Description
Abu Talha is a northerly site accessed by jeep from Dahab. Entry is slippery on a sandy bottom and fins must be done before the edge of the reef table as there are many holes of various depths.
It is advisable that divers do not descend until over the shallow saddle unless perfect neutral buoyancy can be achieved in shallow water. Once out of the reef table the diver will find a beautiful coral shafted like an amphitheatre.
The hard coral drops to 50m in the centre and to the left at 25m a sink hole can be found.
Deeper holes also exist, this being located at the far end of the ‘little canyon’, starting at Abu Helal making this site also perfect for technical divers.
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Other Info
Hidden Canyon which is a system of canyons located in Abu Talha and Abu Helal area. In January 2009 Andrey Chistyakov and his Diving Team initiated a project aiming to map Hidden Canyon’s area.
Hidden Canyon is a system of canyons and is also known as “Small Canyon” regarding the small crack in its’ southern part which was discovered many years ago first at depth of 30 meters. Anyway further it becomes deeper and bigger and goes to the north turning from the small crack to the about 1 kilometer long canyon formation.
Several teams were exploring the area like Tom Steiner (TDI IT) who found TJ Canyon, Paskal Bernabe and Sebastian Kister found cavern in northern part of the TJ Canyon. Anrey Chistiakov started the exploration of the canyons in 2005. With his student Olga Generozova they found a deep cavern in southern part of the Hidden Canyon.In September 2008 Andrey Chistiakov and Dmitriy Podolskiy who already took part in projects of Andrey and completed several deep trimix programs with Andrey, explored the northern part of the canyon system with scooters. They found out that TJ canyon and northern cracks are the parts of a single canyon system - the Hidden Canyon. During a series of deep dives Andrey Chistiakov and Anna Kozlova later approved that idea. All dives were conducted with DPVs (SS and Salvo) that enabled explorations of the remote areas.