Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1105097 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 164 pages

Synopsis
From the coral ridges of the Straits of Tiran to Ras Mohammed park, this guide illustrates the 28 best dives in the peaceful waters of the southern coast of Sinai. It leads the reader through the most spectacular routes and offers outlines of the most typical Red Sea marine creatures.

Customer Reviews

So What's New?
When reviewing the "Hurghada Diving Guide" from these same publishers, I commented on how much of the information within that book was not only inaccurate but had also appeared elsewhere. I now have similar problems with this effort.

28 dive-sites are covered and these include 6 from the Straits of Tiran (previously covered in their "Red Sea Diving Guide"), 10 under the heading Local Dives (including "Ras um Sid (sic) - which is very different from the Ras Umm Sid (correct spelling) found in their Red Sea Diving Guide), 6 from the Ras Mohammed Area (yet again covered in the Red Sea Diving Guide.) and a final 6 sites under the heading "The Strait of Gubal" (sic - again, and that sounds just about right). The latter includes that perennial favourite the Thistlegorm, which now appears in at least four Red Sea titles from these publishers. Padding?, overlap?, or what?

Sadly, one of the very few interesting things about this book is comparing how they have changed their artistic depiction of the Thistlegorm over four books. You would have thought they might have got it remotely accurate by now - but not so.

The book also contains that shipwreck on Shag Rock. This is the wreck they call "Sarah H" in their "Red Sea Wrecks." Having now decided that Sarah H is the wrong name (they also made changes to their previously published shipwreck details in the Hurghada Diving Guide - except that those changes were wrong.), they avoid any need to complete even a minimum amount of research to discover the wreck's true identity and have now given this wreck the inspirational name "The Shag Rock Wreck." When this shipwreck was first discovered the finders promptly named her after their diving guide Sarah Hillel (Sarah H). The ship's real name is, of course, the "Kingston" - something that has been known to Divers with a knowledge of the area for something like 10 years before this book was published...

With the Dunraven also appearing in at least two other titles, yet another repeat of the dive site "Alternatives" and even more out-of-date information on "Shark Observatory" where, incidentally, Sharks have not been regularly sighted for many years, one can only ponder the publisher's motives for producing this book in the first instance. As I said; Padding?, overlap?, or what?

With the overall standard of artwork having seriously declined since this range of books first appeared and some of the fish being wrongly identified, one gets the impression that these publishers are no longer aiming their books at the serious Scuba Diver - just going for quantity instead of quality.

It remains a great pity such excellent photography is wasted on such yet another abysmal product.

NM

For a Sharm dive holiday, this book covers most of the sites
I visited the Sharm area in February 1999. We mainly dived local sites, plus Tiran, Ras Mohamed and the Thistlegorm. This is a fair cross section of the dives available and every one we dived was featured. Good site descriptions covering the terrain, route and wildlife. Some of the 3 D maps were not so easy to interpret. One of my freinds liked the book so much that I have to order it for him which I suppose is a reccomendation in itself