White Knight

Overview

White Knight is a dramatic canyon-and-wall dive set in a wide bay just north of Shark Bay on the local reef line north of Sharm El Sheikh. Its signature is a deep sandy canyon slicing through the reef, flanked by hard-coral walls, swim-throughs and small offshoot caves, with an eel garden out on the sand and a year-round habit of trapping plankton that occasionally pulls in feeding mantas. It is a rewarding boat dive with real topography, run as an easy drift, and a longtime favourite for divers who like canyons and swim-throughs without leaving the comfort of town.

The Dive

The centrepiece is the canyon, which runs from around 5m down to about 50m. You can drop into its mouth from the sandy plateau at roughly 8m, or slip in through a small swim-through, then follow it down — most divers exit the canyon around 28m, with swim-throughs at about 10m and 35m linking it back to the main reef. Set a sensible recreational floor near 30m and treat the deepest reaches as scenery rather than a target. Outside the reef a sandy ledge forms around 12m beyond which a wall drops away, and the dive typically drifts the wall and reef, dipping into the canyon and its passages along the way. A separate offshoot cave at around 18m can be explored, but only by divers properly qualified and equipped with lights and lines.

Current is generally mild to moderate and the dive runs as a relaxed drift, making White Knight approachable for Advanced Open Water divers comfortable with mild current and swim-throughs; the deeper cave is for trained cave or cavern divers only.

Marine Life

The canyon walls are coated in hard coral, and the small reef pinnacles host anemones with resident clownfish, plus nudibranchs and pipefish for the macro-minded. About 100m north of the canyon, between 8m and 15m, lies a garden eel colony stippling the sand. The real wild card is the bay's plankton trap: through the year it can draw mantas in to graze the surface water, alongside the usual reef cast of morays, lionfish, groupers and schooling reef fish along the wall.

Good to Know

Sharm dives year-round, most comfortably April to November, with water from around 22°C in winter to 28°C in summer; visibility is typically a clear 20m or better. White Knight sits among the northern local sites about 1km north of Shark Bay and is easily reached by day boat, run as a gentle drift with the option to explore its canyon and swim-throughs. Save the deeper offshoot cave for cave-qualified divers, and keep an eye on the open water for grazing mantas when the plankton is in.