Big Brother

Roll off the boat at Big Brother and there is no reef to ease onto. You are on the wall, the blue dropping away beneath your fins, and the dive's character is set in the first ten seconds. A day here is built around four approaches, and which one you get depends on the current and the hour. The dawn favourite is the south plateau: a negative entry straight off the moored yacht, down onto a ridge near 30 to 40 metres, where a thresher may rise out of the dark. Threshers spook when too many divers crowd the cleaning station. Get in early.

The north and northwest walls are run as drifts. You descend onto a vertical face thick with gorgonians, table coral and clouds of anthias, then let the north-to-south flow carry you while you watch the open water off your shoulder. Oceanic whitetips tend to show in the middle of the dive, once you have drifted clear of the structure, curious and unhurried. The shallower northwest plateau near 10 metres makes a coral-rich, fish-busy finish and a sensible place to off-gas.

The two wrecks bracket the day as separate dives. The deep Numidia sits on the north wall [see numidia-wreck]; the shallower, more intact Aida lies on the southern side, usually an afternoon dive [see aida-wreck]. Strong, sometimes severe current and the risk of being pushed down on the walls are the constant. Staying with the group and off the open blue matters as much as anything you came to see.

Big Brother is the only place in the Brothers where one reef holds the whole set: sheer coral walls, the area's most reliable oceanic whitetips, a dawn thresher station, and two historic wrecks worked into the same face. Little Brother to the south has finer soft coral and the better hammerhead odds, but no wrecks [see small-brother]; the pure reef-and-shark sites further offshore have none either. Here a deep wreck descent, a wall drift and a plateau shark-watch can all happen in one day off the same boat.

It is also the busy one. Of the two islands Big Brother draws the bigger crowd, and on a peak morning the water fills with divers in waves. That shapes the diving. A soup of divers in the blue can push the sharks out, and the threshers turn shy. It also means no shark show is promised. Divers come a long way and cross an open sea for this island knowing the sharks are a gamble, not a guarantee, and they rate it anyway.

A lighthouse has stood on Big Brother since the 1880s, built of stone quarried on the island itself, its walls feet thick at the base. The British raised it to warn ships off an isolated reef in open sea. The warning was never enough. The reef took a British cargo steamer in the early 1900s and an Egyptian supply ship half a century later, and both now lie encrusted into the wall as the island's signature wreck dives [see numidia-wreck] [see aida-wreck]. Jacques Cousteau dived here and wrote of the Brothers' nervous sharks in The Silent World, an early notice of what would later draw divers across an open sea to a lighthouse rock. The tower still works under an Egyptian navy garrison, and divers still climb it between dives when the garrison allows.

Current sets the terms here. It generally runs north to south and can turn severe, and the real hazard is a downcurrent on the sheer wall pulling you deep. Stay close to the reef, keep a little buoyancy in hand, and if the water starts taking you down, move out toward the blue and add gas early. Negative entries are standard, so be ready to drop the moment you roll in and to be collected by zodiac in chop. An SMB is essential, and nitrox helps on the repeated deep profiles.

This is not a site for new divers. The walls and plateaus stay within recreational limits, but the Numidia's lower sections run into technical depth and are for trained, equipped divers only. Operators expect advanced training and a solid dive history before they bring you here. Time your day around the crowd as much as the marine life. The dawn slot on the south plateau is the prize, before a dozen boats' divers are in the water.