Israel Day 7 - Egypt, Scuba Diving in the Red Sea

We started off our morning bright and early looking out over Eilat from our balcony. Another awesome view!

The first thing we had to do is get our gear at the local Aqua Sport scuba shop. Unfortunately, they did not have the biggest sizes of wet suits (as you will see in later pictures :o) ). Then we got in the bus and drove to the border with Egypt. Yet another long border crossing and we ended up at the Egyptian Aqua Sport shop on the Strait of Aqaba (Red Sea) in a town called Taba. This shop was part of the hotel that was blown up by a suicide bomber two years ago. The security now is really stringent. The funniest thing though was that it seemed as though every guard we met was named Muhammad. We joked that there was probably a basket of name tags all with Muhammad on them and they just grabbed one each morning :o)

We got on our dive boat for the day and made ourselves comfortable. There were both divers and snorkelers on the boat. Here is a good shot of the boat and some of the folks that were on the boat.

We went about 20 minutes to our first stop where we went down to the bottom and did a refresh of skills. It is required in Egypt to do a refresher if you have not completed a dive within 6 months. Once our skills were completed, we were able to swim around and view some of the wildlife. Definitely an amazing spot to dive. Here are some of the pics from that dive.

Nice Shorts!

We then had an awesome lunch on the boat and drove to our next spot, "Coral Island". It was literally an island of coral about 60 feet down under water with all sorts of life around it. There were hundreds of fish circling the reef. We saw frog fish, black eels, an octopus, rock fish, a large crab, and 8 lion fish. These are beautiful fish but very dangerous. We didn't know how dangerous until we came home and read about them.

Here are some great pictures of that stop.

While this may not be the exact place where the crossing of the Israelites happened, it was definitely in an area very similar to this. Here is a picture of a Crusader castle right on the sea with the Negev desert behind it.

It was an awesome day with a total of close to two hours of diving. Unfortunately, we didn't get our third dive in as it was getting dark so we returned to the dive shop and turned in our gear. Another long and tedious border crossing back into Israel and back to our hotel.

That night, we were able to walk around the city on the boardwalk which was almost like a street fair. We had heard about a certain type of fish called Denis fish that everyone who has been to Israel said we had to try. So...we finished off our night with a nice dinner of Denis fish. First we swim with them, then we eat them :o) A good end to another good day.