The Egyptian Red Sea

Egypt's Red Sea coast runs some 760 kilometres from the Gulf of Suez to the Sudanese border, but the charter geography sits inside its northern third. El Gouna, a lagoon town cut from artificial islands north of Hurghada, gives the coast its yacht-club heart at Abu Tig Marina; Hurghada itself is the working port and the jumping-off point for the Giftun Islands, Egypt's oldest marine national park. East across the Strait of Gubal — where the wreck of the SS Thistlegorm has drawn divers since Jacques Cousteau found her in the early 1950s — the Sinai Peninsula runs down to Sharm El Sheikh and Ras Mohammed, the point where the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba meet over a reef wall that drops sheer from the shore. Since May 2025 a foreign-flagged, commercially registered yacht has been free to cruise all of it without the case-by-case cabotage (coastal-trade) clearance the trade spent years working around. The season runs opposite the Mediterranean's: October to May, when Red Sea air sits in the comfortable twenties rather than the 40°C-plus of a Red Sea summer.

“Until May 2025, a yacht flying anything but the Egyptian flag needed permission for every mile of this coast — that restriction is now gone.”

Signature anchorages

From the lagoon-cut marina towns north of Hurghada to the reef wall at the tip of Sinai — six waters worth building a week around.

• El Gouna & Abu Tig MarinaA lagoon town cut from artificial islands and canals some 25km north of Hurghada, founded in 1989; Abu Tig Marina, its yacht-club heart, berths mostly stern-to (med-moored, bow or stern to the quay with an anchor out ahead) for craft to roughly 60m LOA (length overall) on a 3.6m draught, quayside restaurants and bars a few steps from the boat.
• HurghadaThe Red Sea's original dive-tourism port and its busiest working harbour; Hurghada Marina holds around 200 berths, vessels to a stated 80m LOA on a 4.5m draught, with fuel, provisioning and the city's dive schools all within a few minutes of the pontoons.
• Giftun IslandsGiftun Kebir and Giftun Soraya, some 45 minutes off Hurghada by tender, form Egypt's first marine national park, designated in 1986; the windward side is open roadstead (an unenclosed, exposed anchorage), the lee side calmer with sand-patch holding between coral heads, and Mahmya's day-beach-club sits on Giftun Kebir's northern tip.
• Thistlegorm, Strait of GubalA British freighter sunk by German bombers in October 1941, motorcycles and trucks still lashed in her holds; she lies upright in around 30m off Sha'ab Ali (Arabic for Ali's reef), some 30 nautical miles off Sharm El Sheikh and a little further from Hurghada, in a current-swept corridor where the wind funnels hardest. Deep water close to the wreck means a mooring buoy here, not the anchor.
• Sharm El Sheikh & the Sinai coastSharm — Arabic for a bay or inlet — takes its name from the water that shelters the Old Port at Sharm El Maya, known locally as Travco Marina since the late 1990s; the reef wall running north past Naama Bay is the Sinai coast's dive-charter spine, most larger yachts working from anchor rather than alongside.
• Ras Mohammed National ParkEgypt's first national park, declared in 1983, at the exact point where the Gulf of Suez meets the Gulf of Aqaba; Shark and Yolanda Reef drop sheer from the shoreline into strong current, the Yolanda's scattered 1980s cargo — bathtubs, a BMW — still lying on the sand below. Deep water close to the wall means a mooring buoy again, not the anchor.

The scene

A festival now in its ninth year, a wind that built a sport, and the mooring network that keeps the reef beneath it all intact.

Table & stay ashore

Two long-running kitchens on El Gouna's marina, and three very different reasons to sleep ashore.

A week, sketched

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