Egypt pelagic birding diving

Destination country: Egypt. Start and finish from Marsa Alam.

Next schedule: TBA

Duration: 8 days.

Photos: To enjoy some tour photos please click here and here!

Price: ...per person (for non-divers, ... Euro less).Supplement rate for single room occupancy is at least 50% as a result of limited places. Children (2-12 years old) have 40 % discount. Equipment rental for divers: ... per week. Rooms can be share upon request with other lone participants. National Park fees: Brothers Island €50. Rocky and Zabargad or Daedalus reef €70 per passenger. Price includes: All transfers from airport to airport, accommodations and meals on boat, drinking water, soft drinks. The price exclude: bank transfer loss, international flight, visa, tips, alcoholic beverages, personal travel insurance and any other activities of personal request e.g. laundry, satellite phone calls, etc.

Note: The Open Water Diver course can be undertaken en-route on the boat for an outstanding price: €230! Other courses like Advanced Open Water Diver, Rescue Diving and speciality and gas courses can be undertaken upon request as well (prices subject to individual cases), which would require a technical diving instructor to join the expedition.

Special charters: For a family or group of friends, the chartered diving safari boat can be hired for a special price, which includes food, beverages, supervision by a dive master, unlimited diving and snorkelling and the attendance of a birding guide. Price: €12,890. For ANY special requests, please contact us.

Accommodation: Liveaboard, in separate air-conditioned cabins (based on double occupancy).

Numbers: No limit.

Description: "..7 days sailing on the Southern Red Sea, including round two islands where Red-billed Tropicbird Phaethon aethereus and Sooty Falcon Falco concolor breed. In order to avoid disturbance at the nesting sites, it is FORBIDDEN to land on the islands!..."

Top birds: Red-billed Tropicbird, Goliath Heron, Indian Reef Egret, Brown Booby, Slender-billed Gull, Grey-hooded Gull, White-eyed Gull, Sooty Gull, Armenian Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Heuglin’s Gull, Caspian Tern, Swift Tern, Lesser Crested Tern, Sandwich Tern, Little Tern, Saunders’s Tern, Bridled Tern, White-cheeked Tern, Western Osprey, Crab Plover, Goliath Heron, Lanner and Sooty Falcons.

Marine wildlfie: Spinner dolphin, Indo-Pacific Bottle-nose Dolphin, Oceanic white-tip Shark, Tiger shark, Scalloped Hammerhead, Bluespotted Stingray, Spotted Eagle Ray, Dugong, Giant Moray, Common Lionfish, Stonefish, Indian Ocean Crocodile Fish, Red Sea (or Twoband) Anemonefish, Napoleon Wrasse, Hawksbill Turtle.

Itinerary:

Day 1: Arrival to Marsa Alam International Airport. If agreed in advance, meet the guides at the airport and transfer to the boat or to a hotel. There is an optional trip to a place where dugongs can be found within snorkelling depth. In the early evening, once everyone has arrived, there will be a boat briefing on board, for discussion of details of the trip and to agree which islands and National Parks should be visited. The dive masters and the birding guide will then begin the welcoming, until we can no longer keep our eyes open.

Day 2-6: Sailing days. Early morning on Day 2, we set sail from Marsa Alam marina, heading to the far south. For licensed divers, there are 3 dives daily (on a special charter, dives are unlimited); there is unlimited snorkelling and pelagic birding from the sundeck. Because the pattern of a day’s activity on the boat depends on the weather (eg. wind and waves), we cannot predict in which order the islands and reefs will be visited. We therefore do not issue a fixed programme to avoid any possibility of confusion! Mostly during the days birdwatching is easy even using a telescope on board, because the Red Sea is far calmer than the Pacific Ocean! The safari boats, being quite large, are very stable on the water. Every day, dozens of White-eyed Gulls will follow our boat, hoping to pick up any discarded fish offal. Dozens of terns will follow the gulls, making a quite unforgettable sight, their movements punctuated by a nonstop influx of pelagic species. Sightings of dolphins are quite common, and seeing shark underwater is almost guaranteed.

Day 7: Arrive at Marsa Alam marina is the excuse for a farewell party before transfers to the airport, or to a hotel for anyone who has requested an extension for cultural or birding reasons on the mainland. Note that it sometimes may be possible to combine the pelagic birding trip with a Nile cruise.