Rocky Island

The guide reads the current before anyone gets wet, then picks a side. Most dives at Rocky start with a negative entry and a fast drop, because the water has to go somewhere when it hits a rock this small and this exposed. The southern shore is the calmest stretch and the one suited to less-experienced divers in the group: softer corals, smaller reef fish, and a coral-rich plateau to work without fighting much flow. The eastern corner is the opposite. The wall there falls away fast into the open Red Sea, and the brief is simple. Drop down, hang off the wall, and watch the blue while the surface current runs above you. That is where the big animals are most likely to pass. The northern shore takes the most wind and swell, a quick, rough drift along the wall with a choppy surface waiting for the pickup.

What you see shifts with the season as much as the side. When the sharks are in, the eastern and northern walls produce the show, with oceanic whitetips and the occasional tiger cruising the blue. Rocky is one of Egypt's more dependable oceanic whitetip walls, and on the eastern side the whitetips are often inquisitive, sweeping in for a slow, close pass along the drop-off before peeling back into open water; the encounter is most likely autumn into early winter, and never guaranteed. When they are not, the dive is a wall drift past gorgonians and soft coral, with grey reef sharks over the plateau and big Napoleon wrasse on the reef. The current is the one constant, and the whole dive is planned around it.

Rocky is the wild end of the Deep South. It is barely 500 metres of rock in open ocean, and that exposure is the point. The same currents that make it demanding feed the walls, so the coral here is dense and, by repeated account, among the healthiest left on Egypt's offshore reefs, with big gorgonians and soft coral waving in the flow. The bigger draw is what swims past it. Few Egyptian sites stack oceanic whitetip, grey reef and silvertip over one plateau, and Rocky carries something rarer still: a real tiger-shark reputation, built on seasons when the animals settled in for months.

Those seasons come and go. Some trips deliver sharks on nearly every dive. Others produce a wall, the coral, and not a single fin. The third thing Rocky offers is solitude. It sits far enough south, near the Sudanese border, that it stays off most schedules, and the boats that make the crossing often have it to themselves. Its sheltered sibling Zabargad gives the same safari its turtle bays and a quiet wreck [see zabargad-reef]. Rocky gives it the adrenaline.

Current discipline is the whole game at Rocky. The flow runs strong and shifts without much warning, and the real danger is being swept off a tiny island into open sea, so a surface marker buoy and a dive computer are essential kit here, not optional extras. Negative entries are standard. Be ready to drop the moment you roll in rather than pausing at the surface. On the eastern side, stay close to the wall and mind your depth, because the bottom drops away fast and the current can pull you out into the blue.

If you or your buddies are newer to this kind of diving, ask for the southern side, the calmest of the three. Set your expectations on the sharks to the season and accept that they are never guaranteed. There is no night diving here, and the nearest recompression chamber is a long way off, which is part of why composure matters more than your logbook. The deep Maidan wreck on the south side sits well past 80 metres and is a technical dive only, not part of a day at Rocky.