Red Sea snorkeling

The northern Red Sea has some of the clearest water and healthiest hard coral anywhere. Visibility regularly runs 20–30 metres, the water sits around 22 °C in winter and 28 °C in late summer, and because the reefs begin in waist-deep water you do not need to dive to see the best of them — most of the colour and most of the fish are in the top five metres.

What you will see

The Red Sea holds well over a thousand fish species, and roughly a tenth of them live nowhere else on earth. On a normal boat day expect clouds of orange anthias over the coral heads, butterflyfish in pairs, parrotfish audibly crunching the reef, and sergeant majors that will follow you. Look into the blue for barracuda, and along the sand for blue-spotted stingrays.

• Giftun Islands — the standard day trip, sheltered reefs and white sandbars
• Abu Ramada — coral towers and heavy fish life, a little further out
• Sha'ab El Erg — the lagoon where a resident pod of spinner dolphins often rests

Reef etiquette

Never stand on or hold the coral — a single footprint can kill decades of growth, and fire coral stings. Reef-safe sunscreen or a rash vest is better than ordinary sun cream, which damages coral. Take nothing off the reef, shells included.

The Red Sea is a young ocean. Arabia is still pulling away from Africa at roughly a centimetre a year, and the basin between them has been filling with seawater for some five million years — geologically an infant, which is why it is so deep, so narrow and so steep-sided.

That shape is what makes the snorkelling so good. There are almost no rivers running into it, so no silt clouds the water; evaporation is high, making it unusually salty and unusually clear; and the reef drops away close to shore.

The corals that take the heat

Red Sea corals have become some of the most closely studied in the world for an unexpected reason: they are remarkably resistant to bleaching. Their ancestors passed through the extremely warm southern entrance of the basin after the last ice age, and the survivors carried a heat tolerance their descendants still hold — several degrees above the temperatures that kill reefs elsewhere.

Marine biologists now describe the northern Red Sea as a potential refuge: one of the few reef systems that may still be here at the end of the century. That is worth knowing while you are floating over it.

From fishing village to fleet

Hurghada was a small fishing settlement founded in the early 1900s around oil exploration, with a few hundred residents into the 1980s. Diving tourism changed it within a generation, and it is now the main gateway to these reefs — which is also why the moorings, marine park fees and no-anchor rules matter as much as they do.