Hurricane Red Sea 22 September
When Fraser stopped faffing and finally decided to join me in the Red Sea after all, I jumped ship from the YD Grand Sea Serpent trip and moved to Hurricane - still with Tony Backhurst. Hurricane has mixed gases, supports technical diving and would let us do the Red Sea in a DIRStylee.
We got off to an interesting start when we got to the boat at about midnight to find the twinsets we had ordered for the week needed a lot of fettling to get them diveable for the week. Sorting the kit took until just after 3:00 am so the wake up call at 7:00am was not that welcome - until we remembered where we were
Hurricane - can’t complain about anything all week (although others did find little bits and bobs to groan about). The food was excellent, the equipment on the boat all worked, fills were completed as requested and promptly, accomodation was comfortable and clean. The dive guides Joe and Karin did not see their job as babysitters - they did not accompany you on dives unless you wanted guiding, they did not check your air, monitor your depth etc., although one diver who dived to 50 meters on single tank of nitrox on the spur of the moment was warned that this was not a particularly clever move
Hurricane - and Fraser
I won’t go through the dives in detail - there have been enough Red Sea trip reports posted here - but our itinerary was to cover Brothers, Elphinstone and Daedalus. Fraser did 15 dives in 5.5 days diving, I did 17 - out of a maximum 18. The highlight for us both was diving the arch at Elphinstone - our first mix dive since getting the cert - 56 meters, total run time 71 minutes. I realise that many people have popped down to the arch on a single tank of air (indeed some from our boat did) but we chose to do it our way, on 21/35, twins and 50 per cent for deco. This did mean that we got rather a lot longer down there than the alternative would have allowed - and got to spot white tipped reef sharks and take a photo or two.
The Numidia at Big Brother was also a great dive, with a similar profile but with rather different memories. The weather at Brothers was rough, whether we would be able to dive the Numidia was on hold for a day and a half as the wreck is at the far north of the island where the waves were rolling in very high. We finally got the OK about two hours before, which was the time needed to fill our sets. The dive was clearly going to be interesting when the Zodiac dropped us right on top on the wreck (it comes as shallow as 10 meters) but despite a negative entry we had to fight our way back to it, then shelter along the side of the wreck on our descent.
We dropped down to 54 meters quite quickly, noting how cold the water rising up from the drop off was. We had a good look round, a bit of a poke about inside and took some photos. Bottom time was around 25 minutes. When Fraser thumbed it, I took us through the deep stops and it was during this that we first started to notice a change in the current around 35 metres. The current was getting stronger and coming off the island now, out to sea. Rather than bag off and drift, we worked our way up the wreck, switching gas at 21 and had completed half our deco requirement when we hit the top of the wreck. With nothing left to shelter on we tried to swim back to the reef (not much more than 20 meters) but could not make sufficent progress.
We did our best to sit at 6 metres, swimming against the current but were washed around between 6 and 9 meters. Fraser bagged up at this stage and we padded the deco to make up for the washing machine effect, finally surfacing in sight of the island but north of it, being taken further out to sea. GIven that the dive boat was anchored south of the island and the ribs were patrolling halfway along, looking for divers being swept south rather than north things didn’t look great, especially as we were caught in rather large waves. It took a while but in the end, a rib was sighted when we were on the crest of a wave and I fired up my Salvo and flashed it back and forth. With much relief we realised that it had spotted us and after a bit of a mad scramble we managed to get aboard The rib had been looking for some YBOD divers who had been diving at the same time as us - I understand that they made it back by going much deeper where the current was less strong.
Back on the boat, Frase decided to sit out the rest of the dives that day - wise move - but I wanted to return to the water asap to cancel out any little spooks. I ended up jumping in, a couple of hours later, on a YBOD MOD1 lesson with Gary Fox - just a little pootle around in 25 meters tucked away from the current. I felt very noisy with my bubbles when with five rebreather divers but am grateful to them for letting me potter along.
Apart from these dives we had lots of uneventful fishy/corally dives - a few sharks, a few turtles and loads of normal reef stuff as well as you would expect. Our gas bill for the week (two twinsets of 21/35, two stages of 50 per cent, and nitrox for all other dives) was £280. Sounds a lot but I worked out that in the UK it would have cost around £200 so not that bad really.
Finally, the hotel which they transferred us to the Coral Dive Hotel was fine… very good standard of accomodation with appalling service and, unbeliveably, no lunch service in the main dining room.
I did like the bar floor though… very fitting with the theme of the week.
Hope you enjoyed the trip report and if you want to go to the Red Sea - you could do a lot worse than go on Hurricane to the South
Quote of the week… (from Fraser)
“A shark came up and eyed Clare carefully, but left her alone - clearly a decision based on mutual professional respect”
