1) Listen to and watch your instructor. When your instructor is demonstrating a skill, pay attention. The instructor is demonstrating the skills for your benefit (hopefully they have already mastered the skills themselves).

2) Everything in your course has a reason (even that damn snorkel), even if to begin with you don’t understand what the reason is. Your instructor should explain why you are required to do A, B & C. They are not asking you to do something for the sheer hell of it.

1) May seem an obvious one to start with but it’s amazing how many people don’t – LISTEN TO THE BRIEFING.

 The dive guide isn’t giving a briefing to hear their own voice (although with the length of some guides briefings, you might doubt that), they’re trying to impart to you some of their local knowledge and expertise about the next dive and the potential risks and challenges the site may present to you. You should be listening anyway, but if the guide mentions “possibly very strong currents” you should give them your undivided attention and learn how that can affect your dive and what procedures you should use in those conditions. You should also understand any possible signals the guide will use and a lot of guides will only introduce drift related signals when they make their first briefing for a drift dive.

I’ve met people who dislike dogs (although usually they’ll tell you that it is the dogs that don’t like them), I’ve met people who dislike cats with a passion (they are strange little people and they have my sympathy) but I’ve never met anyone who hates the tortoise. How can you? They’re one of the most inoffensive creatures on the planet. Slow moving, posing a threat to nothing (unless you’re a lettuce and then, whoa, you are in trouble), with a generally contented look upon their countenance; it’s hard not to like a tortoise, let alone harbor any misgivings about them.

Amongst my many diving related books is a copy of “Coral Reef Guide Red Sea” by Ewald Lieske & Robert F. Meyers (published by Collins). This book helps me to identify new sightings, relive memorable encounters and acts as a wish-list, showing me lots of wonderful creatures that I have yet to see, such as the Helmeted Gurnard or the Dragon Sea moth (amongst many others).

It is easy to understand these misconceptions (with the exception of the aesthetic value of the moray, after all beauty is in the eye of the beholder); morays are a snakelike fish (most humans have a fear of snakes or anything that slightly resembles a snake), are often “seen” demonstrating an aggressive posture (constantly flashing their fearsome teeth by opening and closing their mouths) and, thanks to movies such as Pete Yates’ The Deep, have a reputation for liking nothing better than to chow down on an unsuspecting diver.

They look like organic dirigibles of the sea, have a cute smiley face and pose no threat to humans, yet each year these wonderful and diverse fish are subjected to abuse by divers, snorklers and swimmers alike. At the best, they are caught and handled until they inflate themselves in to an almost spherical shape and, at the worst, they are caught, cleaned, dried and then inflated to make “attractive and unusual” lamp shades which, were they to know their ultimate fate would be as a talking point on someone’s coffee table, would probably provided them with little comfort.

What are we talking about? Puffer fish and porcupine fish of course.

Shark Reef is the Red Sea’s most famous and most popular dive site. It is easy to understand why, especially if you have dived there in the summer, with its rich and varied corals, and abundance of reef & pelagic fish.

The hammerhead sharks are a group of sharks in the family Sphyrnidae, so named for the unusual and distinctive structure of their heads, which are flattened and laterally extended into a “hammer” shape called a “cephalofoil”. Most hammerhead species are placed in the genus Sphyrna; some authorities place the winghead shark in its own genus, Eusphyra. Many, not necessarily mutually exclusive, functions have been proposed for the cephalofoil, including sensory reception, maneuvering, and prey manipulation.

Stonefish (Synanceja verrucosa)

Length: up to 0.4 mDistribution: Pacific and Indian Ocean, ranging from the Red Sea to Great Barrier Reef

Synanceja verrucosa is a fish species, sometimes lethal to humans, which is known as the reef stonefish or simply stonefish. They are carnivorous ray-finned fish with venomous spines that lives on reef bottoms, camouflaged as a rock. They are the most venomous known fish in the world.