Shark Reef is the Red Sea’s most famous and most popular dive site. It is easy to understand why, especially if you have dived there in the summer, with its rich and varied corals, and an abundance of reef & pelagic fish.
Due to its geographic location, the Sinai Peninsula enjoys a rich source of plankton and other food stuffs that are transported to the area by the strong and massive currents of the Red Sea. Due to their geographic location, the Shark & Yolanda reefs being at the very tip of the peninsula, it is advisably that only experienced drift divers dive here as the currents can be strong, very strong. You can also have large surface swells, especially in the winter, that make exiting the water rather tricky. Having said that, on a bad day Shark Reef is a great dive, on a good day Shark Reef can blow your mind.
The eastern side of Shark Reef is a vertical wall that descends to a depth of over 700 meters (2300 feet). Keeping the wall on your right shoulder, you skirt around a coral outcropping with small caves, and an amazing array of, mostly soft, corals. If you keep an eye on the blue you have the chance, especially in the summer, of seeing large shoals of twin-spot snappers (lutjanus bohar), longfin spadefish (platax teira), orbicular spadefish (platax orbicularis), various trevallies (caranx lugubris, caranx melampygus, carangoides bajad and caranx ignobilis) and bluespine unicornfish (naso unicornis). You can also sometimes find large schools of blackfin barracudas (sphyraena qenie), forming large circles and, if you are really lucky, sharks hunting the barracudas.
After you have finished at Shark Reef, still keeping the reef on your right shoulder, you come to a saddle that connects Shark Reef to Yolanda Reef. At the top of the saddle you find a sandy plateau of about 8m which extends behind both Shark & Yolanda, separating the reefs from the fringe plate. There are a lot of soft corals on this plateau, and it is common to find turtles, especially hawksbill turtles (eretmochelys imbricate), dining in this area. There is also a resident female juvenile green turtle (chelonian mydas) whom has been gracing the area with her presence for the last two or three years. Crossing the saddle can be difficult especially when the currents are moving from the back of the reef to the outside of the reef causing strong down currents in this area.
Once you have crossed the saddle, you come to Yolanda Reef. Yolanda reef is a beautiful and rich coral garden. Once you have crossed the coral garden, at a depth of approximately 20m you find the remains of a loading derrick from the Cypriot cargo vessel, the Yolanda, which ran aground on the western side of the reef in 1980. The ship was carrying, amongst over items, a large consignment of bathtubs and water closets (toilets). In 1987 during a violent storm the ship sunk into the blue and now rests between 160m – 200m (approx.) leaving behind large portions of her cargo scattered on the reef and in particular on a second saddle, this one connecting Yolanda with the Satellite Reef, or Turtle Rock. In this area you can usually find numerous morays (esp. gymnothorax javanicus), blue-spotted sting rays (taeniura lymma), scorpionfish (scorpaenopsis oxycephala), stonefish (synaneia verrucosa) and crocodilefish (papilloculiceps longiceps).
Continuing across the saddle of Yolanda you come to yet another reef, admittedly much smaller than the first two, often called Satellite Reef, occasionally Turtle Rock. Here you find another beautiful coral garden which, at the back, has a very friendly depth of 5m enabling you to complete your safety stop in a very pretty spot.
Shark & Yolanda are so much more than all I have put here, and I haven’t even mentioned Anemone City, another reef that can be included during the dives here. You have here the chance to see just about everything and anything the Red Sea has to offer. It is a truly amazing place.
