Some say that the waters of the Red Sea off Saudi Arabia are the most beautiful in the world. This last weekend was a chilly eighty degrees Fahrenheit, (hey you guys back home in Puget Sound, eat your hearts out) and the wind blew the water up a bit, and spoiled the visibility; we could only see clearly for fifteen or twenty feet. Even so, we saw wildlife that just doesnąt happen in our Northwestern USA waters. I logged pufferfish with little Disney masks, a school of about fifteen Unicorn Fish and a Blue Spotted Ray on that particular dive. Lionfish and Parrotfish are so common that we no longer ogle them very hard. Sponges and soft and hard corals also abound. Diving off the coast here at Jeddah is relatively simple, and the coral reef is a walk from the beach, then a drop to 80 to 100 feet of live coral wall. If you take a boat an hour or two off the coast to the less accessible and therefore less heavily dived reefs, the corals and fishes are even more spectacular. The photo collections featured on this page are the work of several excellent underwater photographers living in Jeddah. I hope they will give you a hint of how awe-inspiring it is to explore the incredible Red Sea. Catch up with the latest news and pictures on Red Sea diving at: www.saudidiving.com Bob Hedberg magister@zajil.net Diving Arabia since 1990

Chuck Zoch's Underwater Photography Jeff Buchanan's Underwater Photography