Since the start of the Iran war and the incidences of ships being shot at by Houti’s in Yemen, we have kept an eye on the cruising fleet that migrates up the Red Sea every spring to the Med. Initially, there was some concern in the cruising community in Asia and the Northern Indian Ocean. Would the Red Sea be safe?
But, it turned out that the war in the Gulf between the U.S. and Iran was localized and had not spread at that time to the Red Sea. As of this week, that calculus might have changed. But, in the spring, we are told by Wade Alaray, who runs a Red Sea Cruiser Facebook group, that some 70 boats made the northward transit this year.
During our circumnavigation, we transited north up the sea between the two former Gulf Wars. In those days, the greatest risk was pirates off Socotra and in the Gulf of Aden so we traveled in convoy and ran without running lights at night. And we were fine.
We chose to “cruise” the Red Sea instead of quickly bashing north to Suez. It was the right decision for us because we found the sea and the lands along its western shore –Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt to be some of the wildest, toughest and most interesting of the whole voyage. We were barred from entering Saudi Arabia on the sea’s eastern side.
We ended up spending two months cruising short distances and lying over in beautiful and curious bays, marsas, (coves) and harbors. Stops in the Hanish Islands in the south, the port of Suakin in the middle and the Egyptian resorts town of Safaga and Hurghada exposed us to a world we had never known before.
Plus, the diving and fishing in the Red Sea was the best we encountered anywhere. We even had a chance to dive on an undersea human habitat built on the side of a coral atoll by Jacques Coustea
But the sailing was tough as we often had headwinds of 20 knots or more. We experienced a sand storm that blasted the gelcoat off our boat’s bow and the cabin’s front side. We hunkered down, sometimes for several days, to let the head winds abate.
We had to ration water and fresh food and halfway through the passage we discovered weevils in our store of flour. In the end, we all lost weight and were as lean and mean as we’ve ever been and for that we can thank the Red Sea.
Passing through Suez showed us this engineering miracle and then popping out in the Med made us feel like we sailed home after a long, hard and fascinating sojourn. We look back at those two months in the Red Sea as a highlight of our five-year voyage with many fand memories.
A New Zealand couple on a westward circumnavigation. made the choice to sail up the Red Sea to the Med from the Indian Ocean in 2025, before the current Gulf War started instead of sailing the extra 17,000 miles around Africa. They are glad they did and wrote a fun and informative account of their adventures in a recent issue of Yachting Monthly.
