Small Brother Island

Hurghada · Red Sea Governorate · Egypt

Small Brother Island is the lesser known but arguably more thrilling half of Egypt's legendary Brothers Islands, a pair of oceanic pinnacles rising from abyssal depths in the open Red Sea. While Big Brother gets more attention thanks to its lighthouse and named wrecks, Small Brother is where the shark action concentrates, where the walls are steepest, and where diving crosses from memorable into genuinely unforgettable. I rolled off the zodiac into moderate current and descended along a wall so densely covered in soft corals that the rock beneath was invisible. Pink, orange, and purple Dendronephthya colonies cascaded down every vertical surface from the shallows to well beyond 40 metres, swaying in the current like a living tapestry. The wall was not merely decorated with soft corals. It was constructed of them, a vertical garden of color stretching in every direction. At 25 metres, movement in the blue caught my attention. An oceanic whitetip shark emerged from the edge of visibility, its distinctive rounded dorsal fin and broad white-tipped pectorals unmistakable. It circled slowly, accompanied by pilot fish in close formation beneath its belly, assessing me with the calm curiosity that characterizes this increasingly rare species. The encounter lasted several minutes before the shark drifted back into the blue. Shallower along the wall, giant moray eels occupied holes with their heads protruding, jaws gaping. Schools of barracuda held formation in the current above the reef crest. A thresher shark appeared briefly at 30 metres, its impossibly long tail scything through the water before vanishing into the depths. Small Brother is not a comfortable dive site. The currents are real, the depths serious, and the exposure total. But for advanced divers, it offers encounters with critically endangered oceanic predators against a backdrop of the most spectacular soft coral walls in the Red Sea.