Diving in Dahab

The reef at Dahab drops away steeply only metres from the beach, and that one fact organises the diving: nearly every signature dive is a walk-in from a pickup parked on a desert track, with no boat involved. The town grew from a Bedouin fishing village into a diving base through the 1980s and 1990s and still feels walkable and unhurried, with dive centres, cafes and restaurants strung along a low-rise waterfront. Freedivers, technical divers and windsurfers share the same few streets.

Three dives set the tone. The Canyon is a narrow fissure in the reef wall entered at around 20 m, where filtered light falls on a coral dome packed with glassfish. Gabr el Bint, about an hour south by boat, is the far-flung one, with giant fan corals on a grassy reef top that steps down in ledges. Closer in, Lighthouse and Eel Garden carry everyday diving: training, macro, night dives and a garden eel colony.

The third is the Blue Hole, a sinkhole roughly 100 to 110 m deep and rimmed by reef. Recreational divers work the outer wall to about 30 m, and the Arch that links it to the open sea is technical territory. The site is heavily crowded, shared with snorkelers at entry and exit, and verdicts on the rim run from bucket-list to unimpressed, though the outer wall draws steady praise.

Anthias cloud the walls, giant morays sit in the crevices, and a hawksbill turtle is resident at Lighthouse. Eagle rays and seahorses turn up occasionally. There is no notable wreck diving.

The Dahab marine section was added to the Nabq protected area by decree 33/1996 as the Dahab Environmentally Managed Area; the Abu Galum Protectorate to the north dates from 1992.

Most visitors fly into Sharm el-Sheikh and cover the roughly 80 km by road: a little over an hour by taxi, up to about 75 minutes with the security checkpoints the driver handles. Dahab needs no full visa on a Sinai-only entry, but Thistlegorm trips and, divers report, Ras Mohammed do.

Dozens of dive centres work Dahab, most of them around Masbat, and they run the days: gear is set up at the centre and loaded onto a pickup for the nearer sites. A day is usually two dives; Gabr el Bint and El Shugarat are boat trips of about an hour, and night and sunrise dives are arranged through the centre. The Blue Hole entry fee is paid on top of the trip, in cash in US dollars, and is quoted anywhere from USD 20 to about USD 25 per person.

Shallow sandy slopes such as Eel Garden suit new divers, and the Canyon interior and the outer wall at the Blue Hole call for more experience. Egypt limits recreational air diving to 40 m, so deeper plans need the matching training and gas. A guided dive with full equipment costs about 35 to 60 EUR depending on the centre, and ten-dive packages at some centres come to around 29 EUR a dive (early 2026); most centres quote in EUR.

The northern Red Sea is salty, around 41 ppt against 35 elsewhere, so carry more lead than you are used to. A hyperbaric medical centre operates in town, next to the Dahabeya Hotel.