Red Sea Diving Holiday November 2015 – part 4
Red Sea Diving Holiday 2015
12th November
A few sore heads this morning as we once again polished off the contents of the beer fridge, we depleted the duty free stocks, and Johnny took it upon himself to try and rid the boat of their red wine.
Last nights nights entertainment consisted of loud music, some dad dancing on the sun deck and Johnny falling asleep on one of the beanbags. This gave way to his new nickname ‘whiteboard’ as a green marker pen found its way to his forehead, face and ears.
Our penultimate dive was a gentle drift at the ‘old Police Station’ located just outside Hurghada. A pretty deep dive with the Red Sea’s largest gorgonian fan coral forest which runs along the wall. Looking carefully on the fans were a few hawknose fish, a pretty rare species. After the fan corals we made our way up to the plateau were there were stacks of morays, a couple of napoleon wrasse, scorpionfish, blue spotted stingrays and a few crocodile fish.
Congratulations to Cookie, Matt and Steve for completing their final Deep Speciality dive, they are now well on their way to becoming Master Scuba Divers.
After a quick refuelling stop we moored up for our final dive of the week, a wreck which was an ex Egyptian mine sweeper. Next to our boat was another of the Blueotwo boats whose divers decided to go in fancy dress. It didn’t take the girls on our boat long to spot the naked diver and the bloke in the mankini doing their giant strides.
The wreck called ‘El Miniya’ was built in Russia in 1956 and was sank by a Mirage III wreck in the Iraq Egyptian war in 1970. Having dived with oceanic white tips, silkies and dozens of hammerheads, Melvin and Ben decided to wait until the last dive to be attacked. The man eating clownfish really had it in for them and left a minute red mark on them which they kept showing to everyone – please see rule no. 5.
Arriving in the marina we cleaned our kit and cracked open the tinnies. After a SSS we headed off in to Hughada for the Last Supper. During dinner a couple beanie hats were handed out. Ben won one for the award of being the biggest party animal and Chris won most improved diver. After dinner 1/2 the group headed back to the boat to polish off the duty free while the others went to a local bar to watch a local boy band, play pool and drink copious amounts of cocktails and beer. At 2am we rendezvoud back on the boat, slowly the numbers reduced until just the hardcore remained – Alison, Taff, the 3 Amigos, Alex, Peter, Wendy and a few others. Johnny did his usual and fell asleep on the beanbag but there was no face graffiti this time. Rumour has it that an end of holiday romance blossomed but I couldn’t possibly comment further.
13th November
The following morning we enjoyed a day by the pool soaking up the sun before heading back to the airport.
This has been an amazing trip with great people, some amazing dives and will last in my memory indefinitely. I can’t wait until the next Red Sea liveaboard in June for some more reefs and sharks.