Trip Report All Star Red Sea Liveaboard Trip Report Sept 2022

[scubadada]

I did much better in 2016 with a day at Little Brother and a day at Big Brother:

Day 1 Marsa Shouna
Abu Dabab I
Abu Dabab III and IV
Abu Dabab I
Day 2 Little Brother
Little Brother
Little Brother
Little Brother
Day 3 Big Brother
Big Brother
Big Brother
Big Brother
Day 4 Daedalus
Daedalus
Daedalus
Daedalus
Day 5 Daedalus
Daedalus
Daedalus
Daedalus
Day 6 Elphinstone
Marsa Shouna

5 1/2 days, 22 dives. I guess I was lucky. Did 22 dives on the southern route too. Obviously, the Brothers itinerary had been adversely affected since my trip.

 

[dflaher]

Thanks for the report, @jlcnuke. From which port (Hurghada or Port Ghalib) did you depart?

 

[jlcnuke]

When I did the BDE route on Blue Horizon last year 3 dives a day was typical and the online itinerary even says 18 dives. Night diving isn't allowed in the marine park and the other days the boat is in transit in the evening/night. I'm not sure how more dives could have been fit in during the itinerary. Did you have obvious times where you even could have fit in more dives?

We could easily have fit in more dives as we didn't move throughout the day to a new dive site typically, and the one time we did was a very short transit from the large brother to small. First dive brief of the day was at 6:30am, max dive time of 1 hour per briefings, and last dive needs to be done prior to sunset (~5:45pm) to meet park rules. You can easily do two morning and two afternoon dives on nitrox given such constraints (for instance, 1 hour dive at 7am until 8am, second dive with a 90 minute surface interval at 9:30am, third dive with a 2 hour surface interval at 12:30pm, and a 4th dive with a 2 hour surface interval at 3:30pm has all dive with a 90-120 minute surface interval and all divers out of the water more than an hour prior to sunset. Diving on nitrox, even with wall dives and divers tending to start off a bit deeper (though coming up shallow to get a 1 hour dive time) there's plenty of room for such dive profiles with a reasonably significant safety margin imo.

 

[jlcnuke]

Thanks for the report, @jlcnuke. From which port (Hurghada or Port Ghalib) did you depart?

We left from Hurghada.

 

[drrich2]

which included the Red Sea Liveaboard from All Star Liveaboards.

Out of the liveaboard options available, what led you to choose that one? I don’t know how the options compare, just curious.

 

[jlcnuke]

Out of the liveaboard options available, what led you to choose that one? I don’t know how the options compare, just curious.

My normal dive buddy and I have both done a number of liveaboard dive trips with All Star Liveaboard in the Bahamas and have been very happy with them, so sticking with that company seemed like a good idea when venturing to a new area. The value was also quite reasonable (based on what we could tell when booking).

 

[scubadada]

We could easily have fit in more dives...

When we did 22 dives on BDE, our average dive time was 67 min (51-83 min) The SI between dive 1-2 and 3-4 was 1:47 (1:06-2:31). The SI between dive 2-3, lunch, was 2:19 (2:11-2:23).

 

[dflaher]

We could easily have fit in more dives as we didn't move throughout the day to a new dive site typically, and the one time we did was a very short transit from the large brother to small.

Did you happen to ask the crew about the limited diving?

 

[jlcnuke]

Did you happen to ask the crew about the limited diving?

The guides were asked if we could do more than three dives during the day and the response was effectively "this is what we do" and nothing more. As such, I can only speculate on why they limited the diving to so little on the trip.

 

[scubajasonr]

I think you did well with the switch from Sea Legend to Tranqulity. We were on Sea Legend last week and while it was generally a good boat it was lacking in some areas. I have dived with Elke and Ahmed of Scuba Scene before, I can see Sea Legend falling below the standard they would want to offer. I have put a trip report in the Red Sea section.

As for the diving we did three dives a day, with a total of 18 dives during the week. I think we would have struggled to get four a day in at Brothers and Daedalus, due to the time it took to zodiac to and from sites, and the time to refill tanks for all divers. Frustratingly we had a few dives cut short due to people getting very low on air after 30mins or so, and the guide insisting we go up with them. I have done this route a few times in the past and can see there was only once when we had four dives in a day at Daedalus, and on that day the last dive was short due to the early sunset.