The Long Trip Home: Diving in the Desert

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The Road Less Traveled

Diving in the Desert
by Wade Hughes

Umm Kamar blocked our view of the helicopter gunship, but we could hear it throbbing low across the water toward us. It was getting close to curfew, and we were probably being treated to a testosterone–laced reminder of the order to be back in harbor by four o’clock. We were anchored in the lee of Umm Kamar, a sere island, a wedge-shaped chip of desert, flaked off and deposited on the Egyptian Red Sea coast near Hurghada.

In a downward gale of hot air, scented with fumes of burned kerosene, the chopper finally bat-bat-batted into view above the sun-bleached island, sandblasted a few of the roosting storks into ungainly and angular agitation, then hovered deafeningly above us. Clearly visible, were the rivets in the fuselage and the streaks of grime slipstreamed back from some leaking oil or hydraulic line in the undercarriage. The door -gunner, helmet visor down, leaned forward to scan our bedraggled boat over the barrels of his machine guns. Our greetings were not returned but, apparently satisfied that we represented no threat to peace in the Middle East, the pilot pivoted the chopper, dropped the nose a little, then, batting away like a bellicose dragonfly, went on to menace another boat anchored a kilometer or so away.

A turbaned Egyptian crewmember, bare brown feet and toes splayed for grip on the deck, heaved on the anchor line, and we were soon on our way back to Hurghada. With tensions high in the whole region, there were two kinds of civilian vessels in the Red Sea after 4 o’clock every afternoon: those safely berthed, and targets.

About six percent of the world’s coral reefs occur in the Red Sea. In many ways, they’re comparable to coral reefs anywhere else in the Indo-Pacific zone; you’ll certainly encounter many of the same types of fish and corals. But one of the things that makes the Red Sea different is its location. Gunships, and the constant real but unfathomable tensions aside, this is an exotic and romantic place. Surface, in turquoise water above an exquisite coral garden vibrating with color and life, face the shore, and you’re confronted with the starkest of contrasts. Shimmering sheets of dry brown sand bake in the unbelievably hot sun. Weathered and worn hills of bare rock frown down on the shore. Silence. Nothing moving. Not a hint of vegetation anywhere. Behind the hills, hidden, lie the parched wastes of the Western Desert. And then there's the heat: intolerable, suffocating.

“Ancient” is a word that sits well in this worn and arid landscape. The Red Sea first came into being about 30 million years ago, when the Arabian Peninsula splintered away from Africa and allowed the sea to flood into the gap. Its age is one of the reasons it holds so many species of fish and coral; there has been plenty of time for species to accumulate there.

We saw lots to interest us both above and below surface. At Shaab Umm Kamar, four lionfish crowded together upside down against the roof of tunnel. Three of the lionfish exhibited the usual pattern of black and white stripes, but the fourth, smaller than the rest, was jet black. It was a juvenile.

Beyond the lionfish, crammed together into a dense mass, was a school of bright pink Cryptic cardinal fish, each one no more than two centimeters long. Nocturnal carnivorous feeders, they spend most of the daylight hours cloaked in the darkness of deep caves and ledges. When they emerge onto the reef at night, they go hunting for small crabs and shrimp. The school slowly parted to let me through as I pressed forward into the tunnel.

Hidden safely behind them was a much larger fish, deep bodied. Solid. Sixty or 70 centimeters long. Silhouetted against the pale light seeping in from the seaward end of the tunnel, it hung warily, midway between the roof and the sandy floor. It was facing me, but, with no flashlight to scare off its shadowy anonymity, I couldn’t clearly identify this fish. I jumped when it surprised me with a headlong rush—not at me, nor the dense mass of cardinal fish, but at the group of lionfish behind me.
As it bustled past my face and into the light of the tunnel mouth, its distinct spots and disproportionately small head revealed it to be a polka dot grouper, or a panther fish. In the entrance to the tunnel, I watched as the battle of the catfish played out; panther fish against lionfish.

Lionfish are members of the Scorpinidae; relatives of the stonefish. Delightful and delicate, spectacularly striped in black, white, and sometimes red, arrayed with oversized and plumed fins and spines, they actively hunt smaller fish and crustaceans. As with their cousins, the stonefish, lionfish depend on venomous spines for their defense. They’ve become amazingly adept at maintaining their foremost dorsal spines pointed directly at any approaching threat.

Once, when I was diving at Bathala in the Maldives, a tiny lionfish, no more than four or five centimeters long, flicked itself upside down and pricked the end of my index finger. I had tried to bring my hand up underneath it to ease it out into clearer water to photograph it. Instead, my finger throbbed for two hours, and the fish remained unphotographed.

As the grouper attacked here in the Red Sea, the four diminutive lionfish resorted to the same effective defense. Whichever one was under the most immediate threat from the grouper stood its ground and, with unflappable poise, deftly pushed its poisonous spines erect and forward. The grouper, 20 times the size of the lionfish, lunged several times. Each time it stopped short of its intended prey, clearly recognizing the danger in those spines. I wondered how it knew that they were to be avoided.

Clearly defeated, the grouper eventually swished in a tight turn, bustled back through the scattering cloud of cardinals, and resumed its hungry vigil in the deeper recesses of the tunnel. The four lionfish looked as though they couldn’t care less and continued to float in a composed group, upside down, waiting for evening when it would be their turn at being predators.

We had a number of experiences with creatures showing uncharacteristic fearlessness when approaching us. Moray eels abound in the Red Sea. Of the hundred or so species of moray, most of them could probably be found here. Like all the eels, morays undergo a planktonic larval stage, floating free in open water. In the sea, this results in widespread distribution by oceanic currents until the larvae grow into juvenile eels and find a reef where they can settle down and call home.We’d seen many species in Egypt, ranging from pencil-thin mottled snowflake morays, burgundy, black, and white zebra morays, and, in one cramped chimney-like hole in a reef, five vivid yellow-headed morays intertwined like plaited rope, all watching us intently with beady blue-tinged eyes.

Its face was constantly in front of my own, Its elastic throat ballooning and shrinking as each successive gulp of water coursed in through its mouth and flowed out the dark circular gill openings behind its head

It’s this appearance that give morays, in general, their bad rap. Secretive, nocturnal hunters, they lurk in the shadows of the reef, away from bright sunlight. Nature has compelled them to continuously open and close their mouth in a threatening gape; which is how they pump water carrying life-giving oxygen over their gills. But, they’re not generally aggressive towards humans. Most morays that have bitten people do so because they have been antagonized as divers have pressed forward into the eel’s lair in search of lobsters or other cave-dwelling life. Whatever the cause, though, a moray bite can result in a savage wound. It is to be avoided.

All this was going through my mind as I first leaned back on my knees, and then tried to squirm slowly to one side, to allow one of these giant morays to get past me. I’d settled on the sand in a gutter on Carless Reef and leaning forward, I'd come face to face with a huge moray eel. As soon as it saw me, it eased forward; not aggressively, but deliberately, persistently. As thick as my leg, and close to three meters long, it didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get away from me. It certainly didn’t seem intent on lashing at me with its ferocious teeth, but it did seem to want to occupy the space that I was in. Its face was constantly in front of my own, its elastic throat ballooning and shrinking as each successive gulp of water coursed in through its mouth and flowed out the dark circular gill openings behind its head.

When I inhaled a chestful of air to lift myself slightly off the bottom, and pushed my hand into the sand in front of me to move myself slowly out from under the ledge, the moray followed me into the open water. Once, out on the Great Barrier Reef, I had seen one moray attack another. The victim of the attack had been swimming across a reef face, and the aggressor struck from the refuge of a ledge without warning. Knotted in writhing combat, they’d stirred up a cloud of sand and silt from which they both eventually shot, in different directions, probably both grievously wounded. I think that, if this eel in the Red Sea had been frightened or angry enough to strike, that is how it would have happened. Curiosity, in this case, is what seemed to create the common bond that held us in this strange encounter, causing the eel to behave unlike any that I had seen before.

The eel s-bended back on itself, swayed from side to side, then again moved forward toward me at a slightly different angle. At one stage, although I was careful not to deliberately touch it, it was arching its upper body against mine as I leaned backward; someone observing from a distance might have described two mismatched dance partners performing a sort of slow, liquid, interspecies shimmy.

Eventually, the moray, tired of the close-range inspection, sagged downward a little, then slowly swirled around in a graceful spiral back into the privacy of the ledge, treating me to a passing view of the wide slab of its mottled flanks as it did so. We parted ways, each of us taking with us a little bit of knowledge about the other, like cultures accidently colliding for an instant.

On a later dive on a colorful wall on the Shaab Abu Ramada, a hump-headed wrasse approached me head-on and hovered directly in front of me. This surprised me. On the Great Barrier Reef, and in Thailand and Malaya, these solitary fish had always been exceptionally flighty; dark bulky shadows on the edge of visibility. I’d never been close enough to see the detail in the bright blue lines around the eyes that earn this fish another of it popular names—Maori wrasse. This one swam so close to my camera that I could not bring the lens to focus on it. I backed away a little, and the fish followed. I backed away again and held up my left hand—foolishly expecting the fish to recognize a “hold it there” signal.

“Crunch!”

It snapped its tail, lunged forward, and bit my hand. Equipped as they are with bony-plated mouths, hump-headed wrasse easily crush heavily shelled mollusks. Fortunately, I didn’t taste as the fish had expected, and it quickly released me, spitting my hand out, and swam away, now disinterested. Stout cotton gloves prevented damage to my skin, but my bruised hand felt as though it had been squeezed in a slamming door. I spent the rest of the dive trying unsuccessfully to lure the wrasse close to me again in the vengeful hope that I could club it to death with my camera housing.

As our diving expeditions came to a close, we were left with only a few days to explore some of the area around. We headed for Luxor. A touristy destination that contains some of most impressive architectural treasures of ancient Egypt, Luxor is an easy point of departure for the Valley of the Kings and Tutenkahmen’s tomb. After the heat and grit of the Red Sea coast, the town offered us shade and greenery, nourished by the lifeblood of water from the Nile. There was no curfew at Luxor and, in the early evening, we were able to convince the owner of a cargo boat to untie from his berth and sail us aimlessly and romantically first up and then down the great river.

We took off, happy to be back on the water. Lulled by the gentle flapping of the loosely billowing sail, we quietly watched the last rays of the sun strike the temple and then sink from sight behind the City of the Dead.

Diving in the desert is an excerpt from Wade Hughes' book, Thirteenth Beach.

Thirteenth Beach is an absorbing account of underwater adventure, history, travel, nature, tragedy, and humor all woven tightly together into a highly entertaining collection of facual experiences and observations. It's written with a sharp eye for detail, an ironic sense of humor, and above all, a personal style that puts the reader in exotic locations and in the water shoulder to shoulder with the author. This is an ideal traveler's fireside companion.

Thirteenth Beach begins in the 1960s on the south coast of Australia where a couple of shivering kids go exploring offshore reefs "with the skittish curiosity of kittens approaching their first mouse" and unfolds in a series of underwater adventures spanning forty years and reaching round the globe to locations as distant as the Great Barrier Reef, Galapagos, the central Indian Ocean, Micronesia, the Caribbean, Red Sea, and Iceland.

Author, Wade Hughes, a Member of the Explorers Club, dives and travels with a sharp pen and little escapes his notice; the result is an offbeat, delightfully crafted parade of the people and places, the fish, whales, and sharks, the boats and shipwrecks, that await anyone following their itch for adventure into the "seven seas and a couple of lakes"?

Wade is an Australian, living in New York. Thirteenth Beach is his ninth book.