Dahab is one of the iconic dive sites. Haven’t you been to Dahab? What you know about diving. Once a sleepy Bedouin fishing village discovered by hippies and later publicized by divers has turned into a pocket resort. However, a certain character of the village remained. Small hotels, full of bars and restaurants us the sea itself. Fruit market, a local center with a fruit bazaar and meat butcheries.
You fly to Dahab via Sahrm El Sheik and then transfer about 2 hours (80 km) by minibus to
Dahab. A desolate two-lane highway on which until recently Egyptian drivers drove at night without lights according to the principle that you can see more and especially farther with the moon than with an oil lamp. Car lights and immediately long lights were turned on as they saw a vehicle coming from the opposite direction, which led tourists to slightly worry about the passing rules.
Dahab is such a diving street or rather a seaside boulevard with hotels on one side of the boulevard and beachfront restaurants on the other. There are diving schools in the hotels and the first dives are usually made by getting dressed on the steps going down to the sea in the restaurant while drinking the lime juices ordered.
Dahab, due to its strong winds, is also a center for windusrfingi and katesurfing
After the first dives are made in Dahab itself, further dives are driven from the dive centers by car and dived from shore at more iconic sites. Dahab is located where Africa breaks away from Asia, the seabed breaks off in tectonic fractures and there are such iconic sites as Blue Hole, Canyon and Little Canyon by the shore.
The word Dahab means gold and may refer to gold leached from the mountains and accumulating in the flat valley on which the city was built. Anyway, the latest spurt of such washouts is where there is now an iconic bridge on the boulevard, which was built in the early 2000s when a sudden downpour in the mountains caused a powerful torrent of water to surge, washing a chunk of Dahab with stores and hotels into the sea, and now there is an open dry space with a bridge over a dry bottom waiting for the next flood. The gold in Dahab’s name may also come from the golden coastal sand. Certainly Dahab’s name does not come from the gold that, along with the goldsmith’s store, was washed into the sea when a massive water runoff washed away a chunk of Dahab, but a lot of it was pulled by divers from the sand opposite today’s iconic bridge immediately after the flood.
Bedouin tradition translates the name Dahab as a place where we lose ourselves in time and later the name itself was distorted into the word Dahab.
Once we arrive in Dahab, the hotel will probably only offer us breakfast and our post-dive lunches will be eaten at a different local pub each day. These wandering pubs of hungry divers are one of the features of Dahab in contrast to the resorts with All In hotels – in Hurgahda, Sharma or MarsaAlam. Talking about where they give better chicken or better seafood is a constant topic of discussion among divers depending on their tastes and wallets.
Dahab is also a place from where you can go on very interesting camel treks and on further excursions i.e. visiting the iconic sites of Sinai i.e. Mount Sinai, St. Catherine’s Monastery or on a longer trip to Jordan to Petra Gorge.
However, for us, Dahab is about diving first. The iconic dive sites for which one goes to Dahab are Blue Hole, Canyon and Littele Canyon.
Blue Hole
The Blue Hole is a typical sinkhole – a sinkhole where the ceiling of a massive cavern has collapsed revealing a vertical well about 100 meters deep at the same time rupturing the wall separating the Blue Hole from the high seas creating an opportunity to swim out of it by passing under an arche – an arch at 54 meters.
On the shore side, the Blue Hole wall drops vertically for 20 meters and then a steep drop runs under the Arch reaching a depth of about 100 meters at the entrance under the Arch and in the drop of the other side of the Blue Hol. After walking along the bottom outside the Blue Hole, we reach a depth of about 120 meters at the bottom. Outside the Blue Hole to the left opens the Bells wall a vertical tectonic break descending with a perfect vertical from zero to about 140 meters.
Canyon
It’s a diagonal tectonic fracture overgrown from the top with an old reef forming a full roof in places and leaving the space open and permeable to blue light.
The canyon begins with a shallow 2-3 meter lagoon with a bottom covered with white sand. This is a great place to get your gear ready for the last time then swim through a passage in the reef and swim left about 8 minutes over a slowly falling bottom to the entrance to Canyon at about 12 meters where there is a vertical well ending in a sandy bottom at 30 meters. This sandbank at the bottom of the Canyon is a favorite destination for deep dives during the AOWD course and a place to practice before diving further during Deep courses. Then downhill the Canyon proper begins. We swim on a rocky drop between vertical walls to a depth of 48 meters where there is an exit from the Canyon to the outside. This is more the goal of technical divers with gas changes and decompression. The return from the dive can be done either inside the Canyon or after going outside over the canyon guided by millions of air bubbles exhaled by other divers or earlier by ourselves, which slowly pave their way through cracks in the Canyon’s vault and then fly out through the sand divided into tiny bubbles to form air curtains and veils.
Below Canyon being a trimix diving destination are Neptune Cave and Wagner Cave.
Littele Canyon
It is a double crack in the reef wall running parallel to the shore forming two parallel canyons running from a depth of 40 meters to about 65 meters. Littel Canyon is less traveled because it requires entering the water and swimming over the sloping bottom for about 12 minutes until you see a zigzagging bottom break below. Then we enter it and between the vertical walls we swim until too much decompression or a small supply of gases chases us to the top and forces us to return for a long time along the slowly rising bottom to the shore and the reef wall near the shore. Little Canyon is worth finding with a guide the first time and then it is a super destination and a test of our navigation skills.
Other dive sites shallower and abundant with life include Ell Garden with its mass of small eels hiding in the sand or Coral Garden with its colorful reef.
Dahab is a place where you should go to explore the dive sites and a place where you should return to relax by reading books in the local pubs between dives, of course.
