(03-12-09) The tragic disappearance of two fellow divers, Maria Lourdes and Israel, stirred again an issue that has been questioned since a lot of time: the precarious security of many of the yachts that offer life aboard in the Red Sea, where thousands of divers go onboard every year.

    Since a decade ago, practically the whole fleet of tourism boats that ply the waters of the Red Sea, with lots of tourists and divers, sail under Egyptian flag (by decree since 1998) and are built in shipyards in the beaches of Alexandria, 250 km. far from Cairo.

    Talking about the shipyards of Alexandria is to describe an immense line of beach where the construction companies follow one another in an ordered chaos and it is not easy to delimit. It is impossible to know where one finishes and other starts, but the shipyards settled there since ancient times are familiar business that have passed from generation to generation and have become “the craft” into a prosper industry, although low quality.

    This beach- shipyard was colonized at the beginning of the century by the first craftsmen, who built fishing barged about five meters long with exotic woods, such as sapeli, brought from West Africa.

    Now, after passing the business from grandparents to parents and from them to their children, families and hired workers, not more than twenty per “shipyard”, strive to design and build very quickly the maximum amount of “pleasure yachts”. The bigger, the better.

    The soaring demand of these boats for tourism in the Red Sea, plus the total lack of security regulations, that even remotely fulfils European standards, has led to a situation of absolute apathy that is beginning to take victims dramatically.

CRAFT SHIPS AT THE SHORE OF THE SEA

    Mohamed Jalal Sabri has the qualities of a good craftsman. He has been all his life in Alexandria building fishing boats and pleasure craft. He learned and inherited it from his grandfather and father. He now leads a team of 18 people, all working carpenters. They are cousins, brothers, uncles and hired people, who meet each day along the Mediterranean.

    The shipyard occupies its corresponding rectangle of beach and they work outdoors on the sand. There are about a twenty half-finished boats, at least seven of them are luxury yachts. There is one huge, about 20 meters long that in a month will be able to sail the seas... Or it is what the owner requires, a man who has bought it on the plane and has already paid the bill, which is less than half the price it would cost at a “cheap” European shipyard.

    Here, although it can be seen as a strange thing, everything goes very fast and production costs are very low. Mohamed says he needs about seven months of work to make ready a yacht of 16 meters. Although, as it is the case of the yacht of 20 meters he is finishing, the owner is in a hurry and it has to be finished in just four months…

    The price of a copy of this type (16m) is about 900,000 Egyptian pounds (100,000 euros), “a quarter of what it costs in Europe,” said Jalal. “The material we use is good wood; wood types we use are Iroko, Teak, Bolondo... The engines are also of good quality, Japanese and Americans.”

    Next to the outdoor yard there are small huts that are used like workshops. Inside one of them – home besides some poultry- there are tens of patterns that serve as guides to make pieces of ships and big tools. They are community booths that are shared between yards, so this way production costs are cheaper.

    Furthermore, there are no secrets. Our host says that “everything is invented. Here there are not two boats alike. Each one is different on the same basis and structure. Every customer wants something different in distribution, height, aspect ... And regardinig qualities it is the same. There is everything”.

THEY SKIMP ON WOOD QUALITY, MACHINES…

    It is time to ask him about the “unfair competition”, those who sell low-quality boats that harm the prestige of other neighbour yards. He says that “the problem is when there is low demand and little profit margin. They are pirates, they use low quality wood, skimp on quality machinery, valves and engines ... For example, in a bilge pump they can save up to 20 euros per unit according to quality. Not to mention metal materials used for riveting and fastening, which corrode in this sea in a couple of years.”

    In the Red Sea there are boats fifteen years old, crowded with passengers, sailing as nothing happened. In theory, the useful life of these vessels is four years and the secret of their depreciation and profit is for the owners that it “never stops”. This causes constant rotations of crews that have little or no experience in handling the boats full of tourists. There it is almost always high season.

    To increase to a thousand the reasons to be shipwrecked in the Red Sea, the abundance of facilities that “blindly”, on the catalogue, offer seats on these “fantastic yachts to make life aboard” to divers, and create situations like the Coral Princess one, in which even the dive master was another inexperienced villager who spoke little English and nothing of another not Arabic language.

    There is a character in this story that plays a key role in passenger safety. He works almost in darkness and gets a tasty percentage of money in each vouyage, and is beyond good and evil when a calamity or any type of incidence occurs. This is the “independent”, the person who comes in contact with the owners of the ships in the shipyards and intermediate with agencies, clubs, organizations, etc… worldwide.

THE BEST GUARANTEE, TRAVEL WITH THE AGENT

    It is here where there we have to make clear division in terms of safety, guarantee and quality of the trip to the Red Sea. On the one hand, the large and small agencies, including diving clubs that have their own staff involved in the trip, from the beginning to the end. The fact that they travel with you is the only guarantee that we are not going to embark on a junk boat.

    They are also trusted most clubs run by foreigners in the Red Sea itself, which sell on site dive boats places that they have under control and ensure European standards of safety and comfort.

    On the other hand, those who “capture” blindly on the catalogue the excellences of any Coral X ship, referred to by old photos, mails, beautiful sites and word of mouth… So things happen ...: with all good will, the Agency X from Andalusia contacts diving clubs offering the Red Sea “at crisis prices”. A Club from Valencia is interested, “all look too good, the pictures of the ship are great and they are people we can trust” and the destination is already underway…

OVERCROWDING, A PROBLEM FOR EVERYBODY

    We have since the early nineties diving in the Red Sea. More than fifteen visits in which we have seen grow the offer of diving, catering, mode of life on board... until reach the overcrowding. I see with horror pictures up to ten ships anchored, all in one, with their passengers divers in the water. If we calculate 14 per boat, it is the beautiful figure of 140 divers kicking both the same reef ... Crazy.

    But the worst thing of all is that everything is mistaken. Money before rationality. There, economic interests have become sport diving into a business enemy of the Red Sea, its nature and even to human beings. There is not enough control over anything, not for human safety or for the reefs and the species that inhabit them.

    There is not a week without news of divers lost in that water lost. Most of the times they are “inattention” by skippers, who left to their divers by the way and that, fortunately, most of the times are rescued. But the tragedy of divers from Valencia exceeds the irresponsibility and should be the starting point of a campaign to somehow get the regulation of underwater activities in that country.

    But, who has to do it? The problem is that it generates an immense wealth for the Egyptian government that it does not want to miss. Each visitor is a source of revenue for the State and it will not scare the customers rationing the supply of ships. That they are in the State that they are does not matter. If anything happens, insurance companies have been contracted...

Text: Jorge Keller - Deep Blue Video