Aida

The Aida still looks like a ship. Where the Numidia is so broken and so deep that it reads as part of the reef, the Aida keeps a recognisable shape, with an intact superstructure and davits still lining the railings. You make a negative entry and descend through the current onto the upper hull, then work the structure before riding the drift back along the reef in the shallows. She lies on her port side at a steep angle down the wall, so the whole dive is a slow track along a tilted ship.

Coming down, you meet the coral-smothered upper hull first, then at around 33 metres the point where she broke apart, the damaged central section and an engine room you can swim through where the hull is split. The quarterdeck planking rotted away long ago, leaving the steel skeleton; heavy winches sit forward of the cargo hatches; the helm and, deepest of all, the propeller lie far down toward 65 metres, past recreational range. The real draw is the encrustation and the fish. Soft and hard coral cover the whole structure, best read under a torch, and the schools are dense enough that batfish, grouper and glassfish block the light in sections. Napoleon wrasse and morays work the recesses. Most divers keep to the 25 to 40 metre band; the stern and propeller are a technical choice, not a casual one.

The Aida is the Brothers wreck for divers who want a wreck dive, not a technical objective. It is the diveable one. The Numidia's interest lies mostly below 40 metres; the Aida's main body sits in the recreational-to-light-tech band, roughly 25 to 40 metres on the upper and mid wreck, so an advanced diver can swim the superstructure, look into the engine room and holds, and still surface with sensible margins. It is the more intact and more photogenic of the pair, a coral-blanketed hull with swirling, light-blocking fish life set against the blue.

It also carries a genuine, well-documented backstory that the pure reef sites lack: a French-built Egyptian lighthouse tender lost while relieving the very garrison whose lighthouse still stands above the dive. The history gives the dive a narrative, and the intact structure gives it the photographs. Together they make the Aida the wreck most divers actually enjoy at length out here, rather than tick off on a deep clock.

The Aida has an unusually well-documented past for a Red Sea wreck. She was built at Nantes, France, in 1911 as a combined cargo and lighthouse tender for Egypt's Ports and Lighthouses Administration1, and she spent decades supplying the remote navigational stations of the Egyptian Red Sea, in her later years pressed into service ferrying personnel and stores.

Her end came on a stormy day while she was relieving the station on Big Brother. Driven onto the reef in heavy seas as she tried to reach the jetty, she sank on 15 September 19572. Everyone aboard was saved, a tug taking off most of the crew and the rest reaching the island. One piece of dive-boat lore is worth correcting: the Aida is sometimes called an Italian ship, almost certainly because she was carrying military personnel when she was lost. She was, in fact, an Egyptian vessel, French-built, in the service of the lighthouses she spent her life tending.

Bring a torch, even in clear water. The Aida's whole appeal is the coral that has blanketed her, and it only shows its colour under a light. Treat this as a deep dive on a tilted hull, not a leisurely potter: the structure keeps dropping away below you, and it is easy to slide past your planned depth without noticing. Her stern and propeller sit in technical ground, best left alone unless you came equipped for them.

The broken-open engine room is a swim-through with light overhead, not a deep penetration, but treat any time inside the hull with respect for your training. Watch for downcurrents on the wall and the easy creep of depth on a hull that keeps tilting away below you. A surface marker is standard kit for the drift pickup, and nitrox makes sense given how often the dives run deep. The experience expectation here is genuine. These islands are reached only by liveaboard, and they assume advanced, current-comfortable divers, not a first deep wreck.