It’s been a while since I’d been to Dahab, so it was good to get out there again with my buddy Gilbert.

I’d never been at this time of the year before, and the life was subtly different – and there were some real highlights.

One of the busiest sites in Dahab is the Canyon – which you get to through a sandy lagoon. Well, we found a ghost pipefish on day 1 (Gilbert reckons it was a mangrove leaf, sculpted with nail scissors). This is the first one I’ve managed to photograph in the Red Sea, although I saw one on Shark & Yolanda a couple of years ago (I didn’t have a camera with me though).

Another busy site – often used to train “newbies” – is Lighthouse – and we found a Seahorse (another first) and a Sea Moth (aka “Short dragonfish) there.

There were also lots of Red Sea walkmen (aka “Two stick stingfish”) – ugly blighters. We’ve really had to look hard for these in the past.

In terms of camera gear, I took my 50mm macro lens, but usually used it with a 1.4x teleconverter – so those images show up as “70mm” in the metadata. Otherwise, I used the 14-54mm.

We stayed at the Hilton – very pleasant – and ate n the town most nights.

Diving was with Reef 2000 again – Little Mo looked after us on most days. We had a day on the boat – a trip out to Gabr El Bint. The currents can get a bit fierce out there, but it’s the best place to find long-nosed hawkfish.

The photo album is loaded and available in the images area. The seahorse shots are around index page 8.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 1st, 2010 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Trip reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.