Alexandria diving, mediterranean, egypt??

[subzero]

I have seen some info on the web that there are very nice historical underwater dive sites in alexandria, i was wondering if some one here can provide me with more information about this diving destination.

Thanks..

[Jack]

Alexandria is known for its beautiful beaches that attract people from all over the world; however, it is the most recent diving spot in Egypt. It now offers one of the most interesting diving experiences in the world. Unlike the Red Sea, Alexandria does not have beautiful coral reefs neither colorful fishes. Diving in Alexandria is a dive into history. Whole cities, palaces and boats are lie beneath the Alexandrian Shore and nobody knows the exact reason they sank in the first place. Although some of the important statues of queens and kings were extracted from underwater; some 7000 Monuments belonging to the Pharaonic and Roman dynasties are preserved underwater.

For all wrecks lover, Alexandria offers you wrecks of ships and cities dating back to 300 BC. Most of the underwater monuments are located in Abu Keer Gulf where whole cities still exist.

Aminotheese City: a whole city with its temples, houses, statues and enormous number of handmade craft. The Goddess Isis used to be worshiped in this city.

Heraliqueon City (The Sins City): This city witnessed the Pharos, Batalmeese, and Bezantic era. It was the Pilgrims City where people come to worship the Goddess Isis. Nobody knows why it is called the Sins City.

Cleopatra's city: This city dates back to 300 BC, and was build by Alexander the Great. It is a complete city with palaces, monuments and even shipwrecks.

Cleopatra Palace: is located inside the Western Port of Alexandria. You will enjoy seeing Cleopatra's royal districts, the statue of Mark Anthony and other monuments. Moreover another spot for diving is the debris of Cleopatra's sun boat and the wreckage of a 2nd World War plane that exists inside Cleopatra's palace.

Quaitabay Fort: There are 3 spots below Quaitbay Fort. The first one is the wreckage of a boat that used to carry goods to Alexandria during Cleopatra's era. The second is the remains of a Roman shipwreck that also used to carry goods to Alexandria. It is located about 650 meters away from Quaitbay Fort. The third spot is another wreckage of a ship that also used to carry goods during Cleopatra's era. It is located 450 meters from Quaitbay Fort.
I hope this information are useful, also i attached some pics for you.

[DiveDevil1966]

Thats great information on diving in Alexandria. I am very interested in reading this as I have not been there myself and was not aware that there is such good diving.
Living and diving in the Mediterranean, in particular in and around Cyprus may also give a bit of a different persepctive to diving in the Med.
The diving in the Eastern Med is great, even though a lot of times divers refer to the Med as empty, and that there is not a lot to see. I do not agree with this at all as there is plenty to see. Anybody diving in the Med just needs to have an open mind and not dive with tropical goggels on.
The Med has a huge variety of different aspects to diving. The Eastern Med is not affected by big tidal movements and therefore does not have a lot of currents either. The vislibilty can be up to 35 metres and provides ideal conditions for training dives at any level. There is also some fantastic wreck diving, which really is mind blowing. To understand the Med and its flaura and fauna we need to look a bit at its history. I have included an articel on the Med which might be of interest. It is a bit long but I think it also very interesting. Enjoy!

The Eastern Mediterranean and the life in it:

The term Mediterranean derives from the Latin mediterraneus, 'inland' (medius, 'middle' + terra, 'land, earth'), in Greek "mesogeios”
The Mediterranean Sea has been known by a number of alternative names throughout human history. It was, for example, commonly called Mare Nostrum (Latin, Our Sea), and occasionally Mare Internum by the Romans. In the Old Testament, on the west coast of the Holy Land, and therefore behind a person facing the east, it is called the "Hinder Sea", sometimes translated as "Western Sea", and also the "Sea of the Philistines", because that people occupied a large portion of its shores near the Israelites. Mostly, however, it was the "Great Sea" or simply "The Sea". In Hebrew, it is called "ha-Yam ha-Tikhon", "the middle sea", a literal adaptation of the German equivalent Mittelmeer. In Turkish, it is Akdeniz, "the white sea". In Arabic, it is Al-Baħr Al-Abyad Al-Muttawasit "the middle white sea".

Geography and Climate

The Mediterranean Sea is connected to the Atlantic Ocean by the Strait of Gibraltar on the west and to the Sea of Marmara and Black Sea, by the Dardanelles and the Bosporus respectively, on the east. The Sea of Marmara is often considered a part of the Mediterranean Sea, whereas the Black Sea is generally not. The man-made Suez Canal in the south-east connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea.
Large islands in the Mediterranean include Cyprus, Crete, Euboea, Rhodes, Lesbos, Chios, Kefalonia and Corfu in the eastern Mediterranean; Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and Malta in the central Mediterranean; and Ibiza, Majorca and Minorca (the Balearic Islands) in the western Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean climate is generally one of wet winters and hot, dry summers. Special crops of the region are olives, grapes, oranges, tangerines and cork.

Oceanography

Being nearly landlocked strongly affects the Mediterranean Sea's properties; for instance, tides are very limited as a result of the narrow connection with the ocean.
Evaporation greatly exceeds precipitation and river runoff in the Mediterranean, a fact that is central to the entire circulation of the basin. Evaporation is especially high in its eastern half, causing the water level to decrease and salinity to increase eastward. This pressure gradient pushes relatively cool, low-salinity water from the Atlantic across the basin; it warms and becomes saltier as it travels east, then sinks in the region of the Levant and circulates westward, to spill over the Strait of Gibraltar. Thus, seawater flow is eastward in the Strait's surface waters, and westward below; once in the open ocean, this chemically-distinct Mediterranean Intermediate Water can persist thousands of kilometres away from its source.

Geology

The geology of the Mediterranean is complex, involving the break-up and then collision of the African and Eurasian plates, and the Messinian Salinity Crisis in the late Miocene when the Mediterranean dried up.
The Mediterranean Sea has an average depth of 1,500 m and the deepest recorded point is 5267 meters (about 3.27 miles) in the Calypso Deep in the Ionian Sea. The coastline extends for 46,000 km. A shallow submarine ridge (the Strait of Sicily) between the island of Sicily and the coast of Tunisia divides the sea in two main sub regions, the Western Mediterranean and the Eastern Mediterranean. The Western Mediterranean covers an area of about 0.85 million km² and the Eastern Mediterranean about 1.65 million km².
In the last few centuries, mankind has done much to alter Mediterranean geology. Structures have been built all along the coastlines, exacerbating and rerouting erosional patterns. Many pollution-producing boats travel the sea that unbalance the natural chemical ratios of the region. Beaches have been mismanaged, and the overuse of the sea's natural and marine resources continues to be a problem. This misuse speeds along and/or confounds natural processes. The actual geography has also been altered by the building of dams and canals.
The Mediterranean was once thought to be the remnant of the Tethys Ocean. It is now known to be a structurally younger ocean basin known as Neotethys. Neotethys formed during the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic rifting of the African and Eurasian plates.

Ecology

THE BUILDING OF THE 101-MILE-LONG SUEZ CANAL was one of the great engineering feats of the 19th century. When it was completed on 17 November, 1869, ships were able to sail directly between the Mediterranean and Red Sea for the first time and, by avoiding the circumnavigation of Africa, weeks were carved off transit times between the major European and Asian ports. This boosted trade and accelerated colonisation of Africa by the European powers.
What the builders of the canal, including construction company chief Ferdinand De Lesseps, almost certainly didn't realise when the final breach was made was that they had started a grand experiment in introducing alien species that continues to the present day. Many fish species have been migrating from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean ever since. This can witnessed on many dives anywhere around the island during day and night. The blue-spotted cornetfish in his stripy night pattern camouflage is a fish which is regularly seen in the Red Sea and has now made a new home in the waters around Cyprus. This fish is not found in the typical Mediterranean fish guides. It might well be that these fish guides have to be rewritten as more and more species will migrate into the Eastern Mediterranean. Many other species have since been spotted.
The migration of Red Sea fish species through the Suez Canal and successful establishment of breeding populations in the eastern Mediterranean, is a phenomenon called the Lessepsian migration, after Ferdinand De Lesseps, the construction chief of the Suez Canal. This invasion is not limited to fish, as a number of Red Sea worm, snail, crustacean and jellyfish species have followed the same route. The blue-spotted cornetfish is one of the latest Lessepsian migrants, and its subsequent occurrence in the Mediterranean is typical of the invasion pattern.
By June 2001, specimens were turning up on the south coast of Turkey, and later that year they were seen in Cypriot waters too.
In 2002 reports were coming in from all around the eastern Mediterranean, including the Aegean. They have now reached the Straits of Sicily, a significant area that marks the boundary between faunas of the eastern and western Med.
There are now around 59 alien species resident in the Mediterranean and some of them are an important sorce for commercial fishing.
The Red Sea invaders have had negative impacts on native fish populations. Gold-band goatfish, for example, arrived in the late 1940s and displaced their Mediterranean relative the red mullet into deeper and colder waters.
Why are the Red Sea immigrants so successful in the eastern Mediterranean when there are already plenty of native fish, some of them closely related to the Lessepsian species? As it turns out, there are fewer fish species in the eastern Mediterranean than might be expected. The reasons are partly geological and partly due to the way the major currents flow into and out of the Mediterranean. Nutrient-rich surface water comes in through the shallow Straits of Gibraltar from the Atlantic and makes its way slowly into the western Mediterranean and then via the Straits of Sicily into the eastern Med. By the time it gets there, many of the surface-water nutrients have been used up and cannot subsequently support large quantities of plankton, the base of all marine food chains. This is the reason for the generally superb visibility in the eastern Mediterranean. This superb visibility is fantastic for the divers and snorkelers but unfortunately it does not provide too much nutrients for the fish in it.
The geological explanation for lower-than-expected eastern Mediterranean fish diversity is more dramatic. Almost six million years ago, the connection between the Atlantic and Mediterranean closed and the Mediterranean dried up, wiping out all marine life, including coral faunas that were as diverse as the reefs in the present-day Red Sea. When the Straits of Gibraltar formed some 700,000 years later, Atlantic sea water flooded back into the Med, bringing with it Atlantic fish and invertebrates. That's why today's Atlantic and Mediterranean faunas are similar (excluding Lessepsian species). The eastern Med was the area furthest from the source of the Atlantic immigrants and many species never made it that far, leaving empty niches that the newly arriving Red Sea species seem to have been able to exploit. Indo-Pacific fish species turning up where they shouldn't is not just a phenomenon in the Mediterranean. There are many examples all over the world with similar examples.
Therefore it is not always correct to blame the fishing industry, spear fisherman or deep seas fishing for the lack of marine life in this part of the Med. As I have been diving in these waters for almost six years and still enjoy every dive as there is plenty of marine life to see. The difference is that we have to open our eyes a bit more unlike in tropical seas the species are smaller and not high in numbers.
There is a great variety of different species to observe from the wrasse to the famous grouper, mullet, two banded bream, barracuda, scorpion fish, little crustaceans, molluscs and much more.

[SandShark]

Hi All,
Just came across this thread today and even though it's a bit old, I thought I would reply to it anyway. I live in Alexandria and dive here on a regular basis (I am part owner of the only PADI dive center on the North Coast of Egypt). The diving here can be absolutely wonderful as long as one is prepared for less than perfect water conditions from time-to-time. Diving in and around Alexandria we have the ruins of the Pharos Lighthouse and Cleopatra's Palace. Diving the Pharos is one of my favorite dives in Alex. To the east of Alexandria we have Abu Quir Bay where the Battle of the Nile was fought between the French and British fleets in 1798. The remains of Napolean's flagship L'Orient, as well as the remains of two smaller French ships are still there. Nearby there are the sunken cities of Herclion, Menouthis, and Canopus which date from the Pharonic to the Ptolomeic periods. Unfortunately, these sites are currently off-limits to recreational diving due to ongoing archaeological work in the area.

To the west of Alexandria the water is typically much cleaner and clearer with more fish varieties, as well as numerous shipwrecks which are mostly from the WWII era. Diving between Alexandria and Marsa Matruh is a bit hit-and-miss due to restrictions by the Egyptian Military. Diving beyond Marsa Matruh over to the Libyan border is also currently off-limits due to drug-smuggling concerns by the local authorities.

The is also diving in the Siwa Oasis! During the Roman Occupation in the early 300 B.C.'s, the Romans modified numerous natural springs and turned them into wells. Most are shallow at 8 meters or less, but many contain remains of Roman construction. Kinda cool to be diving in the desert!

So, if you have any additional questions about diving in Alexandria, just do a Google search for "PADI Alexandria Egypt" and our dive center will come up on top. There is also a link to our forum there as well with updates on local conditions and issues.

Hope this information helps to some extent.
Dive Safe!
SandShark

[Jack]

Thanks for sharing this information SandShark, am sure it will add a lot to the thread, but what about diving in Siwa, is it really desert diving as you call it, i agree its kinda of cool.

i will appreciate if you have any picture or more info about this.

thanks,,,

[SandShark]

Hi Captain Jack,
Diving in Siwa is just that....diving out in the middle of the desert. Siwa is located on the edge of the Great Sand Sea (aka Gilf IL-Kibeer) approximately 3-hours into the desert by car from the north coast and is approximately 30-45 kilometers east of the Libyan border around 30-meters below sea level.

The oasis itself is too shallow to dive in. But around the Oasis there are over 190 springs and wells, many which date back over 2000 years. There are also a couple of lakes near the oasis which are diveable. The wells of Ain Abu Sharouf, Ain Al-Arees, and a few other "Ain's" (wells) have remains of Roman era construction. The water is crystal clear with fairly constant temps. Typical depths are between 6 and 8 meters with some wells having unique fish varieties which are not native to Egypt. I've done some work with the Egyptian Department of Underwater Archaeology in Siwa in the past few months doing assessments, measurements, drawings, etc. Pretty interesting stuff!

However, if someone was interested in diving Siwa, I would recommend that they do not plan a trip there solely for the purpose of diving. Otherwise they would be disappointed. I would suggest planning a desert safari trip to the oasis that includes camping in the desert, some sandboarding, some real kite-sailing, seeing the local bedouin sites and experiencing the culture,.....plus some diving! Makes for a complete and unique adventure all the way around!

Below are a few of the pics from our last adventure

On the shore of Lake Shiatta 15 Km from the Libyan border.


Ain Abu Sharouf looking down 6 meters at Roman remains.

[Jack]

Great Information, thanks for sharing them, i really wonder how is this part of Egypt not well known on the map for diving destinations.
I think you with all the information that you have, you can do a difference , may be if you started to do more threads on this forum about these places, it will change the fact and i see that you are having business there, it will make a difference.

Cheers.

[SandShark]

Hi Cap'n,
The North Coast of Egypt, up until the past couple of years, has been pretty much off-limits to recreational diving due to it being classified as an archaeological and military zone. Although the "locals" have been diving here for years. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism is trying to promote recreational diving on the North Coast which is one of the reasons that I and my partner decided to start a dive center here (Kind of the way Sharm EL-Sheikh and Hurghada started off back in the '80's). The timing was right to start opening up the north coast to foreign tourism....and I think that recreational and TecRec divers will fall in love with the diving here over the next few years. We here are breaking new ground in the diving adventures that Egypt has to offer. However, everyone needs to be aware that we have fickle weather here which makes diving here a bit more challenging than the Red Sea.

I haven't posted more threads because of concerns over pushing the limits of advertising my dive center. I'm really not into the commercial (advertising) aspect of the dive center as I only want to dive, dive, and dive some more! OH! And making enough money to pay for my diving as I am already semi-retired and just want to have fun!

For everyone's information, I am an American (retired US Navy originally from Louisiana) that has been living and working here for over 11 years. My personal belief is that anyone that contacts me or walks through the door of the dive center is going to be treated with the same respect and customer service that I would expect to receive from any dive operation in Europe or the States (a mind-set that sometimes seems to be lacking/absent with many Egyptian run dive centers).

Anyway, will start posting more threads about diving here on the North Coast in the near future. As I was informed today, my dive center is going to be listed in the directory starting tomorrow so I don't feel uncomfortable in providing the website addy here now: Master Divers International - Alexandria, Egypt's North Coast Dive Center
www.alexandriawreckdivers.com (forum where you can ask questions...I'm the moderator)

Dive Safe All and look forward to some more threads on diving on Egypt's North Coast!

SandShark (Sandy for short)

[Water Child]

Hey Sandshark,
I'm hoping to dive one of the ancient cities when I arrive in Alexandria on October 1st. I'd only be available for an afternoon dive and I'm sure hoping for a little direction. I'd love to use Blue Spot if at all possible!