print dive site review | contribute site info / photo
Scuba Diving in the Red Sea
Reader Reviews:
Dive Site: Moray Garden
Location: South Dahab, 28°26.253N; 34°27.586E
Description: Reef / shore dive with coral garden and seagrass area
Depth: 5 - 30 metres (16 - 100 feet)
Visibility: 30 metres (100 feet)
Rating: ***
Moray Garden is located around twenty minutes drive south of Dahab. Facilities at the dive site include some basic Bedouin-style shelters. Normal practice is to make the trip in jeeps or small pickup trucks and then kit up on the sand/rock beach on large woven matting. Take care with your regulators as the course sand can easily get into the second stage diaphragms. Once kitted up, entry is made by walking into the shallows and donning fins. The seabed falls away reasonably sharply down a sand and coral slope and there are gullies and small canyons which can be followed quickly down to the 30m+ mark. Red Sea bannerfish and coral groupers are prolific here. There are also a number of giant clams with their colourful mantles collecting sunlight for symbiotic algae. About 10 minutes swim to the south of the entry point at around 22m is a coral outcrop covered in glassfish or sweepers.
As you begin to ascend and head back towards the shore there is a never ending abundance of stony coral, including yellow waver and raspberry coral. The usual clownfish (twin band anemone fish) inhabit their anemone homes. Look carefully here as there are some fantastic bright red bubble anemones. The latter part of your dive and safety stops can be completed on the sand and coral encrusted slope with pipefish and flounders. Moray Garden is great place to start your diving holiday before moving onto offshore boat dives or some of the big vertical drop-offs.
Rik Vercoe, BSAC Advanced Instructor
Moray Garden is one of the beautiful dive sites in the south between Three Pools and Golden Blocks. At the entry and exit point you have a sandy slope from where you can go either right or left or do drift dives from Golden Blocks or to Three Pools. On the right side you will find a fascinating coral garden with a small wall dropping off to 50m. It is a great place to look into holes and cracks for interesting things like morays, nudibranchs and scorpionfish. Following the coral slope you will pass a nice glassfish pinnacle at 22m. As you come up to the shallow reef at the top of the coral garden you will find a sandy area at 7m where you can see a big school of yellow tail barracudas. At the left side of Moray Garden you have a coral slope with sand alleys streaming down at the deeper part. At the shallower part you have beautiful table corals and coral blocks. It is a great place to find nudibranchs, morays and blue spotted stingrays. Moray Garden can be enjoyed by all divers regardless of level. It has a lot of small things to see but sightings of guitar sharks, whitetip reef sharks and whale sharks have been known.
Very beautiful place and not dangerous as an open water diver. Dive at Moray Garden and it will teach you a lot.
Yasser Emira, PADI Advanced Open Water Diver
Do you have any comments on this dive site?
print dive site review | contribute site info / photo | top 
Do you run a dive operation in this area?
Click here to find out more about being listed on this
page in dive site directory.
|
