Hook, Line, and Regulator (cont.)

You Are Here:

Home >> Hook, Line, and Regulator (cont.)

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? 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 (cont.)
Red Sea, the modern scuba-diver's Mecca.
Within the hour, we all understood why. The main reason, of course, was that Red Sea diving cheapens all superlatives. It's the K2 of scuba, the St. Andrews (and certainly divers can be every bit as fanatical as mountain climbers and golfers). Yet as Françoise pointed out, there's also a lot more here than just the sea. "When I get too bort with the resort," she said at one point, in her adorable accent, "I can go to ze desert and be alone." It's true: Only ten minutes from the pulsating nightlife of Sharm, you enter the cool, vast purity of the Sinai desert, with an infinite black sky, gleaming with stars, arching over eternal white sands. "But it's a leetle funny," Frangoise added. "I am a forester in a place wiz no trees."

At one point, Françoise points to the surface, where a lean barracuda swims between us and the brilliant sunlight rippling on the surface.

After several last rounds of adjustments and instructions, our group finally is ready to submerge. The Red Sea coast has virtually every sort of dive terrain: walls, reefs, caves, and a few well-preserved wrecks. But at Ras Muhammad, wall diving is the thing. So off we waddle toward the water, carrying 60 awkward pounds of gear on our backs. A few young Italian swimmers and snorkelers regard us with becoming respect. About 40 yards out, the water finally becomes deep enough for us to snorkel the rest of the way. Soon we enter a shallow cove, its warm, crystal waters swarming with parrot fish, pale aquamarine beauties striped in yellow and pink; on the sea floor are fringed mollusks, snapping their jaws wide. Sixty yards from the shoreline, just beyond the protecting embrace of the cove, we come to the wall—an underwater cliff as steep and sheer as the ones in Road Runner cartoons. It drops away into an apparently bottomless chasm, blue and ever bluer as you look down. For a moment, I experience a mild wave of vertiginous doubt. But Jessica and Françoise have already begun their descents, and so I squeeze the air out of my buoyancy vest and slowly fall into the depths of the Red Sea.

The contrasts in the Sinai are astounding: ten minutes ago, we were on a barren plain, swept by hot winds; here, slipping slowly down this wall under the cool sea, we're surrounded by teeming life. Soft corals in all the radiant hues of a Degas pastel undulate sinuously, clustered around the overhangs and outcroppings of the cliff. When we descend to 70 feet below the surface, we see intricate, lacy gorgonian fans gently pulsing, with clouds of goldfish swarming through and around them.

Françoise will later tell us that the visibility was "lousy, no more than 15 meters," but at the moment it seems limitless to me, especially after my mud bath in the Long Island Sound. Neon-striped angelfish and butterfly fish circle around. At one point, Françoise points to the surface, where a lean barracuda swims between us and the brilliant sunlight rippling on the surface.

Before I earned my certification card and rented my first scuba tank, I never thought much about fish, unless they arrived on a plate with boiled potatoes. But now I am, I admit, entranced. Ten minutes after we descend, a school of about a hundred blue wrasses begins to swarm around us. One of them swims quite close and stares straight at me with a curious and unblinking eye: he's sizing me up as much as I'm marveling at him—a fish-eye view for both of us.

I run low on air long before the women, cutting the dive short. Françoise will later console me: "Oh, zat's OK, ze men always use it up faster zan ze women." But she's just being diplomatic. The real reason is that I've been thrashing around like a hooked bass. Ecstasy isn't always gainly.

There may come a day, and it may not be altogether distant, when experiences like this will be almost impossible. The stretch of Middle Eastern beachfront from Ras Muhammad east to Sharm and on up the coast to the hippie capital of Dahab is growing at a phenomenal rate. The infrastructure can barely keep pace. In some places, litter is heaped so high that progressive trip outfitters have begun organizing Egyptian beach cleanup tours.

Page: