Neudribrachs and Giant Burgers

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Burgers come in a fairly standard shape and I don’t know about you but when I see a big ‘un my stomach groans in protest. Now unless you’ve had THE Pirate Bar burger you ain’t seen nothing. This thing is MASSIVE! No joke at a guesstimate I would place her at about 15cm in diameter putting her at numero uno for mahussive beasts of a burger. I witnessed (but did not try!) this extraordinary treat last week while having dinner with some guests. Afterwards we decided to venture to Camel Bar. If you’ve ever been to Sharm you would have heard about Camel. According to the intructors it used to be this great diver hangout, the kind with peanuts covering the floor, dingy lightening and of course footie but alas that is long gone! With cocktail jugs costing in the region of 180-260 LE (about 20 to 30 quid) it’s a shame that I went there having already consumed too much of the strong stuff. Lets just say our drinks bill after a few hours was 600 LE, I can live on that for 4 days!! But it was great fun 😊 Camel is now very much a top class cocktail/shisha bar and I felt positively under-dressed in my sea encrusted boardies and tank top!

Now to move onto the good stuff, the Sea! After seeing the baby turtle my mind has gone into over drive and every time I look into the blue I see dark figures gliding in the water. Yesterday while diving Tower with Kev we were swimming along nice and slow when I looked into the blue and saw a DOLPHIN! ‘HELL YEAH’ I thought. So I preceded to race up to him and grab his fin in excitement. He turned around to see what was wrong and I pointed at the gliding silver creature. At the exact time Kev turned around the damn silver thing turned around it was a very ordinary fish. He was not impressed: P

One of the great things about doing a Divemaster is you get to dive A LOT and visit virtually every site (well this is the case with Oonas!) So I am becoming very acquainted with the great Ras Mohammod National Park and Tiran. If you dive and have never visited the Red Sea DO IT! Come NOW! Its beautiful. I did my Open Water and Advanced in Malta and though renowned for its amazing wrecks the fish aren’t in abundance. After 4 or 5 dives there I could name most of the fish. Here I see different ones EVERY dive! There are these great little orange fish with purple eyes called Anthias and they are crazy little creatures. They spend all day long swimming into the current with there mighty fins. And apparently if there’s no current they swim up so they can then swim forcefully down! Nutters.

The other day Kev and I took a Canadian guy called Ed for a shore dive off Sonesta beach. We were about 18 metres when Kev started getting mega excited about what looked like two rocks and a undulating pink thing. So of course I started studying the pink thing (realised it to be coral) and was like ‘yeah..cool?!’. But he was really animated giving the O.K sign vigoursly and then the neudibrach signal…ok so these lumpy rock things are a sea slug? But no, there not just any sea slug there were Blue Edged Glosodoris and they were mating?! So after a quick surface intveral and some lunch we jumped back in (with Ann another instructor accompanying us) this time with cameras. Kev and Ann have SUPER powers for spotting aquatic life and no only did we find the BEG’s again but FIVE other types of neudibrachs! Including one that wasn’t in any of the Red Sea books (we looked when we got back)…mmm… so out came THE Neudibrach book and I flicked through every page until VOILA! I’ve found it! I yelled joyfully until Kev came over and pointed to the writing ‘Yeah….. you’ve found an Indonesian one…well done *Sarcastic face*’ ahhhh shite….maybe not :P ‘Maybe it wanted a holiday!’ I retorted convinced that the Neudibrach HAD to be this Thai one. So up went the photo on some Neudibrach identifying website and MWAHAHAHA! It was identified as the Thai one! *Insanely gleeful face*!

So the moral of this story is Neudibrachs apparently like travelling as much as we do!

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