Sharm El Naga
By Jaimy de Vries
To expand my diving skills I went on a week-holiday in Egypt at Sharm El Naga. I followed some specialty courses, with my dive school ABC Dive, to learn how to deep dive, wreck dive and to clean the ocean. It was a fun and educational trip! Thanks ABC Dive!
This was my first diving holiday and it was quite a shock what we needed to do to prepare ourselves, and how much stuff we needed to bring along. I had to bring so much stuff that I was surprised that it could fit in my dive suitcase. And I can tell you this, my dive suitcase is not tiny– even I could fit in it. Besides the packing, we needed to fill out so many forms. Most of them because diving is a dangerous sport and due to the corona pandemic. And still it wasn’t enough, at the airport we needed to fill out more forms! When we arrived in Egypt, they didn’t even take a good look at the forms. That’s frustrating – all that work and they couldn’t even bother to take a look! After getting our luggage back and a 1,5-hour drive through the sand of Egypt we arrived at our hotel, in the middle of nowhere. We had diner and went to bed early.
The next day we had our check dive. This is to see if your diving equipment works well and to see if you have enough weight with you. In Egypt you have the red sea that contains a lot of salt in the water, so you need double the weight than what you need in sweet water. In the Netherlands I dive with 6 kg weight on me, in Egypt I needed 12 kg!! The check dive is also to get familiar and comfortable with the environment. After our check dive, I took two dives at the hotel bay. We saw blue spotted rays, a crocodile fish, a lionfish and a murena.
The next few days we had educational dives, called specialties. I took 3 specialty courses: learning how to deep dive, how to safely penetrate a wreck and we made a dive against debris (how to keep the sea clean). My diving instructor came to me and asked if he could pair me with someone who had difficulty with buoncy. The person needed a stable buddy and because I was handling a situation very well the day before, they thought of me. That was an honor and it could be good learning moment for me. I needed a compliment that day because I was having a cold and my previous dive didn’t go as smooth as I hoped. It gave me the confidence boost I needed. The next day I put my skills as a rescue diver in practice. Maybe I want to become a dive master in the future, so some practice won’t do any harm.
So the next day we went on an excursion to a different spot in the red sea: Abu Nuhas. We took a bus at 5 A.M. to the boat. We had breakfast on the boat and on 9 A.M. we took our first dive to a wreck. I needed to help my buddy a couple of times that day, but after that she did it all by herself. We took 3 dives in total that day. Our first dive was at wreck Carnatic that we analyzed (that was our assignment). And at the other wreck Chrisoula we took our second and third dive. First we examined the Chrisoula wreck to make a safe dive plan how to safely penetrate (yes that’s how they call it) the wreck. On our third dive we followed our plan and we had a great dive: it was fun and we safely returned back to the boat (safety first). We bumped our fist and took some photos. The last dive was my 50th dive as well! So that meant that I can call myself a master scuba diver – a title of honor! Woehoo!
The other day the dive with my buddy didn’t go so well, so I decided to help her and practice again that day to undo our earlier mistakes. And besides, I could use some practice as well to blow up the DSMB (a balloon that you blow up underwater so that the boats can see you on the surface). We made a dive-plan together for the next day how we’re going to dive and come back safely. We followed our plan at our last educational dive, and it went smooth! And we had an extra challenge: there was so much wind and current…, so that made everything a little bit more difficult. But we did well and we were so proud of each other! Finally we both got our certificates!
Besides the educational dives I also made some fun dives. I took several dives with my buddy-team, we called ourselves the Magic-five. We liked challenges, so we arranged a zodiac to bring us to dive spots farther away and from there we took a drift dive back. It was really fun to explore the area around the bay and the dives were a bit more exciting and challenging. The hotel bay gets boring after diving there more than 10 times. Between the dives we had very interesting and fun conversations, no subject was too much and we got to know each other very well – let’s keep it at that haha.
I also took a night dive with Ivar and Emilia. It was my second night dive in total, so I was a little bit nervous but in a positive exciting way. Night dives are so different compared to day dives. Some fish are hiding in the coral
and other fish are behaving very differently than they do at daytime. For example the lion fish: they get a lot closer at night because they use the light of our flashlight to hunt. Our night-dive started with that, a lion fish came very close and was swimming vertically above a fish next to us. Het tried to catch it but missed it. We went left in the bay and turned to our right. We saw a star fish that moves his legs towards each other if you put light on him. At the end of our dive we sat on our knees and we dimmed our lights. We clapped our hands to look if we could see illuminated algae. They give a small blue light when it comes in touch with movements. And we saw it! It was very fun and special.
On one of the last dives that week we went on a dive against debris dive. With a group of 29 people – divided in four groups – we did some work in the sea. We gathered 17 kilo of trash out of the water. Mostly plastic bags and cups. Also some medical masks from the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s sad to see how much trash people dump, or what accidentally gets, in the water. We cleared a small area of trash, but it feels good to help the environment. If we all do something it can make a big difference.
After our last dive on Friday, we cleaned our diving equipment. That evening the hotel’s chef did an extra job to make a wonderful dinner. And they arranged ice cream (I kindly asked and used my charm that afternoon if it was possible to have ice cream after dinner)!! That made me a happy girl and others were excited too! The next morning we packed our bags, made a group photo and gave tips to the great employees of Hotel Sharm El Naga.
We went with a big group, more than 30 people, where most of the people didn’t knew each other before our trip. In a short period of time we experienced a lot together and became a big group of friends – it was easy: we all share a great hobby: scuba-diving! The group became even bigger. During the week a German guy, named Moritz, joined our group. We didn’t called him Moritz because the name ‘ German guy’ just sticked. Thank you all for a great week!