Ras Mohammed National Park: Diving Guide

Ras Mohammed National Park is the reason Sharm el Sheikh became a diving town. Egypt declared it a park in 1983, making it the country's first, and four decades of protection show underwater: reefs in condition the rest of the Red Sea aspires to, at the point where the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba meet and push water past a wall of hard coral.

Shark and Yolanda Reef

The signature dive, and one of the most-dived sites in the world for good reason. Two coral pinnacles rise off a plateau at around 20 metres, the wall behind them drops into deep blue, and the current runs past all of it.

In summer the plateau does something remarkable. Snapper mass in their thousands to spawn, joined by batfish and barracuda, and the schools get dense enough to dim the light beneath them. Divers hang in the current on the edge of the plateau and watch it move. Between June and September this is as good as Red Sea diving gets.

The dive usually finishes over Yolanda, a Cypriot freighter wrecked here in 1980. The hull itself slid into the depths years ago, but her cargo stayed: shipping containers, a scattering of bathroom fixtures — toilets and bathtubs sitting on the sand at 20 metres — and the captain's BMW. It is the strangest finale to a great dive anywhere in diving.

The rest of the park

Anemone City is exactly that: a plateau carpeted in anemones with their resident clownfish, at friendly depth and usually dived on the way to or from Shark Reef.

Jackfish Alley runs along a wall with a shallow cave system, jacks in the blue and often a reef shark patrolling the drop. Shark Observatory is a sheer wall dive under the cliff the park is named for, one of the steepest drop-offs in the northern Red Sea.

The park's reefs sit in a genuinely protected marine environment, which is what separates the coral here from reefs elsewhere that get the same water but none of the enforcement.

What to know before you go

There is a park fee, charged per diver per day and normally collected by the dive centre with the trip. It funds ranger patrols and mooring maintenance, and it is the reason the site is still worth the boat ride.

These are drift dives with current. The boat drops you upstream and collects you downstream, which is precisely why the fish are there. That suits Advanced-certified divers with recent hours far better than newly qualified ones; if you are early in your diving, the sheltered bays around Sharm and the reefs at Hurghada are the better first week.

Nothing is taken and nothing is touched. The park rules are strict about contact with coral, and the enforcement is real. Good buoyancy is the entry requirement in spirit if not on paper.

Fitting it into a trip

Ras Mohammed runs as a day boat from Sharm el Sheikh, usually two dives with the Yolanda cargo as the finale, and it pairs naturally with a Thistlegorm day earlier or later in the week. Most divers do both on the same trip, which is a good argument for basing in Sharm rather than further down the coast.

Season, costs and the shape of an Egyptian dive week are in our Egypt trip guide; the country's other regions are covered in the Egypt diving guide, and the full catalogue of Egyptian sites sits on the Egypt dive sites page.