Standing on the deck of the MV Eshta, I looked out upon a calm, clear blue wilderness that was the Red Sea. My heart was racing in anticipation of what lay ahead, my very first dive in tropical waters !.

While waiting for the boat to get into position on the reef, my thoughts drifted back to the days when I used to watch documentaries on SCUBA diving and marvelled at the underwater world of our oceans. I dreamt of the day when I would experience at first hand, the spectacle of a Coral Reef that was teeming with sea life , to be within inches of sea creatures that I had only seen in books or on T.V and maybe even see a shark (at a distance of course !).. And now that day had finally arrived !. As the boat was getting into position at the drop off point, we carried out another quick check of our dive gear and then waited in line with my dive partner. The dive guide jumped in first to check the direction and strength of the current and then gave the go-ahead to the rest of us. I stepped off the dive platform and for a few seconds was enveloped in a cloud of bubbles. Then everything went quiet….

The first thing I noticed was the absolute clarity of the water, Even though we had just jumped in, you could still see all the way to the sandy bottom lying 25 metres below. We gradually descended, getting ever closer to the reef , until the blue waters of the sea suddenly exploded into a multitude of colour. Never before had I witnessed such splendour, the reef was amass with all varieties of soft and hard Corals and swimming amongst the coral was a diversity of sea life.

I was in complete awe of the beauty and majesty of the reef that was before me. The reef itself hummed with all manner of sea life, from the golden Antheas frantically swimming in the current, the soft corals feeding on microscopic plankton, the moray eels hiding in small crevices to the great shoals of jacks, snapper and tuna fish circling just off the edge of the reef.

We descended further down the reef until we reached the sandy plateau at about 25 Meters deep. Here a mighty sand bank gradually sloped towards the edge of the reef where it stopped and then suddenly dropped-off to the dark depths of the sea floor.
Down here in the sand I saw blue-spotted rays and other sea creatures that burrowed themselves in the sand, waiting for their next meal to swim by!.

Even down here the water was spectacularly clear with visibility of anything up to 50 meters. In such clear waters it was very easy to 'forget' how deep you were, therefore one had to keep a close eye on the depth gauge as well as the remaining air in your cylinder !. Now that we were closer to the drop-off this was a good place to see some of the bigger fish like Eagle rays, barracuda and if you were lucky, perhaps even the odd shark !

But it was soon time to begin the gradual and slow ascent back to the surface. On the way up I saw the reef 'change' from being rocks and boulders near the bottom to the colourful soft corals and abundant sea life in the shallower regions.

There was so much to see and yet not enough time to see it all, I wanted it to last forever… unfortunately, 'forever' happened to be just under an hour!

Before long we were back on the boat. We had barely stepped back onto the boat when the entire dive deck was enveloped by the noise of divers, each determined to tell everyone else what they had seen (this is probably what they mean by the 'Dive de-brief' !).
And that was my first ever dive in tropical waters. There have been many since then, with each dive being progressively more spectacular than the previous one, but for some reason, that very first dive always seems to be the most memorable one.


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