Thanks :) We were out of Marsa Alam for this trip and were really lucky cause it was end of the season early December if memory serves me right, so we were the only boat on all the sites we visited. I've heard good things about Hurghada, especially for shore diving. No, unfortunately, I haven't been any further south than St Johns. There were people on the boat on the trip I'm describing in these first 3 scuba scribe posts who had been diving liveaboard in Sudan and they said it was much more pristine.
I'm in love with Egypt waters though, I seem to have extremely good luck in Egypt red sea. I saw some really impressive stuff on my last trip to the red sea, I'm going to do another scuba scribe post soon called the red sea revisited and I don't want to spoil the surprise but I had a very lucky encounter with two large marine species and have some amazing pic's/footage of it. Coming soon for sure ;-) lol