Hi Jai Bar -
I just took Uwe's statement: "[dive centres that are] okay with photographers diving solo" to mean solo diving, as in not with anybody else in the water. It's very rare that this is allowed in Sharm.
However - you raise a good point about the solo traveller and I would say that I don't recall any reputable dive centre in Sharm charging extra for solo travellers - the prices are fixed, and there is no "haggling" over the cost, although some discounts may apply for - for example - pre-booked packages, repeat customers, armed forces personnel, fellow instructors and Egyptian nationals. The only problem the solo traveller faces in terms of expenditure is with the hotels, who invariably put a "singles supplement" on the rooms, but this is mostly out of the hands of the dive centres.
I can guarantee this is the case - especially with the big name centres - partly because back in the day before I became an instructor, I was always travelling solo, and also because when I worked in Sharm, I spent a lot of time behind the counter and in the back office, involved with operations and planning, so I'm quite intimately familiar with the business side of things. Also I managed a dive centre in Indonesia... not saying that it doesn't happen in some places, but definitely not in any centre I would recommend.
With the independent diving thing: Part of this is to do with local regulation and partly due to the environment.I don't know if you've been to Sharm but the reefs in Tiran, and some places in Ras Mohamed, especially Shark and Yolanda, are prone to some very powerful currents that can, if you don't know where you're going, push you off the reef very rapidly. It happens from time to time that divers do not pay attention to their guides and get caught in the current and blown off into some very heavy swell - especially in Tiran - but at least with a guide in the water, we know where they were and where they are likely to be when they surface. Also, the CDWS made the senior instructor on the boat solely responsible for that boat. Not the captain, not the dive centre manager - the lead guide (as in, me!). Any accident would therefore potentially result in our prosecution, whether we were at fault or not.
As I say - generally speaking we wouldn't allow anybody to dive independently unless we knew them very well - some of our customers were highly experienced and had been visiting 2 or 3 times per year for 20 years. In this case we would allow them to maybe trail behind the group semi-independently, and allow them to surface unsupervised, but for first time divers, regardless of experience, never. The house reefs and some of what we call the "local sites" are virtually free of current, simple to navigate (lots of straight, sloping reefs) and easy to bail out of in an emergency. In this case we would allow some divers to buddy up and dive without a guide. The house reefs were marked with ropes and buoys so as long as people stuck to an easy-to navigate area, they could surface anywhere and easily swim back to the shore. Diving from the boat we required the divers to be "known" to us, and some divers who might have been allowed to dive the house reef independently were required to be guided from the boat. Most people where quite happy with having a guide - after all, we knew where all the best stuff was!
Mostly it all came down to dive centre policy, local regulations, and instructor judgement. All the big centres in Sharm carry out a continual risk assessment on their divers and give them a "level" which determines where and how they could dive. Level 1 would be: must always be guided, Level 2 was unguided on the house reef, guided on the boat, level 3 divers could dive independently from the boat in the local dive spots but not Ras Mohamed or Tiran, level 4 would be independent everywhere except the Thistlegorm, level 5 was reserved for former members of staff. It seems a bit draconian sometimes but them's the rules, most people were quite happy with it and understood their own personal limitations, most people wanted to dive with a guide anyway, and with one or two exceptions, pretty much everybody was happy with the way things worked.
So that's a very long answer!
Cheers
