Red Sea, Egypt. Forty Minutes Above Seven Thousand Years.

This edition opens the second phase of the tour. Lobster Bob is in the Red Sea, Egypt, on the eastern coast of the Sinai Peninsula. The track is Sea. The type is Wildlife. The vehicle is Nellie PZ 1953 N, the boat Lobster Bob co-owns with Cpt. JT Peg of Penzance. She has crossed the Red Sea more than once. Each time without complaint. Lobster Bob has not yet been allowed to take credit for any of those crossings. Nellie does not require him to.

The Red Sea is salt water bounded by desert on both sides. The reef systems beneath it predate the Pyramids of Giza by several thousand years. Roughly twelve hundred species of fish live in the water between Africa and Asia. Some of them live nowhere else on Earth.

What follows is the postcard from below the surface.

Hola Mijo! Lobster Bob here...

We had come down on Nellie. PZ 1953 N she has crossed the Red Sea three times. None of those crossings required my input. She made that clear by not asking.

I lowered myself off her side at first light. The water in the Red Sea was warmer than the air above it. That has not always been true in places I have swum. It was true here.

The first thing I saw was not a fish. It was a wall. The reef started at four metres down and went straight to the seabed. I could not see the bottom. Visibility at Sharm el-Sheikh that morning gave me thirty metres of clear water. The wall used all of it.

I floated. The coral went on.

Two clownfish moved through their anemone without registering me. A grouper sat in a recess in the rock. He looked at me. He was not impressed.

The reef builders themselves are not animals you would notice. The polyps are a few millimetres across. Each one is doing one job. Build a small chalk house. Photosynthesise with the algae living inside it. Repeat. They have been doing this on this reef for seven thousand years. I was there for forty minutes. It tolerated my presence without complaint.

The failure was small. I tried to follow the wall south. The current was going north. I did not consult the current. The current did not consult me. I drifted three hundred metres in the wrong direction before I admitted what had happened. Cpt. JT Peg watched from Nellie. He logged it.

I have made larger mistakes that I have explained at greater length. This one I do not explain.

The Red Sea sits between two continents and two deserts. The Sinai Peninsula on one side. The Saudi Arabian coast on the other. Both sides are sand and rock and very little else. Twelve hundred species of fish live in the water between them. Some of them live nowhere else.

This is the school-yard fact. A child can repeat it at a dinner table tonight. The reef has been growing here for seven thousand years. Egypt has had three major religions and dozens of dynasties in that time. The reef has noticed none of them. It is older than every empire that has ever owned the coastline. It will outlast the next ones too.

When I climbed back onto Nellie, JT was at the helm. He had been watching. He did not need to say anything. I did not need to explain.

I made tea. I drank it on deck while the sun came up properly. The coral, which had not been informed about any of this, continued doing what it had been doing for seven thousand years.

Nellie crossed back to Hurghada at her own pace. PZ 1953 N has handled worse water than this on a calm morning. She did not require my opinion on the matter.

I gave it anyway. She ignored it.

The reef did not care.