Snorkelling in the Red Sea

Given how much I love being on, in and under the sea, and how accessible some of the most pristine reefs and waters in the world are here ,its hard to believe it has taken me 9 months to do some proper marine based activities.

A few of the team went out with the Galaxea team from the Red Sea Global project for a bit of snorkelling on what was the hottest day, by some margin that I've had here - it was 42 degrees on my way down to the boat for the trip and I even heard reports of the mercury hitting 46 degrees during the day in the village.

After a quick trip out from the main site here we arrived at a beautiful reef not far from the Shebara resort and got into the water. The water was crystal clear and lovely and warm. The reef itself was vast and certainly colourful in many places, but there was also a lot of what looked like bleached coral to my untrained eye. We snorkelled over massive, shallow brain coral formations, past enormous giant clams and into the deeper water which contained some massive, deep coral bommy structures which were full of life. We saw 2 eagle rays, 6 or 8 quite large reef sharks and an uncountable number of brightly coloured reef fish.

It was an excellent trip and just what the doctor ordered after what had been a fairly stressful few weeks at work, will certainly make a point of doing these trips again as often as I can.Read more