Red Sea Wrecks

The Red Sea is a narrow channel littered with ragged reefs. Since coral deposits are made of limestone, when a ship hits a reef it usually spells devastation. Some shipwrecks are visible today, still gripped by the reefs that broke them. Others are forgotten, having plunged to oblivion in depths of two kilometres and beyond.

Sometimes wrecks are hazards in themselves: at Gordon reef in the southern Gulf of Aqaba the Louilla sits where she ran onto a reef in 1981. Close by are drums scattered on the sea floor: the only remanants of an unknown vessel that hit the Louilla, sank and then plumetted off the edge of the drop-off next to the reef.

Others sit as testament to the effects of war: the Red Sea’s most famous wreck, the Thistlegorm, sits off the southern tip of Sinai. When German fighter-bombers spotted her on a reconaissance mission up the Sinai cost, the Thistlegorm was bombed from the air, sending two locomotives flying into the air and settling the wreck in 20m of water. On the other hand the Italian Umbria was travelling to Port Sudan when World War two broke out. Impounded by the British, on hearing news of the impending war the captain of the ship scuttled her. Even today the ship is stacked with its original cargo of explosives and detonators.

At other sites there are cargo boats, tugs, a submarine (sunk as an artificial reef in Israeli waters, see xxx) and the remains of the most famous underwater explorer Jaques Cousteau’s Conshel Two, an underwater habitat built as a prototype for human colonisation of the sea.

Most poignant is the wreck of the Salem Express, a ferry now lying on her starboard side in 30m of water south of Egypt’s Hurghada. On a return crossing of the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, the boat was full of pilgrims returning from Mecca. On December 15th 1991 she struck a reef and went under; hundreds of passengers disappeared with her. Unused lifeboats, suitcases and even duty free packaging still litter the wreck as testament to her tragic fate.