Sha'ab Rumi

Port Sudan · Red Sea State · Sudan

Sha'ab Rumi holds a unique place in diving history. This horseshoe-shaped reef in the central Sudanese Red Sea is where Jacques Cousteau built his Conshelf II underwater habitat in 1963, housing a team of oceanauts who lived and worked beneath the waves for a month. The Oscar-winning documentary World Without Sun brought this reef to global attention, and six decades later it remains one of the most compelling dive destinations on the planet, not just for its history but for its extraordinary marine life. The liveaboard moored inside the lagoon, and our first dive was a pilgrimage to the Conshelf remains. At ten metres on the sandy floor, the garage structure emerged from the blue, a cylindrical metal frame now completely colonised by hard and soft corals. Anemones and clownfish occupied the rusted window frames. Nearby, tool sheds and storage frameworks lay scattered across the sand, each one a miniature reef in its own right. It is a strange and moving experience to hover over the spot where humans first attempted to live permanently underwater, knowing that the reef has quietly absorbed the experiment back into itself. The main event at Sha'ab Rumi is the south plateau. We descended the outer wall at dawn, dropping to thirty metres where the reef shoulder extends into open water as a flat coral platform. The visibility was over thirty metres, and the water was a deep indigo. Within five minutes the first hammerhead appeared, a single large female cruising the thermocline with that distinctive undulating profile. Then the school came. Twenty, thirty, perhaps forty scalloped hammerheads materialised in the blue beyond the plateau, a loose formation of bizarre silhouettes sweeping their cephalofoils from side to side. They held their depth at around thirty-five metres, circling in a wide gyre that brought them past our position three times before they descended and vanished. The wall itself was carpeted in coral. Enormous gorgonian fans grew from the vertical face, their lattices filtering the Red Sea current. Grey reef sharks patrolled the wall in pairs, and a silvertip shark, rarer and bolder than its grey cousins, cruised past at eye level with a deliberate, unhurried gait. A school of bigeye trevally numbering in the hundreds formed a tornado above a coral head, the vortex spinning and reforming as individuals joined and departed. On the return along the reef top, a Napoleon wrasse the size of a small table accompanied us for ten minutes, its curiosity about our cameras apparently insatiable. The reef fish density at Sha'ab Rumi is remarkable, anthias swarming every coral head, surgeonfish grazing in disciplined schools, and giant moray eels poking their heads from seemingly every crevice. This is what the Red Sea looked like before the dive boats came, and Sudan's isolation has preserved it in a state that Egypt's reefs can only remember.