Hook, Line, and Regulator | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Hook, Line, and Regulator

Today's Question
What's the best way to learn to live off the land? answer

Is it better to buy or make a survival kit? answer

Today's Question
What country has the best ratings for eco-tourism? answer

What is the greenest rental car? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine

Page:

Hook, Line, and Regulator
A compressed air pilgrimage to the Red Sea, where hobbyists become compulsives in the blink of a piscine eye.

By Jamie James

The first time I visited Sharm El-Sheikh, the resort town near the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, I almost missed the point of the place. My ostensible purpose was to visit the nearby Monastery of St. Catherine, an exquisite, sixth-century Byzantine complex at the foot of Mount Sinai. St. Catherine's was great, spectacular even, but when I got back to Sharm, I was plunged into the usual resort inanity. "Sundown dancerobics on the beach with Kristal and Jeff!" read the poster in the lobby. Right. Where's the bar?

While I was studying the menu, trying to find a drink that didn't catch fire or involve fruit salad, I met a group of young Australians. They were drinking lager, and they were quiet, mellow, even decorous. They radiated a blissful quality that reminded me of the monks at St. Catherine's. I asked them what had brought them to Sharm.

"Diving, mate," said the biggest, blondest one.

"So, how is it?" I asked, trying to sound matey. "Pretty good?"

I might as well have stopped a New Yorker on Fifth Avenue to ask if there were any shops around. He turned to his buddies and said, "Wants to know how the diving is." With the good manners of most Aussies, they politely tried to conceal their scorn. Finally the big guy nodded and said evenly, "I reckon it's about the best. Where you come from, mate?"

"New York," I replied.

"Ah." He arched his snow-white eyebrows, comprehension flooding his tawny face.

An entire culture has bloomed in the Sinai around scuba, a beatific, chummy culture absolutely distinct from—and many fathoms calmer than—the beach scene

Up to that point, my aquatic adventures had been pretty much confined to swimming slow laps at the city pool on Carmine Street. But now one beer led to another, and I tried to get the Australians to tell me more about diving. Ask most people about their sport and they will bore you for hours on end with elaborate replays of forgotten games and obscure rule variants, but all I could get out of these guys was dreamy stuff along the lines of "It's like . . . well, it's not like nothing else" and "You just gotta try it for yourself, mate."

The next morning, I borrowed a snorkel, mask, and fins from the hotel, waded out into the Red Sea, and within five minutes found myself peeping into the Aussies' world. It was a revelation, the baroque coral and swarming, glittering fish. But too soon I reached the drop-off and looked down into a deep, beckoning sapphire abyss. It was gorgeous. And unattainable. There might as well have been a little sign that said Divers Only.

For decades, the Red Sea has had a transformative effect on people: It's taken perfectly ordinary visitors and turned them into divers. And it's taken diving hobbyists and turned them into obsessives. An entire culture has bloomed in the Sinai around scuba, a beatific, chummy culture absolutely distinct from—and many fathoms calmer than—the beach scene. A culture from which I was excluded.

After I left Egypt, I often thought about learning to dive. But there was never a compelling reason until I received an invitation to return to the Red Sea. Immediately I resolved to become scuba certified, eventually completing my checkout dive in the Long Island Sound. There I got to see plenty of mud and tendril-like seaweed up close. With visibility of less than two feet, that was the only way to see it.

But this time spent amidst the murk paid off, because two weeks later I was back at the Red Sea—prepared, I hoped, to join the ranks of the brotherhood. Our dive group was setting up on a curved white-sand beach at Ras Muhammad National Park, 4,200 square miles of pristine shore land south of Sharm. As the sun seared us mercilessly, I sat on the tailgate of a Jeep, watching my diving buddy, Jessica, an airline executive, eye the equipment in front of us with consternation. My spirits began to flutter ever so slightly, until our instructor, Françoise, a lithe, deeply tanned 27-year-old Belgian, exhibited all the competent assurance that one could hope for.

Françoise's in fact was a rather typical Sharm story. Six years earlier she'd taken up diving in Belgian quarries and then visited the Red Sea on holiday. She'd never gone home, shucking a career in forestry to become a dive master.

Page: