What the heck is that!? or Diving the Red Sea

We had a great time diving the Red Sea in both Jordan and Egypt. The coral is in pretty good shape and there is a variety of life that we haven't seen before. Check out the pictures of Aqaba, Jordan and Dahab, Egypt on the website for some of the really cool stuff we saw. By the fourth dive, we had seen so much that when Mary pointed out a group of rare (to us) lionfish, I just waved my hand and swam on. Picture here is a Red Sea Walkman. The wings open when it's real angry. Ooops.


Saudi Arabia is considered the holiest of the holy lands in Islam and non-Muslims are not terribly welcome. We wanted to check it out, though, so we did a dive called the "Saudi Border". It's a wall dive that starts almost directly off the border checkpoint between Jordan and Saudi. Now we can't say for sure that we made it across the line, but it was close enough. Lots of lionfish on this dive.

We did a couple wrecks, one of them a WWII British cargo ship that was full of tanks, trucks and motorcycles when it was sunk by a German bomb south of the Suez Canal.




We did a dive at the southernmost tip of the Sinai penninsula where warm and cold currents from the deep come together and draw some of the bigger fish out of hiding. After we passed a regular old blue spotted stingray, we came across a handful of gigantic eels. The biggest was at least 7' long and had a neck that seemed about 1' across at the widest. It was an absolute monster with a big gash along its body from some battle that we were lucky enough to miss. These are so big that they are just not afraid of anything - three of them actually came out of their rocks and free swam for us.

Our final dive was at night in Dahab. There's a lot of plankton in the water that glow when you disturb them. We must have spent 15 minutes on that dive just dancing and moving around to watch the phosphorescent trail of plankton that looked like fairy dust. In between, we saw some interesting night action. It turns out that parrotfish spend half an hour every night to build a protective cocoon with their saliva before they sleep. How cool is that?
OK, so I forgot to rotate and zoom this picture, but look close and you'll see a thin white membrane around the fish. kinda gross, actually.