Marsa Shagra dive camp, thanks to imposition by the tourist board it’s certainly becoming more of a small resort than a camp, but that’s just the way of development I suppose.
In true comedy fashion the airline gave us the wrong local time, which we only discovered the next day (April 1st) and hence didn’t actually believe for a full 24 hours. In many ways you could say it was our own fault – not one of us in the group had thought to check the time difference before we left…
The diving was pretty good – though I’ve got to say compared to the Liveaboard trip, and even the majority of the Sharm reefs, it wasn’t anything ’special’. Unfortunately I missed one of the better days diving (Elphinstone) due to a rather unfortunate run-in with the lesser spotted tank-fish.
The lesser spotted tank-fish you say? I’ll expand. We took a Zodiac out to Egla Top for a Sunday morning dive, and we all did our lovely James Bond-esque backwards-rolls off the side of the boat and into the clear blue water. Unfortunately, we didn’t all do them at the same time. The quote afterwards really summed it up for me – “I looked left, and I looked right, and I couldn’t see you… so I went for it”. The problem, so it happened, was that I was quite obviously directly behind him. Elementry my dear Watson. The PADI manual would call this a ‘complete f**k up’.
So, I get struck in the top of the head by a 30kg dive tank strapped to a 100kg postal worker, and it all goes rather wrong from there. At this point I was rather more dazed, sinking, and bleeding from the head than I intended to be at 9:30 on a sunny Egyptian Sunday morning. I managed to get some air in my BCD, and shout ‘tank on head tank on head!’ repeatedly and with some careful help ended up back in the boat. It transpires that somewhere around here I strained my shoulder quite badly, but I really wasn’t thinking about that at the time!
After a rather uncomfortable 30 minute boat ride back to camp – with me being very worried that there was blood trickling down my face with everybody rather concerned and that this whole event had yet to really ‘hurt’ – I ended up in an Egyptian ‘hospital’ where comedy banter included such broken English as the doctor saying “No! No! Local anesthesia! Local local local!” when rejecting the first concoction offered in a syringe by his assistant.
One injection of ‘local local!’ in the head and three stitches later and I was packed off with orders not to dive for at least two days, possibly more, and an interesting concotion of never-before-heard-of drugs (anyone for a ‘Bristaflam’?).
Thankfully (I’d like to think this was due to strengthening from the years of philosophical training and darn-right stuborness) my head wasn’t ‘broken’, the wound healed quickly, and I was back in the water on Tuesday for some good quality diving. I’m *very* thankful that tank didn’t hit me in the face, or in my temple, so – I guess – all around fairly lucky.
During the rest of the week we had a diver attacked underwater (a case of mistaken identity we presume?), a dramatic ’scrape’ with another truck where we were all rather lucky to keep our arms, and a member of our group spend the night in the deco-chamber with a suspected bubble in his leg. There’s plenty more diving stories. There’s the actual dives, there’s the continuing comedy of the Northhampton postal-workers (think David Brent meets the Chuckle Brothers) and there’s my first experience using the underwater camera (photos to follow soon!), but I somehow think this is inevitably going to me my strongest memory of the trip…