Review: Northern Red Sea Wrecks and Reefs

Northern Red Sea Wrecks and Reefs
Travelling Diver, £12.50.

Northern Wrecks and Reefs
by Rik Vercoe
Published by Travelling Diver
£12.50

This is the 6th in the series of the Travelling Diver Guides. It covers the wrecks and reefs you may visit on a liveaboard departing from Hurghada or Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt.

Like the other guides, this one comprises a loose-leaf pack of pages in full colour, each dedicated to a single dive site. Every page gives a detailed dive site description or wreck history, with room for you to write your own notes. There is also a very good map of the dive site, information on difficulty and location. As well as being a guide the pages are designed as a dive log, with boxes for you to fill your dive details: sea conditions, temperature, maximum depth, bottom time, etc.

The guide really does manage to pack loads of information into a small space and covers most of the dives you will do on a week's liveaboard holiday. However, 9 of the 16 dive sites in the new guide are also covered in Travelling Diver's earlier publication Red Sea Wrecks Northern Egypt. So if you already have a copy of this you will experience some duplication. The extra dives you get in the new pack are: Shark Reef and Jolanda, The Alternatives, Small Passage, Sha'ab Umm Usk, Siyul Kibeer, Sha'ab el Erg and Umm Gamar South.

The pack has two spare logbook sheets with room for you to log four dives. The sheets are standard 3-hole diving logbook size.

As with the other guides these pages make it easy for you to have a record your dives in much greater detail than the few notes most of us scribble down about the site. Focusing on a very small area - just the dives you might experience on a week's trip - means the guide is compact and light. No need to pack several thick, heavy books. The downside of course is if you visit different areas of the Red Sea often, it can become expensive to have to buy a new guide for each trip. Although not if you win one in our competion.

About the author
Rik Vercoe has spent many years as a professional dive guide and instructor. His passion for diving has lead him to complete more than 1000 dives within the Red Sea alone. An accomplished artist, his drawings of shipwrecks and reefs have gained international acclaim and a dedicated following within the diving community. Rik now lives in the UK, where he continues to feed his interest in diving and historical research.

Copies of the guide may be purchased from Amazon.


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