Diving in the Red Sea

During my egypt holiday i wanted to do my advanced PADI course, a natural progression after doing my Open Water course in Thailand in 2002. However, i do not consider myself an 'advanced diver' at all - hell, ive only done 20 dives anyway! But i do consider myself to have bettered my breathing and buoyancy control. We chose a dive school called Camel Dive, at Sharm-el-Sheik. I can now dive to 30 metres, a fact of diving which became all too surreal for me at one point - I had a funny turn underwater at 30m during my first deep dive of the training course whilst doing some skills tests. It seemed to have been triggered by me fretting about touching the corals with my fins. My breathing became erratic which led to a panic attack. I signaled my instructor straight away and we ascended to 20m, and soon i felt normal again and fit to carry on. I and my diving instructor reasoned that i had not drunk enough water, or that nitrogen narcosis was creeping in. For those of you who don't know about scuba, nitrogen narcosis happens when, at depths of +30m, the nitrogen you breathe in your air tank becomes halucinagenic! Cool - Tripping underwater! No, seriously, it was a wierd experience but it didnt put me off doing more dives, although i think i learned more respect. Scuba Diving isn't a game...... The snorkelling just offshore was amazing as well! Did some more dives, including a night dive (pink jellyfish pink jellyfishpink jellyfish....in torchlight lol!) and i did a Peak Performance Buoyancy Dive to finish off my Advanced course. We both opted to do one of our dives on Fish Identification - theres a Global Project going on called Project Aware where divers can join in by sending in their collected data. Sounded good we thought. So i bought a fish slate, and the advanced PADI book - Adventures in Diving Manual. Diving in the Red Sea is a real treat as the visibility is very good, and due to the high salt content, you are naturally more buoyant. There are also a wealth of wrecks there including the SS Thistlegorm. However, parts of it lie at 30m+, so i probably would want to do both the Wreck Diving and Enriched Air courses first. I have not done any diving since Egypt, but i certainly plan on going again sometime. To keep interested, i regularly look at underwater photos from people on Flickr, such as Aquanerds, who last year was voted best Flickr underwater photographer.