Farasan Banks & Al Lith

There is no infrastructure here to lean on. A trip means a chartered boat, long transits between reef groups and days without sighting another dive vessel, and because many of these reefs carry no moorings and no settled site names, the crew scouts from the tender and drops divers live off the back. Briefings are short on detail for the plain reason that nobody has dived the spot often enough to have any. Plans move with the wind, and the itinerary is a direction of travel rather than a schedule.

The banks are shallow ground broken by reef after reef, and the diving splits into two kinds of day. Inside, among the islands, the water is calm and coral grows in gardens down sheltered slopes, easy dives where the point is how intact the structure looks. On the seaward edges the reefs fall away properly and pick up current, and those dives are spent watching the open water off the wall. Southern Red Sea water runs warmer and greener than the north, so expect shorter sightlines and thinner exposure suits than an Egyptian trip.

Fish here often hold their ground rather than fading off, which is what most divers notice first, though it varies reef to reef: the Farasan Islands have carried protected status since the 1990s, while artisanal fishing still works parts of the banks. Because so few divers pass through, there is also no received wisdom about which reefs are the good ones, and a week can turn up a wall nobody aboard has seen before.

The spring whale shark aggregation is why most people book, and it helps to know what it is. The animals feed near the surface, so the best of it happens shallow and often on a breath rather than on scuba, and it runs to a season rather than a date, which means a trip can miss it. Otherwise the reefs carry the week on their own. It suits self-sufficient divers happy to trade famous sites and easy logistics for reefs almost nobody has been on, and it makes a poor first liveaboard.