Watch your altitude before and after diving - especially flying. Make sure you have 24 hours break before boarding a plane to reduce your risk of decompression sickness.
The cargo ship, CSCL Hamburg which grounded in a popular diving area in the northern Red Sea has been refloated and towed away.
CSCL Hamburg
The 260m-long CSCL Hamburg ran on to Woodhouse Reef, between the Sinai coast and Tiran Island, on New Year's Eve. There were no injuries, no leakages and no lost deck containers.
Unfortunately, the grounding casued damage to the Woodhouse Reef, destroying some 25m long and 30m wide of coral that fell down the edge of the reef, damaging corals as deep as 45m.
However, the reef and divers appear to have escaped lightly. "A few metres either way and it could have taken out dive boats and killed divers, not to mention causing massive environmental damage all around," John Kean, a Sharm El Sheikh based PADI and TDI diving instructor and author of SS Thistlegorm. "Although that patch of reef may never be the same, we should count ourselves lucky that it was not a huge disaster."
In the short term, more people than before are visiting the site, out of curiosity. But according to Kean, the "finer points of Woodhouse remain untouched and unaffected by the ship's collision".
