Day 1 - The Poseidon Adventure begins - 10/01/2016

The day began, as all liveaboards do, with a check dive. The reef (Poseidon) was pleasant, somewhat like an aquarium, but with nothing of any great interest. It was, afterall, a check dive.

It was to get better with a move to the Giannis D – one of the reasons for my trip.* The Giannis D ran aground and sunk in 1983 and has been sitting at a 45 degree angle confusing divers ever since. It's really quite disorientating, I personally began using my torch and bubbles  as a plumb line while penetrating. It's a great wreck and at a little more than 20m very accessible.

While inside the wreck we lost the Kingmaker amidst the dazzle of Royston's lights. Knowing he was no longer inside the wreck, the remaining three of us emerged and had a look for him. Now when you lose your buddy you tend to stick to standard buddy separation procedure, but on this occasion we asked ourselves what would the Kingmaker do? We took a gamble and headed to the shallower bow of the boat where we found him snuggled in like a cuckoo with another buddy pair - panic over, dive saved. It made me wonder though....

Our third and final dive of the day was a night dive on the Sha'ab Abu Nuhas reef itself. I took the opportunity to have some with an inexpensive UV torch I'd been given for Christmas. The down side was that this meant I'd have to dive with a yellow filter on my camera - something which I'd never done before. IT definitely messes with the white balance of the camera. As such I have no fluorescing photographs. I do, however, have some nice little video clips and some non UV but yellow filtered pictures of Spanish Dancers!

To add even more colour to the experience, the Kingmaker was using a red filter on his video light. Apparently, it doesn't scare the reef life quite as much and so you see a bit more on the dive.

Kingmaker

Hell's Kells

Fish & Coral

Giannis D bow

Porcupinefish

* I've done a Red Sea Liveaboard before and I have dived much of this itinerary before. However my last boat was wooden hulled and poor weather meant she wasn't able to make the crossing over to Sha'ab Abu Nuhas.