MV Emperor Asmaa

★ 2 · patricia McLean · 2020-03-06

Having had my mind blown by Ras Mohammed last April on the live aboard Snafru Spirit through Eagle Divers, I was really excited about returning to the Red Sea. I was especially excited about diving the St. Johns area because the official description made it seem mythically pristine and colorful. What a let-down. The only swarms of fish were the little orange anthius, the coral was relatively colorless and the dives were — except for two canyon dives and one of magical, gigantic hard coral— all the same. No dramatic walls, no Zodiac entries. All from 7 to 15 meters. Almost every time we gathered the dive guide gave us a preview — Sharks! Turtles! S,ea cows! Octupus, sea horses! Colorful coral gardens! 95 percent chance of diving with dolphins! And every time I emerged from the dive seeing none of this (on one dive, turtles were seen by a few divers and one group also saw a manta ray). Around midweek, it was hard to muster the initiative to pull on a wetsuit. Also on the first gathering, a dive guide told us to not point out lion fish because they are so common in the Red Sea, and a dive guide actually throughout the week over and over again pointed out lion fish. In fact, I think that lion fish is the only fish that the guides, with whom I was diving most of the week, pointed out to me. One of the dives was so bad it actually felt like a prank— two colorless mounds with hardly any fish. And to add insult to injury we had to swim a very long time to get to them. When I expressed to a guide my confusion that this was on the itinerary, the only response was “We do this dive every week.” I have only been diving a year but every dive location— Bonaire, Grand Cayman, Cozumel twice, and even snorkeling in Hawaii— offered more color and variety of fish and coral. Red Sea divers seem to put down Dahab, but the diving there was superior to anything I experienced in St. Johns. A dive guide confided in me that February is not the month to dive the Red Sea. I don’t know how a different month would produce more color in the coral, or what it has to do with the lack of variety of the dives, but if it is true that February is the wrong month to dive the Red Sea, I wish Padi Travel, to whom I looked to for guidance when planning my trip, had given me the heads up. With all of this, I still enjoyed the week. And that’s because the dive guides and other staff were funny, kind, skilled and helpful. And also because the guests were a great bunch. I was a solo traveler and the other divers from Germany, Switzerland, Spain and America, were super nice, fun, and friendly. The common bathrooms could have been kept cleaner. The food was lovely and lovingly prepared. Patrisha