Dennis Bakhuis

Dive site · sea · Safaga and Soma Bay

🇪🇬 Abu el Kefan

Safaga, Red Sea, Egypt

A 650-metre blade of reef standing alone in open water with walls falling hundreds of metres, an hour and a half out of Safaga and almost always in current.

Dives here
1
Deepest
41.7 m
Water
salt
First · last
2009
Also known as
Abu Kafan · Abu Qifan

Revision 1 · changed 10 Oct 2026

History
  1. r1 10 Oct 2026 Imported from the personal log · Dennis Bakhuis

Site data © divelog-sites contributors (ODbL), descriptions and maps CC BY-SA 4.0 · 53edcaf

1 map

North plateau 10-30 mSouth plateau 10-30 mAbu KafanEast wall, 60 m+West wall, 60 m+Drift, plateau to plateau · 918 mCoral block↓20 mCoral block↓25 mErg joined to the reef at 18 m↓18 mCurrent, mostly from the northN50 m
  • Hazard
  • Pinnacle / rock
  • Dive path
  • Wall / drop-off
  • Shallows
  • Coral / reef
  • Depth
Site map · 3 objects · 1 path · max 25 m

Abu Kafan (Abu el Kefan), a narrow reef about 650 m long NNW-SSE standing alone in open water, with near-vertical walls on both long sides dropping far past 60 m and a plateau at 10-30 m off each end: the northern one with two coral blocks down its middle, the southern one with the erg joined to the reef at about 18 m. The plateaus and blocks are placed from dive-centre descriptions (4eversea, divers-guide.com), so their extent is approximate; the drift line is the usual plateau-to-plateau drift with the northerly current, not a recorded track.

Map © divelog-sites contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0 · 53edcaf

Abu el Kefan is a narrow reef about 650 m long rising out of deep water south-east of Safaga, 75 to 100 minutes out by boat. Its sides are near-vertical and drop hundreds of metres. At each end the reef throws out a plateau at 10–30 m, and those plateaus are the dive: soft coral, large gorgonians and black coral, with the current running across them.

It is an exposed site and a serious one — there is nothing to hide behind, the current dictates the plan, and the boat has to come and get you. Dived 3 December 2009 to 41.7 m, the deepest Egyptian dive in the log.

Dived here with

Niels

Nearby sites

1 dive at Abu el Kefan

  1. 3 Dec 2009 with Niels boattraining date3 Dec 2009 depth41.7 m time43 min water—

Sources

  • First-hand observation (Dennis Bakhuis)