Vessel UK Issues Safety Warning After Three Fatal Dive Boat Accidents in Red Sea

[Ez E]

I would be extra cautions and do everything in your power to not be a victim. Know where the exits are, keep important docs in a dry bag that is always handy, keep a torch and mask close to your bunk. Generally the cheaper the worse, but that's not always the case. Since you are there, take advantage of your location, but be smart about it. Go with your instinct and keep your eyes open.

Makes you wonder if you should keep a Spare Air or small pony bottle attached to the bag also. I dunno.

 

[Searcaigh]

Makes you wonder if you should keep a Spare Air

This is probably the only decent reason for carrying one of these.

 

[tiacalypso]

This begs the question, are all Egyptian liveboards bad? Or can we not tell the difference between good operators and bad due to government lack of oversight? I think this is and important question.

I will be in Egypt for work a couple of times in 2025 and planned to dive at the end of each trip. Are shore operations bad as well? A collegue of mine describes a situation where his son nearly died doing a poorly guided shore dive.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to identify a good operator, both liveaboard and shore?

I spend 3-5 weeks per year diving in Egypt. I think part of the problem is that Egyptian dive staff who are fixed employees at a given dive centre/shop earn very little money, even by Egyptian standards. This leads to cutting corners and to them taking guests on trips the guests are not trained for yet, in the hope that the guests will like it and tip big. If you are going to a dive centre, especially a super cheap one that gives you 10 boat dives for €220 or something, you will have a riskier operation - and perhaps a worse diver:staff ratio. I would always look at the pricing and the diver:staff ratio when inspecting centers and shops. And go with your gut feeling, if the manager gives you a bad vibe or if people pressure you to dive - don't go.

When I am shore diving, or daily boat diving, I tend to book private guiding for myself and my friends. I have good friends in Egypt - some Egyptian, some European - and I book one of them as our private dive guide. This may cost as little as €100-150/week/person on top of the normal dive fees and you get a nice, relaxed week because you know they are taking care of everything. You will not have anyone pressuring you to do dives you aren't ready for, and you know that you are paying your private dive guide directly, instead of paying the dive shop. Even the dive fees for the shop go through your private dive guide. Private dive guides are usually freelance instructors so they really need to impress you so that you will book their services again, and they are usually very safety-oriented because they can choose any operator or shop, and if a shop is not safe, they will not dive from it. It's their lives, too, after all. (The same can be said for fixed employees at the shop, but they would have to find a completely new job if they refused to dive with their employers, changing the power balance.) And of course, the best thing of a private guide or instructor: you can book any courses, any time, and you can do them 1:1. Even if you don't want courses, a week with a private dive guide is a bit like an à la carte menu: you can ask them to arrange specific dive sites. When diving from a daily boat, you just go wherever the boat goes. Your private guide can find out which boat is going where, and arrange for you to be on different boats every day if this is necessary to get all your dive sites.

I have done LOB with three operators: Dive Hurghada, Blue Planet Liveaboards, and Oceanic Liveaboards. Here, I am sharing my very personal and subjective experiences with them.

Dive Hurghada were an absolute catastrophe, I had booked onto the LOB but was not even given a bunk in a room. The captain allowed us to dive from zodiac in ungodly conditions that were absolutely not safe (there was an accident that injured a dive guide as a result of this, and left a dive group stranded in the open Red Sea, floating and hoping to be found for about 45min). I had previously done what Egyptians call "daily boat diving" where you stay in a hotel and book onto a dive boat for the day with Dive Hurghada, and I loved their boat, and always had good service. This was 3-4 years ago.

Blue Planet Liveaboards tends to be my go-to nowadays; I have never had a bad experience with them that was due to crew error or anything (I have experienced one person dying on a LOB, but that was due to their pre-existing medical conditions and could not be blamed on anyone). I tend to do two LOB per year with them (and have done so since 2022). Blue Planet are very safety-conscious in their briefings, of course I cannot speak to the quality of their engineers and mechanics because I know zilch about engineering and zilch about boat standards. I know Egypt has introduced new regulations on the type of engineers required on LOB boats, and I asked my friend who occasionally guides for Blue Planet, she said Blue Planet had no problems because they had the engineers (I read reports of other operators closing/reducing their schedules due to lack of the newly-necessary engineers). If you're looking for a lovely LOB, book Blue Planet's boat called "Blue", or "Blue Storm". They own several other boats ("Blue Planet 1", "Blue Pearl" and "Blue Seas"), but these two are my preference because they're larger and a little more luxurious.

Oceanic Liveaboards is my friends' company and they're the new kid on the block, so to speak. They have barely opened yet, and currently host invitation-only LOB. They do not own a fleet of boats but they tend to charter whichever is the newest and most luxurious new boat in Hurghada's marina that year. I have done a LOB with them on a boat called "Majestic" that was absolutely terrific (newly built in 2023). They don't yet have a website but an Instagram.

 

[chillyinCanada]

I spend 3-5 weeks per year diving in Egypt. I think part of the problem is that Egyptian dive staff who are fixed employees at a given dive centre/shop earn very little money, even by Egyptian standards. This leads to cutting corners and to them taking guests on trips the guests are not trained for yet, in the hope that the guests will like it and tip big. If you are going to a dive centre, especially a super cheap one that gives you 10 boat dives for €220 or something, you will have a riskier operation - and perhaps a worse diver:staff ratio. I would always look at the pricing and the diver:staff ratio when inspecting centers and shops. And go with your gut feeling, if the manager gives you a bad vibe or if people pressure you to dive - don't go.

When I am shore diving, or daily boat diving, I tend to book private guiding for myself and my friends. I have good friends in Egypt - some Egyptian, some European - and I book one of them as our private dive guide. This may cost as little as €100-150/week/person on top of the normal dive fees and you get a nice, relaxed week because you know they are taking care of everything. You will not have anyone pressuring you to do dives you aren't ready for, and you know that you are paying your private dive guide directly, instead of paying the dive shop. Even the dive fees for the shop go through your private dive guide. Private dive guides are usually freelance instructors so they really need to impress you so that you will book their services again, and they are usually very safety-oriented because they can choose any operator or shop, and if a shop is not safe, they will not dive from it. It's their lives, too, after all. (The same can be said for fixed employees at the shop, but they would have to find a completely new job if they refused to dive with their employers, changing the power balance.) And of course, the best thing of a private guide or instructor: you can book any courses, any time, and you can do them 1:1. Even if you don't want courses, a week with a private dive guide is a bit like an à la carte menu: you can ask them to arrange specific dive sites. When diving from a daily boat, you just go wherever the boat goes. Your private guide can find out which boat is going where, and arrange for you to be on different boats every day if this is necessary to get all your dive sites.

I have done LOB with three operators: Dive Hurghada, Blue Planet Liveaboards, and Oceanic Liveaboards. Here, I am sharing my very personal and subjective experiences with them.

Dive Hurghada were an absolute catastrophe, I had booked onto the LOB but was not even given a bunk in a room. The captain allowed us to dive from zodiac in ungodly conditions that were absolutely not safe (there was an accident that injured a dive guide as a result of this, and left a dive group stranded in the open Red Sea, floating and hoping to be found for about 45min). I had previously done what Egyptians call "daily boat diving" where you stay in a hotel and book onto a dive boat for the day with Dive Hurghada, and I loved their boat, and always had good service. This was 3-4 years ago.

Blue Planet Liveaboards tends to be my go-to nowadays; I have never had a bad experience with them that was due to crew error or anything (I have experienced one person dying on a LOB, but that was due to their pre-existing medical conditions and could not be blamed on anyone). I tend to do two LOB per year with them (and have done so since 2022). Blue Planet are very safety-conscious in their briefings, of course I cannot speak to the quality of their engineers and mechanics because I know zilch about engineering and zilch about boat standards. I know Egypt has introduced new regulations on the type of engineers required on LOB boats, and I asked my friend who occasionally guides for Blue Planet, she said Blue Planet had no problems because they had the engineers (I read reports of other operators closing/reducing their schedules due to lack of the newly-necessary engineers). If you're looking for a lovely LOB, book Blue Planet's boat called "Blue", or "Blue Storm". They own several other boats ("Blue Planet 1", "Blue Pearl" and "Blue Seas"), but these two are my preference because they're larger and a little more luxurious.

Oceanic Liveaboards is my friends' company and they're the new kid on the block, so to speak. They have barely opened yet, and currently host invitation-only LOB. They do not own a fleet of boats but they tend to charter whichever is the newest and most luxurious new boat in Hurghada's marina that year. I have done a LOB with them on a boat called "Majestic" that was absolutely terrific (newly built in 2023). They don't yet have a website but an Instagram.

But isn't part of the problem the newer boats being poorly designed? They may look good but . . .

 

[tiacalypso]

But isn't part of the problem the newer boats being poorly designed? They may look good but . . .

Difficult to say. Sea Legend was built in 2019, Sea Story in 2022. Couldn‘t find anything on Seaduction. I‘d say we‘d need the stats of how many boats are built each year and then how many of these sink. But I‘d also like to know if all the boats came from the same shipyard.

 

[TostitoBandito]

It's also plenty easy to sink/burn even a properly designed boat when it's inadequately provisioned/maintained or has unqualified or inadequate crew operating said boat. I'd venture a guess that the vast majority of these incidents are far more on the operations and maintenance than the ship design side of the venn diagram.

 

[Searcaigh]

It's also plenty easy to sink/burn even a properly designed boat when it's inadequately provisioned/maintained or has unqualified or inadequate crew operating said boat. I'd venture a guess that the vast majority of these incidents are far more on the operations and maintenance than the ship design side of the venn diagram.

When I lived in Saudi Arabia back in the 80s I was convinced that there was no Arabic word for "maintenance"

I had an issue with my LP inflator in Dahab, and when I went into the dive op's workshop to see what I could find to take the K valve apart, I was a bit taken aback, although not surprised, to find that what they had was either broken or damaged in some way if not rusted.

 

[Sebs]

This begs the question, are all Egyptian liveboards bad? Or can we not tell the difference between good operators and bad due to government lack of oversight? I think this is and important question.

I would say definitely not all operators are bad but there is a lack of oversight. I can only speak from personal experience but the boats I was on (Discovery II and Sindalahs) always had night guards on duty.
I can't comment on electrical or engineering but we were briefed multiple times to not charge anything in our rooms if we weren't in there ourselves and my bunk mate consistently plugged in a 1 to 3 adaptor and charged **** without being in there. I should mention this guy also dove without a longhose setup but his octopus on a necklace. The dive guide very quickly told him to cut off the necklace off his octo.

I will be in Egypt for work a couple of times in 2025 and planned to dive at the end of each trip. Are shore operations bad as well? A collegue of mine describes a situation where his son nearly died doing a poorly guided shore dive.

The only shore diving I did was with Scuba Seekers in Dahab and I cannot recommend them enough. In general I would go for operators that in addition to recreational diving, offer high quality technical diving. Although more expensive than ****** $20/dive operators, they will be better.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to identify a good operator, both liveaboard and shore?

Honestly price is a good start. I think Liveaboards could be a bit of a crapshoot but land-based operators should be easier to find.

 

[scubaozy]

I recently was in Hurghada and we did have an actual situation. We had quite heavy storms end of March and during the crossing from Brothers to North, I woke up with the smoke alarm, quickly verified in below deck hallway that there was smoke. I had my emergency drybag ready so I woke up the next cabin and went to upper deck. We woke up the crew and guides and they found that due storm, water was coming into the front cabins and this short circuited the electrics starting the smoke. Lucky that it did not turn into a full fire. People staying in those cabins were in fact not sleeping there (they were sleeping on upper deck lounge area) because they already had water entering the cabin in the first day.
We had smoke alarms working luckly, but smoke alarms are not that loud, I have relatively light sleep, so, I was able to hear it. People sleeping in the top deck did not hear anything. Anyway, my recommendation to everyone is to play through the fire scenario in your heads in the first day, and make sure you know exactly how you will respond.

I had a near miss in 2022, it was a British run company. Nobody warned me

 

[LI-er]

This is probably the only decent reason for carrying one of these.

The indisputaable decent reason for carrying one of these is because when you're in a bad situation on the wrong side of the water any air is better than no air.