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The Diving Adventures page is dedicated to wonderful or maybe not so wonderful dive trips around the world.
Diving Eritrea and Sudan summer is the first in the series. These stories will be brought to you in an on going
series which will continued each a month.
Shark
Attack
| The next two dives are much the same on Saunders reef, although I nearly drown because of laughter on the last one. It is a late afternoon dive and the light is beginning to fade. I'm armed with my video camera and hovering mask to coral when I catch a glimpse of something big. Something big that is swimming towards me. The dark shape materializes into the mother of all nurse sharks. This thing is the size of the Hindenburg and its headed straight for me. Cool, I think. This will be a fantastic shot. At a distance of one meter, the shark sees me and makes a 90 degree left turn and powers around the pinnacle beside me. Donnita is on the other side of the pinnacle with her head buried in a crevice looking for eels. In an instant, I know that this is going to be really funny. I hear Donnita's muffled scream, then I hear the shark's muffled scream. Donnita does an emergency shark ascent and kicks the poor behemoth in the head. All I can see are a pair of blurred fins and a terrorized nurse shark moving at escape velocity into the distance. Bernie struggles to get out of its way and narrowly escapes impalement by nurse shark. Meanwhile, my regulator is exploding with laughter and I can no longer see as my mask is flooded with water. Later, I'm crying as I playback the video and see that I missed the entire sequence. But we all know that the best dive stories never have any visual proof. A great day of diving concludes over dinner as the guests recount their versions of what happened on Saunders Reef on June 25th 1996. The majority of divers on the boat are from the London area. Mary Ann, Donnita, and myself are the American contingency, although we consider Steve in an honorary fashion as he has been brave enough to travel with three crazy Americans. After Steve thoroughly enjoys a sumptous dinner complemented by a bottle of wine, I know that I 've successfully chosen a suitable liveaboard. |
Suakins
| We travel overnight and leave Eritrean waters on our way to the Suakins. Morning brings flat seas and spectacular visibility. We're at a wall known as Dharat Abid. Saunders reef was very nice, but Dharat Abid provides quintessential Red Sea diving. The water is hovering at 28 degrees and is absolutely crystal clear. The wall is vertical, dramatic, and prolific with unblemished hard corals, soft corals in various shades of white, yellow, pink, red, and purple, and wire corals that spiral towards the surface above, providing a maze of cover for thousands of powder blue triggerfish that weave among the corals and watch us drift overhead. I'm approaching my no deco limit at thirty meters so I move up to twenty meters. As I move shallower, the coral growth is lusher and the marine life is even more varied and abundant. Eels, clownfish, domino fish, half and halfs, a pair of lion fish, big eye soldier fish, and of course the ubiquitious white tip passing in the deep. Over the next 80 minutes I stairstep my way along the reef. There is a colony of carpet anemones that cover a section of the reef the size of the DSAC Clubhouse. Dozens of clownfish share the enormous spread with scores of tiny black and white domino fish that dance among the swaying tentacles of the anemones. This is like a mansion for clownfish. There is so much to see I never want to surface. I spend the next 25 minutes between 4 and 7 meters under the guise of an extended safety stop. The marine life at the reef top is spectacular, like nothing I have ever seen. I could easily run out of superlatives before describing half of the reef panorama lying before me. We finally surface and our RIB is ready and waiting. I think they were a bit surprised at our diving stamina and resulting bottom time, but never expressed any concern or criticism. We returned to the Sea Surveyor to find that everyone else had already finished breakfast. 30 meters for 105 minutes. Not a bad dive! A second dive at Dharat Abid left a similar impression, but alas, a third dive was not to be. It seems that the illustrious pair of videographers, John and Bernie were not impressed with a flourishing, dynamic reef of epic proportion. They only seemed interested in toothy predators and requested the Captain to move on to more shark infested waters. |
Sanganeb
reef
| The next few days were filled with a mixture of walls and shallow reefs. I found the variety of conditions interesting in that some of the reefs were untouched examples of exquisite beauty. Yet others lacked a certain grandeur in that the deeper reefs were noticably scarce of life in some instances. After several days of the occasional white tip, we began to wonder when we might see the hammerheads, grey reefs, silvertips and siIky sharks that we had expected on a regular basis. We all had high hopes at Sanganeb reef, known for its reputation of delivering big time shark action. I guess we all had visions of schooling hammerheads competing with mating whale sharks. We entered the RIBs with a sense of urgency and it sooned became a race to the bottom. There was nothing there so I stopped my descent at 43 meters. The sun's rays had yet to penetrate the depths and I was hovering in the deep, waiting for the big parade. Over the next several minutes I repeatedly scanned the depths, the distance, the reef, and the surface for any sign of Mr. Big. I ascended a few meters to a safe level and waited like a sentinel. Bubbles rose from below. How deep were John and Bernie? 50 meters? 60 meters? I left them to their own devices and turned my gaze back into the blue distance. "Screw this" I thought to myself and swam the 20 meters back to wall. Soon I was caught up in the morning ritual of the reef dwellers and forgot all about Mr. Big. Back on the boat everyone asked the inevitable question, "Did you see anything"? Someone thought they might have seen a manta but they were'nt sure. For the second dive, our trusty captain delivers us to the far side of the reef, adjacent to the lighthouse. Here we go again. Dive 2, the search continues. This time we drop in on a sloping reef that gradually approaches the shallows. I stay above 20 meters to maximize bottom time after the deep morning dive. This section of the reef is in poor shape. The corals look as though they've been dynamited or dredged. Dead broken coral heads are everywhere evident. Live cover is limited to new growth from the last couple of years and the occasional older coral head that has escaped destruction. Fish life is sparse but the formations and topography in the shallows are quite interesting. The pinnacles resemble a stonehenge that has been displaced and then rearranged in a linear formation. Overhangs and ledges create interesting crevices that glow and disappear in the dancing sunlit shallows. Vibrant orange and pink soft corals have taken hold and provide a haven for the ever present golden anthias. The most interesting discovery are the giant clams found nestled in the tops of the coral heads. Some have mantles of emerald green or turquoise. Some are purple and others are a variegated brown pattern. They are fascinating to watch. With every exhalation, my bubbles trigger a sensory mechanism that causes the shell to clamp shut. As the clams grow larger, the mantles become increasingly thick, thus preventing them from ever closing completely. Nonetheless, I could not persuade Donnita to insert her hand inside any of the larger specimens. Unfortunately, we saw no sharks but we did have an interesting dive and found the shallow areas of the reef to be very interesting. |
Sharks
- Sharks- Sharks
| On the ride back to the Sea Surveyor we pass a Sudanese yachtsman who is methodically rowing his way to the lighthouse. Presumably, he has come from Port Sudan which is over a dozen kilometers distant to the east. His yacht is a square wooden boat with no motor or rudder, and I doubt that it even has a keel. The post dive report includes a few occasional sitings of white tips by some of the divers. By now,we are considering mutiny. Where are all these big sharks we were promised? Of course , we know that one can't predict nature or make it perform on schedule, but the brochures had practically described this spot as a veritable shark feeding frenzy with no equal in the world. Oh well, the reefs are interesting and Steve is happy with the food, so I can't really complain. It's now dive 3 at Sanganeb and I've pretty much given up on the shark frenzy, so we have the RIB driver take us a little further up the reef to explore some new territory. Plop, fin, squeak. The ears take a little work and as I hit 15 meters the water looks crinkly and gets a little chilly. Something else is happening...we're being swept across the bottom and I have to struggle to latch onto an unsuspecting coral head. A curious Napoleon wrasse keeps a watchful eye over us. The current is absolutely ripping across the reef plateau. A bit of diving wisdom instantly materializes in my consciousness: where there's current there's sharks! The adrenaline rush starts in my gut and and quickly ripples through my being. They're here. I haven't seen them, but I can feel them. Two gray reef sharks sweep across the reef down current, turn upstream as a pair and come in for a close up, get to know you kind of approach. One breaks off in front of Donnita and the other cuts right between us, taking in every detail before lazily moving off into the current. There are sharks to my left, in front, to my right, and also behind me. None of them come in close but the show is definitely on and we have front row seats. With decompression mode looming and air supplies dwindling we reluctantly release our holds on the coral heads. The idea is to work across the current, move up the reef and finish off our dive in the safely of the shallows. That's the idea anyway. The current sends us tumbling over the edge of the plateau and suddenly we are in 25 meters of blue water and descending. What's wrong with this picture? Struggling to stay out of decompression, we fin like mad and even have to pump up our BCD's to offset the vertical current that is trying to carry us down the wall. After a few tense moments we slowly begin to ascend and soon feel the current dissipate. After an extra long stop, we surface grinning from ear to ear. |
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