By Howard Rosenstein

My diving career had a unique beginning. In 1968, at the age of 21, while skin diving off the ancient Roman harbor of Caesaria along Israel’s Mediterranean coast, I noticed something glittering on the seabed. Freediving down to investigate, I picked up the shiny object, along with a handful of sand. As I surfaced, the sand filtered through my fingers, leaving in my palm, a 2,000-year-old Roman gold coin, the first of many I would find over the next few years. With money from the sale of some of these coins, I started my diving business in 1970 at the age of 23.

By 1972, my Mediterranean Diving Center had become successful, and I decided to open a branch at the oasis resort of Neviot beside the Red Sea on the Sinai Peninsula. A year later, I relocated to Na’ama Bay in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, in the southern Sinai.  

The road from Eilat to Sharm el Sheikh along the Red Sea was completed in 1972, the year I began my business. The Sinai at the time was a remote, isolated place, populated by Bedouin communities and several hundred Israelis, some of whom helped establish tourism-based settlements in Nuweiba, Dahab, and Sharm el Sheikh.

Throughout history, the Sinai Peninsula has been a battleground between regional powers, most recently, between Egypt and Israel, with major wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973. When we started our diving operations, remnants of these conflicts lay scattered throughout the landscape, in stark contrast to the area’s beauty above and below the Red Sea waters. We used to gear up in the shadow of abandoned Egyptian tanks on the shore next to Ras Muhammad National Park as late as 1974.

 In the early 1970s, conditions were basic, and simple accommodations and limited tourism infrastructure characterized the holiday experience. The first customers to dive with us in the Red Sea were students and certified divers from our Mediterranean Diving Center/Red Sea Divers, as well as local dive enthusiasts.

My business got its first big break when National Geographic ran a cover story by Dr. Eugenie Clark, with photography by David Doubilet, featuring our diving operation in September 1975. That article and additional media coverage helped attract divers initially from Europe, later from the U.S., and eventually from all over the world. The business continued to grow.

 

 

When we started, all dive sites were virgin, with many sites easily accessible from the shore via small boats. We were among the first lucky ones to discover, explore and share them. With so few diving operations in the area, our divers and staff had most of the sites to themselves, something hard to fathom these days, when it’s common to have tens of dive boats moored over the more popular dive sites.

When Egypt took control of the Sinai in April 1982, there was only one hotel, three diving operations, and fewer than 10 dive boats in Sharm el Sheikh. Live-aboard diving safaris were introduced in the early 1980s, and I expanded into this activity.

During my 50 years in the diving business, I have had many memorable experiences. One of the most unusual was a dive down into an ancient Bedouin well at Saint Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. The purpose of the dive was to extract a broken water pump damaged in a flood. My dive was down a 20-m-deep well at an altitude of 1,500 m. I had never dived at altitude and was totally unaware of the decompression effects. While diving into a dark hole in the earth at the foot of Mount Sinai, I got tangled in the wires and pipes of the pump and was barely able to extract myself and emerge with the pump. I succeeded–but I almost lost my life in the process.

In the early 1970s, with all the incredible diving in the Red Sea, one diving attraction was missing: a shipwreck. We tried for years to find one, and then, one day, a local Bedouin fisherman hinted at a wreck out in the Suez Gulf, beyond our usual expedition area. Our search led to the discovery of the wreck of the SS Dunraven, a British steamship that ran aground in 1876 and sank at the Sha’ab Mahmoud Reef. There is nothing more thrilling than finding a virgin wreck, lying untouched on the seafloor for 100 years.

Over the past half-century, the Sinai has become one of the most sought-after dive destinations in the world, with tens of thousands of divers and hundreds of dive boats. There is stringent conservation policy, first instituted by the Israeli administration in the 1970s and followed by the Egyptian administration. But the significant increase in diving activity and the construction of large hotels and resorts along the shore has affected the quality of diving, with the pelagic fish and sharks much less evident than in the early years of Sinai diving.

The Red Sea region has been plagued by geopolitical and security challenges ever since we started our operations. The 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt ushered in a new era for Sinai diving, leading to continued, though uneven, increases in business. Whenever the region was clouded in conflict, business would drop dramatically. Yet, somehow, the area rebounds; the tourists return, and business flourishes again, at least until the next round of conflict.

I managed to operate in this climate for 25 years, but, ultimately, due to political tensions, it became too risky and challenging to run the type of high-end operation that we had established. I closed my live-aboard business in 1997.

Diving the Red Sea during the pioneering period of exploration was among the very best years of my life. 

Howard Rosenstein’s memoir is available at www.olympusdive.com and Amazon.