Swimming with Dugongs at Abu Dabbab: Rules, Etiquette and Real Odds

If you take one thing from this guide, take these. Dugongs are protected, easily stressed, and a bad encounter can push an animal off its feeding ground for the rest of the day.

None of this is difficult. It is mostly about staying still and letting the animal get on with eating.

Dugongs are marine mammals, not fish, and their nearest living relatives are elephants rather than seals or dolphins. Locally they are called sea cows, which is a fair description of how they behave: they graze seagrass, slowly, for most of the day.

An adult reaches around three metres and 400 kilograms. They are placid, slow-moving and completely harmless — they have no interest in you whatsoever, which is exactly why disturbing one is so easy and so avoidable.

They surface to breathe every few minutes and return to the seagrass. That rhythm is the thing to protect. An animal that has to keep interrupting its feeding to avoid swimmers is an animal burning energy it needs.

Dugongs are listed as vulnerable to extinction by the IUCN, and the Red Sea population is small and thinly spread. This is not a common animal having a quiet day. Individual dugongs matter to the population in a way that individual reef fish do not.

They are also slow to recover. Females produce a single calf after a long gestation, and only every few years. A population that loses animals does not bounce back quickly.

Their food is the other pressure. Dugongs depend entirely on seagrass meadows, and seagrass is damaged by boat anchors, coastal development and sediment. Protecting the meadow at Abu Dabbab is as important as protecting the animals in it — which is why boats moor carefully and why you should never stand on or kick through the seagrass.

Abu Dabbab bay, around 30 minutes north of Marsa Alam by road, is the best-known dugong site on this stretch of coast and the reason the trip exists. Its shallow seagrass meadow is prime feeding ground.

The bay is protected, and access is managed. You enter from the beach into shallow water that shelves gradually, which makes it an easy snorkel — no boat crossing, no deep entry, and on a normal day very little current.

The same meadow supports resident green turtles, which is genuinely useful to know when you set expectations. Turtles graze the same seagrass and are seen on most trips. The dugong is the rarer prize on the same day out.

We would rather you booked with accurate expectations than felt misled afterwards, so here it is plainly.

Turtles: very likely. Abu Dabbab has resident green turtles feeding in the seagrass daily. On a normal day most guests see at least one, often close and unhurried while it grazes. This is the dependable part of the trip.

Dugongs: genuinely uncommon. They are solitary, shy and few in number. A sighting is a real stroke of luck, not a scheduled item on the itinerary. Anyone advertising a guaranteed dugong encounter is either misleading you or planning to harass an animal to produce one.

Our advice is simple: book Abu Dabbab for the turtles and the calm, easy water. Treat a dugong as a bonus. That way the day is a good one either way — which, on the numbers, is how it usually goes.

The moment a dugong appears, the temptation is to swim toward it. Do the opposite.

Stop and float. Stay where you are, stay at the surface, and let the animal continue on its own line. A dugong that does not feel pursued will often carry on feeding a few metres from you for several minutes — far better than a brief glimpse of one leaving.

Never get between it and open water, and never between it and the surface. It has to breathe. Blocking that path is the single most stressful thing a group of snorkelers can do, and it is what usually ends an encounter.

Do not dive down on it. Freediving over a feeding dugong pushes it off the meadow. Watch from the surface.

Keep the group spread out and behind it. A semicircle of people closing in reads as a predator to any animal. Guides will position the group deliberately — follow them.

Do not use flash. It startles the animal and produces poor photographs anyway in shallow, bright water.

Useful to recognise, because most people who disturb wildlife do not realise they are doing it.

A relaxed dugong grazes with its head down, moves slowly and surfaces on a regular rhythm. A stressed one stops feeding, lifts its head, changes direction abruptly, or surfaces more frequently and briefly.

If you see any of that, the group is too close. Back away and give it room. It may well settle and resume — and if it does, you will get a far better encounter than by following it.

The same applies to turtles. A turtle that repeatedly aborts its trip to the surface because people are above it is being harmed, quietly, even though nothing dramatic appears to be happening.

It is easy to read all this as restriction. It is closer to the opposite.

Sites that are managed well keep their animals. Abu Dabbab still has dugongs and resident turtles because the bay is protected and the meadow is intact. Places that let visitors chase and crowd marine life lose it — the animals move on, and the operators are left selling a trip to an empty bay.

The practical version: calm groups see more. Every guide will tell you the same thing. The guests who float quietly and wait get long, close encounters. The ones who swim hard at everything get thirty seconds of a retreating animal.

If your guide calls people back or cuts an approach short, that is not them being cautious for its own sake. It is the reason there will still be something to see next season.