Abu Dabbab Bay

Abu Dabbab is a wide, shallow bay about 30 km north of Marsa Alam, closed at each end by a rocky headland. What makes it unusual is the floor: a broad meadow of seagrass growing on sand, in water shallow enough to snorkel over comfortably.

What you are likely to see

• Green turtles, feeding on the grass. They are used to snorkellers and generally carry on eating
• Occasionally the dugong — a sea cow, and the reason most people come. Sightings are luck, not schedule
• Guitarfish and rays on the sand between the grass patches
• Hard coral and reef fish on the reefs at both headlands

Practicalities

Entry is straight off the beach, no boat needed. Keep off the seagrass — standing on it kills what everything here is feeding on, and it grows back slowly. Stay clear of the turtles rather than following them; a fed turtle that comes up for air into a ring of snorkellers cannot breathe. Reef-safe sunscreen, or a rash guard instead.

The dugong is the point, and it is also the problem. There are only a few thousand left in the Red Sea, and the seagrass they depend on grows nowhere else along this coast in the quantity it does here.

Abu Dabbab went from an empty bay to a named stop on every Marsa Alam excursion list inside about fifteen years, and the pressure showed: boats anchoring in the grass, swimmers crowding the animals, sunscreen in the shallows. Mooring buoys, a limit on boats and a code for how close you may get were introduced in response, and the bay is watched more carefully now than most.

None of that is decoration. A dugong surfacing every few minutes to breathe will abandon a feeding ground it cannot surface in peace on — and there is nowhere else along this coast for it to go.