There was a time when to go to the Red Sea was to go to Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba. Taba is immediately south of Eilat, and offers the sort of conditions that give warmwater diving its often-unwarranted cissy reputation.

We went there recently to do a regulator comparison test and, with no particularly great expectations, were agreeably surprised to find that it offered the highest-quality coral-reef diving. We needed easily accessible deep water with consistently benign conditions and there was certainly plenty of deep water accessible from the shore, but with a lot more to look at during the long deco-stops needed in the shallows than any of us had imagined.

The Hilton Hotel at Taba has a long beachfront with numerous restaurants and swimming pools, and with lots to do for non-divers. It's close to the border with Israel. In fact it's so close that it was once within Israel, until the day it was agreed to move the border south by a few hundred metres.

Now the jetty of the Aqua-Sport Dive Centre within the Hilton complex marks the limit of Egyptian territory, and woe betide anyone who thinks they might meander northwards equipped with aqualung and fins. The Israeli gunboat is waiting!

Aqua-Sport has been in business over the border in Eilat for 40 years. Many of our readers learned to dive there. If you want to visit Israel temporarily this is no big deal, but it is important to pass through the border accompanied by your passport.

It is also possible to travel aboard Taba Aqua-Sport's diving dayboat to Coral Island in the south, or further to less-often visited dive sites, but for the purposes of our regulator project we stayed within the confines of the Hilton Hotel beach, diving repeatedly at our own pace from the shore. We were there for a week and were never bored. I can recommend it.

I had forgotten how uncannily clear the water here can be. The visibility here is among the best in the world, helped by a clear sky and a bright desert sun.
Taba has been somewhat forgotten by the diving world in recent years, and has lost out to the idea that the further south you go in the Red Sea the better it gets.

The hard and soft corals are in perfect condition. None of the hard corals displays any sign of bleaching, and each individual reef head represents a complete spectrum of Red Sea reef life in these gin-clear conditions. This includes immaculate table corals, often in as little as 4m of water, with lunar cod, butterflyfish and thousands of colourful anthias in attendance, with the many lionfish that prey on them, of course. Taba could claim to be the lionfish capital of the world.

What is also remarkable is that the marine life is so co-operative towards the underwater photographer. The examples we saw did not seem at all frightened by a close-approaching camera.

So apart from a myriad of clichés, what fish did we see on a regular basis? How about giant frogfish, the size of small oven-ready chickens, in various colours and often in pairs? At times there seemed so many of them that they almost became boring!

"Can't you find something less ugly?" I signalled to my buddy.

He must have misunderstood me, and kept pointing out groups of huge stonefish instead, all along our route. They really are appallingly ugly, even for fish. I began to feel that the numerous yellowmouth moray eels, writhing snake-like across the sand to any convenient cover, were in fact quite handsome!

Taba has a shallow reef-top that is covered partly with seagrass and in other places sand, with occasional coral heads. Even swimming over the seagrass can bring surprises. An old abandoned tyre makes a home for a collection of small reef animals such as one eel, one lionfish and a couple of dozen anthias.

You'll meet the odd turtle browsing, too. Swim a couple of hundred metres out to sea and the reef drops away suddenly and steeply. Follow the slope down past clumps of coral, each with its own community of animals. Even at extreme depths, the desert sun shines brightly through.

During the time in deep water during our regulator test we saw schools of very large golden trevally jacks that circled us curiously. Then there were pairs of large sting rays feeding, and multiples of lionfish which were attracted to the artificial caves formed by the huddled pairs of divers. I was kept very busy, hustling them safely away from the test divers, who were trying to concentrate on what they were doing.

Northwards along the coast, in Eilat, is the Dolphin Reef resort. It's a place that rehabilitates dolphins rescued from dolphinarium and circus, and even those retired from military careers. The resort is not now allowed to keep these animals confined so, although they always return for the free hand-out of food that's offered, many of them spend their time cruising the coastline of the Gulf of Aqaba, even as far as Nuweiba.

Although strictly speaking these creatures are not wild, a dolphin encounter while underwater always makes for a special moment. These are big animals, a lot bigger than most sharks, and they are expert breath-hold divers, zooming around under water like mischievous children.

The high point of one dive was a group of three of these bottlenose dolphin pirouetting around us, kissing us on our regulators and biting playfully on our fins for at least five minutes. They then formed up into a tight group like the Marx Brothers, beaming broadly, to peer into the lens port of my camera and give me a great portrait headshot.

If only I had had some film left in my camera. Narked? I was positively furious!