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There were few Egyptians involved in the Egyptian diving industry in 1992, which was the year when I decided to widen my experience with a six-month stint as a dive-guide on a Red Sea liveaboard.
The industry had been left in the hands of some battle-hardened Israelis and a few assorted Europeans, foolhardy enough to take their chances with Egyptian bureaucracy, hard climatic conditions and a decidedly third-world supply chain.
I joined the British-owned and run Lady Jenny V and set off from Sharm el Sheikh on a voyage that would see us dive the length of the Red Sea, from Egypt and the Sudan in the north to Eritrea, Yemen and Djibouti in the far south.
Despite the hardships and the political difficulties encountered in running such a vessel, both passengers and crew had some of the greatest diving experiences of our lives.
In fact, we had decided by the end of that summer that the more familiar northern Red Sea had little left to offer.
Shimshon Machiah ran a converted Fleetwood trawler he called the Sun Boat. An Israeli, he ran mainly fishing charters but took occasional divers from what was a fledgling diving community. He took his anglers to a site in Sha'ab Ali that he had been shown by Bedouin fishermen, where he knew a WW2 wreck lay.
He told me about it in Sharm el Sheikh. He said he'd been diving and fishing around it for 10 years. It seemed like a fisherman's tale to me. Still bursting with exciting stories from my recent southern odyssey, I was none too interested.
From Sharm I went to Eilat, where I managed to flood a new and incredibly expensive Nikonos RS camera. I headed back to the UK, feeling disenchanted with underwater photography.
Back in my lounge in St Albans, I browsed through Jacques Cousteau's book The Living Sea. It retold his Red Sea adventures in the 1950s, and I found myself interested in his Conshelf 2 experiment, which he had set up at Sha'b Rumi in the Sudan, where we had recently spent a month.
There was also a chapter entitled The Thistlegorm, which recounted dives on a WW2 wreck stuffed to the gunwales with motorbikes, trucks and other assorted war supplies. Cousteau told of how he stumbled across the wreck while looking out from the underwater observation chamber of his vessel the Calypso (despite the fact that the masts of the wreck would have been breaking the surface at that time).
David Wright, a UK-based diving-holiday operator, had formerly been the dive guide on another vessel based out of Sharm.
Co-incidentally, at the same time as me he had been reading an old copy of National Geographic, which contained a story about the Thistlegorm and a "truckfish".
Cousteau, the great story-teller, had recalled meeting a Napoleon wrasse as big as a truck on the wreck. David had heard from me about Shimshon's wreck story, put two and two together and phoned me in excitement.
We set off back to Sharm immediately and embarked on a charter trip aboard another Israeli-operated boat, the Poolster, captained by a likeable youth called Ronan assisted by his mother, Shula. The boat had already been chartered by a group of British divers
led by the late Gaenor Power.
Ronan told us that he knew the wreck well, but we had not allowed for Israeli pride. He didn't actually know where it was.
So I obtained a GPS position from a friend, Mike Archer, who was then captain of the Lady Jenny V. He had evidently been shown the position by Shimshon, but in those days GPS was in its infancy, and so were GPS receivers.
We managed to persuade Gaenor's group that they wanted to dive this new wreck, but their patience started to wear thin as it became obvious that we were not sure exactly where it was.
It didn't help that the local brigadier in charge of the military in Sharm got wind of the wreck. Hearing that it was full of armaments, he placed a blanket ban on anyone diving it.
I didn't really see that as a problem.
I had just dived the length of the Red Sea without permission from anyone, and had got used to the sound of Kalashnikov rifles being discharged in my direction. I knew that it was used only as an attention-grabbing device!
Without a precise and proper position for the wreck, we decided to drag for it with a small anchor on the end of a long line. Eventually we struck, but not before the other passengers had started to sigh with impatience and complain that we were ruining their holiday.
David and I were first in. It was amazing, not only because it was such a big wreck, not only because of what it contained in the way of cargo, but for the marine life around it.
It was smothered from stem to stern in colourful soft corals. The stern was home to literally hundreds of Red Sea groupers. A huge school of barracuda hung motionless over it in the current. Blacktip reef sharks skulked around the sandy seabed.
The cargo was more or less intact. Apart from a couple of bikes that had evidently been lifted to the surface by the Cousteau team and then simply tossed back, everything was ship-shape and in order. Row on row of motorbikes were stacked upon truck after truck.
Their saddles had rotted but their fuel tanks were intact and their toolkits sat where they were carried, under their seats. There was little of that wanton destruction seen today, with truck windshields broken, steering wheels and wipers missing.
Valve-radios were piled high. The utensils in the galley were as they had been left when they were first immersed. I had just returned from diving the Umbria in Port Sudan and numerous Victorian steamships wrecked in the Yemen, but this was the best wreck I had ever dived.
Our first dive on the Thistlegorm coming to an end, David and I ascended the Poolster's line. I was running low on air, and at about 8m my regulator ceased to function. I signalled to David but he seemed to freeze, eyes wide.
I took his octopus from him, cursing to myself, only to find that he had run out at exactly the same moment.
As luck would have it, the other divers from Poolster saw us and entered the water. They came streaming down past us.
We tried to flag one down but the sight of the wreck was too much and no one was inclined to stop.
So our first dive on the Thistlegorm ended with a rather quick ascent over the last few metres. Luckily we got away with it, and made another 10 dives over three days.
I would have stayed there all week, but the other divers aboard wanted to see what else the Red Sea had to offer. They had no idea what a privilege it had been to dive such a wreck in those early days of its rediscovery.
As David and I hung out for an extended deco-stop on our final dive, another dive boat, this time from Hurghada, arrived on the scene. We witnessed 20 divers descend to the wreck, and listened saddened to the noise of 20 divers setting to work with chisel and lumphammer, in the quest for souvenirs.
We watched from above as a diver hammered the end off one of the steel boxes that were piled high in the area devastated by the bomb that sank the ship.
We couldn't see the look on his face when he discovered that he'd been hammering at the percussion end of four large shells.
That box with its shells has been moved a few times since but it lies nearby to this day, with the shell ends still exposed.
DIVER published my article about the Thistlegorm in May 1993, including an artist's impression by Rico.
It kick-started an industry that has spawned a BBC television documentary and endless books, videos and DVDs, and made the Thistlegorm probably the most famous and regularly dived wreck in the world.
By the following May, the wreck was more or less in the state in which you see it today. The soft corals and much of the more dramatic pelagic life has now gone but it's still a fantastic dive.
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A 25lb gun and 303 rifles on the Thistlegorm
David Wright with Ronan, captain of the Poolster.
The Thistlegorm as depicted by illustrator Rico for DIVER
join the queue to see the Thistlegorm
the four shells that nearly cost a lumphammer- wielding diver dearly
the 1993 issue of DIVER carriedJohn Bantin's story
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