On a Mission for Healthy Seas
Red Sea, Egypt | Twinset Nx32 & Stages | 3 - 12 metres | 2025 - present
From tourist beaches to virgin reefs: human impact runs rampant with irresponsible tourism and overconsumption.
Under the pristine waters of Lagoona Beach in Dahab lies destruction: layers upon layers of plastic bags, cups, and containers built up over the years. Fishing line extending 30, 40, 50 metres - overgrown by corals, and embedded into the root system of their surrounding sea grass meadows. Pipefish surrounded by plastic cups; an eel who made a discarded crate its home, but that became its prison; reef fish fighting to survive as the plastic covers the grass and outnumbers the corals.
We cleaned up a section over multiple dives, painstakingly removing hundreds of kilograms of single-use plastics from an environment suffocating in it. We were proud - what looked like a dumping ground when we started, was finally clean.
A tourist season later and the situation reverted. We were only doing garbage trucks did on land, underwater.
What we did mattered, certainly, and perhaps the beach-goers that watched us exit the water with numerous modified flour-bags full of the debris we collected, will think twice before leaving their single-use plastics to fly into the ocean, or better yet, carry reusable bottles and utensils instead. To expect the minimum-wage workers under the sweltering Egyptian sun emptying waste-bins to walk around the beach, turning their jobs from emptying waste bins to solo beach cleaners, is unreasonable and unfair.
It is critical, for sustainable consumption of petrochemicals, to preserve our marine environment, and for the health of our entire food chain that ultimately ends with us and at a time when microplastics have been found in every fibre of our bodies, to tackle the source: the single-use plastic industry.
I have learnt that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the seemingly infinite number of masks, gloves, and single-use plastics of all types it required to curb the spread of the illness, Dahab was almost plastic free. Its residence would carry tote bags with them for their shopping, and tourists would be charged for plastic bags, prompting them to carry their own. Disposable containers were rare.
The surge in single-use plastics after life, travel, and tourism crept back to normal levels, is responsible for the plastic that burdens the underwater realm at the shores of Lagoona Beach.
The other consequence of people making up for their two to three years of lost travel, has been the demand for seafood in Dahab. Dahab’s shores border a marine protected area, where only the indigenous population, or the Bedouin people, are permitted to fish for their own consumption. The growth of this town, the influx of businesses set up by outsiders, and the resulting reduction in income and income potential for the local population, seems to have pushed some to fish not just for their own consumption, but to sell their catch.
Fishing from the shore, reef flats, and small boats invariably leads to ghost nets, as these nets are entangled on reef structures and are then abandoned, killing indiscriminately, attracting larger predators, and killing them too.
In early 2026, we received a call - there was a juvenile black tip shark and a juvenile manta ray trapped in a ghost net, further out in Lagoona. They had been predated upon by a larger animal - most likely, a larger shark, the cleaners of the ocean.
I have never seen a shark or a manta during my hundreds of hours underwater in Dahab. Ever. It made me wonder if the Gulf of Aqaba hosts predominantly small fish due to a lack of big, oceanic currents, or because everything else is simply fished out.
Barely two weeks after the Ghost Diving Egypt team removed that net (from which its victims had been consumed, entirely) we were alerted to a ghost net wrapped around a reef in an area divers don’t dive. We scouted it on snorkel and apnea, found the net, and planned our mission. The reef was pristine. Corals unlike any others I had seen across dive sites in Dahab; healthy, intact, diverse, and beautiful.
Thankfully, we found no death. The reef was still alive, and those that were trapped were freed. It took us three hours of of gently untangling and unhooking net from reef, tying away slack with re-usable zip ties, and finally, using lift bags to bring the 20+ kilogram load to the surface.
While the net wasn’t deep, three hours underwater requires more than a single-tank for most. Apart from gas consumption, redundancy is key, as we were working underwater. We had additional stages for spare gas if required, and, as we had to swim over a shallow reef flat to access the drop-off and net, we needed to compact the net into a large flour-bag in order for it to not entangle us, or entangle the reef flat upon our exit. We wore drysuits; the water was 21-degrees and we were submerged for an extended period.
Upon our exit, we met a bedouin man as we exited the water.
“There are many more nets along this stretch” he said.
We are the last link in a long supply chain that causes both plastic and ghost nets to enter and haunt our oceans. The work that both professional divers and tourist divers do is valuable and important, but without links to community programs, incentives, policy changes, and tourist education, our efforts may be largely, and unfortunately fleeting.
