Diving Sharm el Sheikh: Ras Mohammed, the Straits of Tiran and the Thistlegorm

Last updated: 6 August 2026 · written by the team who dive these sites

There are more dive sites within ninety minutes of these jetties than some countries manage in total, which is how people waste a week here: they dive whatever was chalked on the board and miss the reason they came. If you are still choosing between Egyptian bases, read our comparison of the Red Sea bases first. This is about the sites.

Which trips a Sharm week is actually made of

Every centre runs much the same menu: boats leave the marina at Sharm el Maya, or the jetties in the bays north of it, do two dives and are back mid-afternoon. One exception involves getting up in the dark. Six diving days comes to ten to twelve dives, and how you allocate them matters more than which centre you book.

Most weeks use all of it: a check dive locally, two days at Tiran, one or two at Ras Mohammed, one long day on the wreck. That is what we build into diving holidays in Sharm el Sheikh.

Ras Mohammed, and what Shark and Yolanda actually delivers

Ras Mohammed is the headland at the southern tip of Sinai where the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez meet, and it became Egypt’s first national park in 1983. Boats take 45 to 90 minutes depending on the jetty. A national park fee applies and is normally collected on the boat.

The dive everyone comes for is Shark and Yolanda Reef: two coral pinnacles off the point joined by a saddle at roughly 12 to 20 m, with wall on the outside of both dropping far beyond sight. It is run as a drift — in near Anemone City, along to the corner of Shark Reef, across the saddle, finishing on the Yolanda cargo.

That cargo is the part people misremember. The Yolanda was a Cypriot freighter that went onto the reef on 1 April 1980 carrying British bathroom fittings. The hull slid off in a storm in 1987 and was not found again until 2005, at around 145 to 160 m, so this is not a wreck dive. What remains is lavatories, baths and pipe across the sand at about 15 to 20 m — odd rather than beautiful, and shallow enough to finish on.

Come in June, July or August and you get the fish. Twin-spot snapper are the ones that come to spawn, gathering in their thousands over the saddle, and batfish, barracuda and unicornfish stack up around them for the same reason the snapper are there. The same months bring the hardest current, and not in one direction: it accelerates round the corner of Shark Reef, can reverse mid-dive and can push down on the outer wall. Groups get separated. With fifty dives and none in moving water, ask for Jackfish Alley instead — sandy slope, shallow caves, no drama.

The four reefs of the Straits of Tiran

Tiran is a line of four reefs across the strait between Sinai and Tiran Island, an hour to ninety minutes north-east of the marina. North to south they are Jackson, Woodhouse, Thomas and Gordon, named after nineteenth-century British hydrographers. Water moving in and out of the Gulf of Aqaba funnels through deep channels either side, which is why there is nearly always current.

Gordon, the southernmost, is the most forgiving: a plateau at roughly 10 to 25 m on the sheltered southern side where the boats tie up, old oil drums on the sand worth looking inside, turtles, and an amphitheatre where reef sharks turn up. The Loullia, a freighter that grounded on the northern edge in 1981, still sits above the surface, so you see it from the boat.

Thomas is the smallest and, on its day, the best. The wall drops to a plateau at about 25 m carrying a run of large gorgonians, and below that a canyon starts at around 35 m and falls past 90 — a technical dive, so recreationally you swim over the top and look down. Current at the northern tip can end a dive early.

Woodhouse is long, narrow and almost always a drift, because there is no mooring to work back to. A cut runs through it about halfway along at roughly 25 m, and at the north-east corner the currents meet.

Jackson is the most northerly, the most exposed and the first to be dropped when it blows. Scalloped hammerheads are reported off its back wall from around August into early October, at 25 to 35 m. Treat that as a possibility, not a plan; people dive Jackson all week in September and see none.

Is the Thistlegorm worth a three o’clock start

Once, yes, if the sea allows it. The Thistlegorm was a British merchant ship carrying supplies for Allied forces in North Africa when German bombers found her at anchor at Sha’ab Ali on 6 October 1941. Nine men were lost. She sits upright, deck at about 16 to 18 m and sand at 30 to 32 m, holds still loaded with Bedford trucks, BSA and Norton motorcycles, rifles, boots and aircraft parts, and two railway locomotives blown clear onto the sand either side.

The honest part is the logistics. Three to four hours each way means a pick-up between two and four in the morning and a return in the early evening: two dives spread across ten or eleven hours afloat, and the better part of sixteen hours between the alarm and the hotel bar. Current often runs a knot or two and you go up and down a line. Centres ask for an Advanced qualification or roughly twenty logged dives, and they are right to.

Day boats arrive mid-morning, by which time a dozen others are tied on. If the wreck is the reason for the trip, it is dived better from a liveaboard that overnights alongside and gets in at first light. Of the routes in our guide to the Red Sea liveaboard itineraries, it is the northern wrecks and reefs week out of Hurghada that is built around her, moored above the wreck and diving her three or four times; the offshore southern routes never go near her. When the north wind cancels the day trip, the fallback wreck is the Dunraven, upside down since 1876 just south of Beacon Rock on Sha’ab Mahmoud, in about 15 to 30 m.

The reefs in the bay, and what they are for

The local sites get written off as filler and should not be. Temple, minutes from the Sharm el Maya jetty, is three pinnacles off a sandy plateau at 12 to 15 m; it takes almost everyone’s check dive and it is the standard night dive. Ras Umm Sid, below the lighthouse, is a wall hung with gorgonian fans; the Gardens — Near, Middle and Far — are sheltered slopes and walls along the northern side of Naama Bay itself, minutes out from the jetty.

These are the sites that stay diveable when the wind is up, which in January could be half your diving. They are also where a rusty or nervous diver gets sorted out before anyone asks them to handle current at Ras Mohammed. Being honest with us about that changes which centre and which resort in Sharm el Sheikh we put you in.

When to go, and what the wind takes off the table

The water is coldest in February and March at about 21 to 23°C, warmest in August and September at about 28 to 29°C. A 3 mm suit is enough from June to October; take a 5 mm from December to April. Visibility is usually 20 to 30 m, often better in autumn.

Wind decides your week, not temperature. Northerly fronts come through every five to ten days at any time of year, more often between December and March. The first casualty is the Thistlegorm, because the crossing runs into open water at the mouth of the Gulf of Suez; winter day trips are cancelled regularly. Tiran holds up better, since each reef has a sheltered side, but Jackson comes off the list first.

So September to November is the best window and October the pick of it: warm water, the best visibility of the year, fewest lost days. June to August buys the aggregations and the strongest current, with air temperatures in the high thirties, which matters more than people expect on a steel deck. December to March is quieter and cheaper, and you should budget for losing days.

How busy it gets, and what the trip costs in time

Shark and Yolanda in October has a queue of boats on the moorings, and the Thistlegorm at eleven in the morning can hold a hundred divers. This is not a quiet corner of the Egyptian Red Sea; it is the busiest one. The reefs are in better shape than that suggests, but if solitude is what you want, nothing fixes it.

Direct flights from the London airports take around five and a half hours, a little longer from the north, and Egypt is two hours ahead of the UK for most of the year, so there is no jet lag. Where you sleep decides your mornings: hotels run from Sharm el Maya through Naama Bay up to the Nabq strip, and the further north you are the longer the drive to the marina — unless the hotel launches its own boats. The Four Seasons Resort sits in Sharks Bay, about fifteen minutes north of Naama Bay, with a house reef, its own dive centre and a private jetty, so the early starts begin at the bottom of the garden rather than in a minibus; the Steigenberger Alcazar, a ten to fifteen minute taxi from Naama Bay, is the one we book most often for mixed parties, where the non-divers want a pool day rather than a boat.

The paperwork catches people. Fly into Sharm, stay under fifteen days and keep to the resort areas of Sharm el Sheikh, Dahab, Nuweiba or Taba, and UK passport holders get a free entry permit stamped on arrival; going beyond those areas needs the full tourist visa. The trip that catches divers out is the Thistlegorm, because the boat leaves the permit area and centres check for a full visa on the dock, so buy the e-visa before you fly if that day matters to you. Check the current FCDO wording while you are at it, because this is the detail that changes.

Who this isn’t for

If you are coming for sharks, go somewhere else. Sharm gives you the occasional whitetip on the Gordon plateau and a maybe on the Jackson wall in late summer. That is the honest ceiling. Oceanic whitetips, threshers and dependable hammerheads live on the offshore reefs further south, which means either a base at Marsa Alam, where Elphinstone is now within reach of a day boat, or an Egyptian liveaboard spending its week at the Brothers, Daedalus and Elphinstone.

If you have ten dives in the book, or you have been out of the water for five years, do not build the week around the Thistlegorm: centres want an Advanced card or around twenty logged dives for it, and the drift sites want either that or a guide who has watched you in current first. None of that shuts you out of Sharm. This is one of the cheapest, warmest, most sheltered places in the world to log the dives that get you there, which is why half the boats have a training group on board. It is an argument for ordering the week properly, bay reefs and a refresher first, headline sites later, rather than an argument against coming.

And if a two o’clock alarm followed by ten hours on a boat sounds like a bad day rather than a good story, skip the Thistlegorm and spend that day at Tiran. That is a legitimate choice, and it costs you nothing except the wreck.

Who it does suit: divers from about twenty dives upwards who are comfortable being moved around by water, and newly qualified divers who are happy to spend the first half of the week on the bay reefs and the gentler Ras Mohammed sites. What they get is hard coral, proper walls and real choice inside ninety minutes of the dock, on a short flight with no time change. For them, a week based in Sharm in October is close to the best value in Red Sea diving.

Frequently asked questions

Can you dive the Thistlegorm on a day trip from Sharm el Sheikh?

Yes, and most centres run it weekly. The crossing is three to four hours each way, so pick-up falls between two and four in the morning and you are back in the early evening after two dives on the wreck. North winds cancel it regularly between December and March. Centres want an Advanced qualification or roughly twenty logged dives, because the deck sits around 16 to 18 metres, the sand is at 30 to 32, and current on the site often runs a knot or two. You also need a full Egyptian visa rather than the free Sinai entry permit, because the boat leaves the permit area.

Do you need an Advanced qualification to dive Ras Mohammed and the Straits of Tiran?

No. Most centres prefer Advanced plus some recent dives for the drift sites, because Shark and Yolanda Reef is a drift in current that can change direction mid-dive, and the Tiran reefs are drifts along walls where the boat collects you downstream. Open Water divers dive both areas every week on the gentler options, such as Jackfish Alley or the Gordon Reef plateau, with a guide keeping them close. If your logbook is thin, plan the bay reefs first and the headline sites later in the week.

Are there sharks at Sharm el Sheikh?

Some, but this is not a shark destination. Whitetip reef sharks show up on the Gordon Reef plateau and along the Tiran walls, and scalloped hammerheads are reported deep on Jackson Reef’s back wall from roughly August into early October. None of it is dependable. For oceanic whitetips and consistent big-animal diving you want the offshore reefs further south: Elphinstone from a day boat at Marsa Alam, or the Brothers and Daedalus by liveaboard. None of them is a Sharm day trip.

What wetsuit do you need for diving in Sharm el Sheikh?

A 3 mm full suit covers June to October, when the sea sits at roughly 26 to 29 degrees. From December through April take a 5 mm, because the water drops to about 21 to 23 degrees in February and March, and wind on an open boat deck makes surface intervals colder than the numbers suggest. Pack a hood if you chill easily or you are doing three dives in a day.

How many dives will you get in a week, and what happens if it is windy?

Six diving days at two dives a day is ten to twelve dives once you allow for the no-fly gap before your flight home. Northerly fronts pass through every five to ten days, more often from December to March. When one hits, the Thistlegorm day is cancelled first and Jackson Reef comes off the Tiran rotation, but the bay reefs and the inner Ras Mohammed sites usually stay open. You lose the dive you wanted rather than the dive itself.