Why I Became a Diving Instructor

My family opened Shark Restaurant in 1983, making us one of the fourth families to settle in Dahab. We came from Cairo to this remote paradise where the desert crashed into the sea, where Bedouins lived simply and the reef was still pristine. For decades, I watched my family welcome guests at our table - serving fresh fish, sharing stories, making visitors feel like they had found a home away from home.

Growing Up on the Shore

As a child, Dahab was my playground. I swam before I could walk, or so my mother likes to say. The lagoon was my backyard, the reef my secret garden. I knew which rocks held octopus, which sandy patches attracted rays, which crevices housed the moray eels my friends found terrifying and I found fascinating.

But I did not think of diving as a profession. The restaurant was our family business, and I assumed my life would be lived on land, greeting guests, managing the kitchen, carrying on the Shark Restaurant tradition that had put Dahab on the map for so many travelers.

The Moment Everything Changed

In 2009, a guest at the restaurant changed everything. He was a diving instructor from Germany, and he stayed with us for two weeks. Every evening, he would return from his dives and tell stories at dinner. Not stories of fish or coral - stories of transformation. How a nervous student had overcome his fear of water. How a couple on their anniversary had held hands at twenty meters, surrounded by fish. How a teenager had found confidence underwater that she could not find on land.

I realized something that night: my family had been doing the same thing for decades, but on land. We welcomed strangers and sent them home as friends. We fed their bodies and nourished their spirits. We made people feel safe in a place far from home.

What if I could do that underwater?

The Training Years

Learning to dive was easy. I had been swimming these waters my whole life. The physics, the procedures, the emergency protocols - they came naturally to someone who had grown up reading the sea like a second language.

But becoming an instructor was different. It meant learning to see through other people's eyes. Understanding that the reef I found as familiar as my own living room was, to a first-timer, an alien world full of strange rules and potential dangers. Learning to speak with calm when students panicked. Learning to wait when they needed time. Learning that the best instructors are not the ones who know the most about diving - they are the ones who remember what it felt like to not know anything at all.

The Hospitality of the Deep

In 2011, I certified as a PADI instructor. But I did not leave the restaurant behind. I simply extended the family tradition to a new dimension. The same warmth we showed at the dinner table, I now show beneath the waves. The same patience my mother used with difficult customers, I use with nervous students. The same pride my father took in a perfectly grilled fish, I take in a perfectly executed first dive.

People sometimes ask me which job I love more - the restaurant or the diving. But they are not separate jobs. They are both about the same thing: making people feel welcome in a place that could feel foreign, showing them beauty they might have missed, sending them home with stories they will tell forever.

What I Have Learned

Thirteen years as an instructor has taught me that teaching diving is not really about diving at all. It is about trust. When a student breathes underwater for the first time, they are trusting me with their life. When they descend into blue darkness, they are trusting that I will bring them back to light. When they face their fears - and everyone faces fears underwater - they are trusting that I will stay calm so they can find calm.

This is not so different from what we did at the restaurant. When a family trusted us with their anniversary dinner, or a traveler trusted us to introduce them to Egyptian cuisine, we carried that trust carefully. We honored it.

The Legacy Continues

My family still runs Shark Restaurant. It is still ranked among the best in Dahab. Tourists still flock to taste our grilled fish and seafood specialties. And now, some of those same tourists continue their journey with me - from the table to the reef, from the surface to the deep.

I did not leave the family business. I expanded it. And every time I watch a student take their first breath underwater, eyes wide with the same wonder I felt as a child swimming through my backyard reef, I know I made the right choice.

Dahab is my home. The sea is my home. And sharing both with visitors from around the world - that is my life's work.