Day 3 – Wreck, reef and turtle!
Saturday, 20th May 2006 by JulieTuesday:
Shortly after 07h30, we were in our kit once more and pounding over the waves in a Zodiac, back to the Abu Nuhas reef.
Today’s first dive was the Carnatic – a grand old P&O steam and sail hybrid which went down in 1869. Almost all of her passengers were saved but the £40,000 of Royal Mint gold in her cargo holds went down, and became the focus of one of the very first proper salvage expeditions later that year. About £10k of the gold was not recovered and the dive guides use that to tantalise divers.
I was a little worried about my left ear which had started to hurt the day before towards the end of the night dive, but it after some mild pain going down, it seemed to clear up.
It was a pretty dive. After all its time underwater the 19th century wreck matched Steve’s description of being “as much a reef as a wreck”. Once again we could explore the complete interior of the great iron hull since all the flooring had rotted away.
For me the highlights of the dive were the shoals of fish sheltering in the bow. These guys were tiny, maybe 1.5 – 2 inches long and a quarter as wide, and they came in schools of silver-blue, a very curious silver-transparent mix (these are glassfish it turns out), and orange. There were masses of them and they formed big clouds in the water, darting and regrouping constantly, flashing like slivers of silver when they all caught the light.
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After breakfast we moved slightly further up the strait on the west side of Sinai, and stopped near two islands known imaginatively as Big Gubal and Small Gubal. The briefing for our pre-lunch dive was up on deck as it was a reef dive at a site called Malek, and the illustrations were a simple schematic drawn by Steve.
We had a Zodiac trip to take us round the corner from the boat, and dropped in just after 12h00.
It was an amazing dive for sea life. There were fish everywhere, from lionfish with their pretty and venomous brown and white spines lurking under overhangs, to clouds of anthias and black and white striped humbug dascyllus. We found a giant clam of about 20cm, opened to expose soft folds that quiver in the passing currents, and spotted a tiny grey moray eel poking out his head.
Of special note was the scorpionfish that Tom noticed lying on a ledge. Exactly the same colour as a lichen-covered rock, he watched us with one careful eye as we hung in the water watching him and marvelling at his camouflage.
His outline is perfectly broken up by a lace filligree effect – little pieces of it hanging off all over his body, and it really appears to be bits of random plant-life growing on a rock. Looking at him was just like one of those optical illusions – one minute you see a rock… the next, the lines in the rock metamorphose into a fish. How cool. 
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The final highlight of that dive was a turtle. Oh wow. It was just swimming languidly through the blue, graceful as a dancer as it moved its fins up and down. I could have watched it for hours but we only had a minute or two before it swam out of sight.
At 59 minutes that was one of our longest dives to date – and a thoroughly enjoyable and relaxing hour spent in a very different world.
