of great skill on the first dive so of course he was right to not let us dive on our own. This dive went a lot better. I moved the weights around on my belt (it�s amazing how having one weight just a half inch in the wrong place can completely screw up your buoyancy) and was much more stable throughout this dive. The site is an O-shaped reef, with a small opening where you can swim through to get on the inside of the O. The opening was a bit shallow (3 to 4 meters deep) and narrow (for us newbies anyway) but we made it through without any problems. During our swimming safety stop at the end, we could feel waves pushing us around (we were at about 3 meters), which was a bit disconcerting. On this dive we saw a very small red starfish, Blue-Spine Unicornfish, and some very big table corals.
Walking from the dock to the dive centerAfter resting back at the hotel, we walked to the nearby vera pizza parlor, run by an Italian couple. We each ordered a pizza margarita and enjoyed it very much. It was pretty close to genuine Neapolitan pizza, without the real buffalo mozzarella and with dried basil leaves instead of fresh. A group of Colona DMs sat at another table and left shortly after we arrived. Then we walked back to Cinnabon, where we ordered four Minibons to have for breakfast on Wednesday and Thursday morning.
Egyptian Cinnabon
Tuesday 20 September
We ended up diving with Colona for the rest of the week, five days in all. So the agenda for these days pretty much matches Monday: Get up at 6:30 and get ready. Wait in the lobby for the Colona bus, and watch the poor Emperor Divers guy look in vain for his party before taking off without them (really, this happened every day). Take the bus to Colona, get our stuff and put it “on the donkey”, get on the boat. Gear up, dive, set up gear for second dive, eat a delicious, freshly prepared warm lunch, dive again, back to Colona and on the bus back to Les Rois, where we arrived at about 5:30 each evening.
The boat Calypson brought us to our first site for Tuesday, El Desha. We joined five other divers with DM Bart for this dive over a coral garden and along a reef wall. There was a bit of difficult current on the way back to the boat. I used the camera again. This was my least favorite dive. Arthur and I were a bit chaotic in our buddy check and entered the water hastily, as all of the other divers were already in the water and waiting for us. We both started our descent with our snorkels in our mouths and resurfaced after choking on the extremely salty water. During the dive I had a lot of trouble with my buoyancy and thus saw hardly anything, but I also didn�t miss much, as on this dive there were the least fish to see. We did see our first Diadem Sea Urchin and a very big Batfish towards the end of the dive.
El Desha dive site
On the second dive, two of the divers from our first group were in a class, so they did a course dive. Bart told the other three to buddy up together and swim around the site, El Helous. So it was just me and Arthur with Bart. I felt kind of bad about this, but we didn�t show Bart a lot of great skill on the first dive so of course he was right to not let us dive on our own. This dive went a lot better. I moved the weights around on my belt (it�s amazing how having one weight just a half inch in the wrong place can completely screw up your buoyancy) and was much more stable throughout this dive. The site is an O-shaped reef, with a small opening where you can swim through to get on the inside of the O. The opening was a bit shallow (3 to 4 meters deep) and narrow (for us newbies anyway) but we made it through without any problems. During our swimming safety stop at the end, we could feel waves pushing us around (we were at about 3 meters), which was a bit disconcerting. On this dive we saw a very small red starfish, Blue-Spine Unicornfish, and some very big table corals.
Walking from the dock to the dive center
After resting back at the hotel, we walked to the nearby vera pizza parlor, run by an Italian couple. We each ordered a pizza margarita and enjoyed it very much. It was pretty close to genuine Neapolitan pizza, without the real buffalo mozzarella and with dried basil leaves instead of fresh. A group of Colona DMs sat at another table and left shortly after we arrived. Then we walked back to Cinnabon, where we ordered four Minibons to have for breakfast on Wednesday and Thursday morning.
Egyptian Cinnabon
[...] Today we had a practice dive in the Oostvoornse Meer, here in the Netherlands. We hadn’t dived since Hurghada in September 2005, except for Nemo 33 in Brussels two weeks ago. The visibility was 3 to 5 meters, which was better than when we did our PADI Open Water dives in this same water in July last year. [...]
[...] Last week we had our second excellent experience with Colona Divers, this time in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Colona is a Scandinavian dive operator with shops in Hurghada (where we first dived with them in 2005) and El Gouna in addition to Sharm. We did dives 22-30 with Colona from October 10-15. We should have started our diving on the 8th but I was feeling ill (heat exhaustion) on the evening of the 7th so we decided to join Colona as snorkelers for our first day. Unfortunately there was some miscommunication between the dive shop and the dive masters on our boat. We enjoyed our first snorkeling stop but the next two stops were for drift dives (we were the only snorkelers on the boat) and we were not informed of this - in fact the dive briefing indicated the boat would remain stationary. At the second stop, after swimming around a bit, we noticed the boat had moved quite far away - to the other side of the reef! Alarmed, we quickly aborted our snorkeling and swam quickly to the boat. The divers had a third dive but we stayed on the boat. In retrospect we could have also probably cleared up the confusion at the time but we were spooked and actually not too happy with Colona after that day. [...]