the photographer

taking pictures underwater is not an easy skill. i've been doing it for 12 years now but still i don't think i'm good at it, even if my underwater digital slr camera is a very nice piece of equipment. but there are guys who just know much better than me how to use it. one of them came for a visit to take pictures of the new hotel & dive shop. his name is gerald nowak and he's a professional photo journalist. his portfolio includes all the big german dive magazines including 'tauchen', 'unterwasser', 'aquanaut' and 'atlantis'. he did just two dives on our house reef in less than optimal conditions, but the results are quite impressive.

the diver in the photo is rudi robisch, the bavarian manager of the other orca dive club in hamata. together, they found some nice objects like this small school of batfish.


gerald and rudi even found some big fish like this malabar cod which is great news to us and the new dive shop.


finally gerald found these two - at 6 o'clock in the morning. that's why we look a bit tired. thanks, gerald, for the pictures. we really enjoyed your company.

diving the red sea

while we wait for the completion of the new dive shop, fränzi and i go out on the boat almost every day to get to know 'our' dive sites. the dive boats are huge compared to the day boats we use at ningaloo.

the boats look nice but they also are very slow. it takes up to two hours to get to the dive sites but we don't mind too much because the boats are spacious and comfortable. so, we just hang out and relax with our customers on the sun deck.


working on dive boats in egypt is an easy job compared to the work divemasters have to do in australia. all the hard work - filling tanks, transporting cylinders and gear to and from the boats - is done by the egyptian crew members. all we have to do is to make sure everything runs smoothly and to look after the divers. sometimes we feel like guests on the clean and tidy boats ourselves.

the dive sites are mainly colorful coral gardens. probably the most beautiful hard and soft corals in the world. but there is not much big fish left in these waters. obviously, it has all been fished out by the egyptians who even used dynamite for many years. i learned scuba diving in the red sea 15 years ago but it was a completely different story back then. there were big fish and sharks everywhere. but now? in four weeks we haven't seen one shark. so, we started taking pictures of ourselves instead.

sometimes we get to see a 'big cod', as they say here, but the fish they mean would be considered a rather small cod at ningaloo. we appreciate the marine life at ningaloo even more since we dive here. it reminds us of how it once looked here in the red sea before they threw dynamite overboard. i hope the ningaloo reef will not face the same fate with all those recreational fishing boats going there in increasing numbers these days. it becomes a rather sad experience to find one single big fish in the sea after weeks of diving, like the big napoleon wrasse we encountered two days ago on a dive site called 'shaab claudio'. when it approached us, we saw that its lips were badly deformed and infected, from being fed by hand or from a fishing hook - we don't know. to us, this magnificent fish looked rather lost and lonely.