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A Regatta on the Red Sea
May 2024
The race to the finish line on the second and final day of the El Gouna Sailing Festival came down to this: tack now, or tack later? The leading boat, a Hanse 455, was several boat lengths ahead of the trailing Varianta 44. Both were well clear of the rest of the fleet and sailing close-hauled against the light northerly breeze. The finish line, marked at opposite ends by our spectator boat and a bright orange buoy, was well within sight.
What wasn’t immediately clear to me and the other spectators was that if the two yachts held their course, they would sail past the buoy from the outside. They were already sailing as close to the wind as possible; finishing inside the line would mean tacking to a beam reach, sailing parallel to the finish line for some distance, then tacking again to cross the finish line close-hauled. When the trailing Varianta demonstrated this, greatly widening the gap between itself and first as it entered the beam reach, we realized it wasn’t because they were crazy—the Hanse would soon need to do the same. Yet the Hanse held its course.
With the advantage of a larger size and sail area, the Hanse approached the buoy confidently, as though unaware they were on the wrong side of it. Soon enough they were past the buoy and the finish line altogether, and only then did they initiate the tack. The Varianta was rapidly approaching, but its only chance to catch up would be if the Hanse messed up. In this light breeze, any mistake could result in a stalled boat. Nevertheless cool under pressure, the Hanse completed its tack, sailed back to the buoy and around it, then tacked once more to cross the finish line first.
As the last spouts of wind blew and a stifling afternoon arrived, it would be another half hour before the last of the thirteen sailboats crossed the finish line. Several of the audience had ditched the spectator boat for the coolness of the water, and a live band was playing under a shaded canopy on the second deck. We were moored near Bayoud sandbank; beneath us, visible even from the highest deck, surgeonfish crisscrossed islands of corals.
The event was infused with the spirit of the warm sea on which it was taking place—a sea alive below as above, glistening in the afternoon light like an emerald. Though there was certainly lots of money involved (and there is no yacht sailing that does not involve lots of money), the vision and execution matched the environment: laidback, stylish, skillful.
The organizers, Red Sea Sails, dubbed the regatta a sailing ‘festival’ to emphasize that it was more about being on the water together than competing. With Egypt’s sailing community being tiny, an event like this had to have something for everyone, including the spectators. (So much so, perhaps, that several of the spectators hadn’t realized when the racing began, and were blown off their seats when the finish horn sounded.) The racing was not limited to yachts either; several dinghies provided by the El Gouna Sailing Club took part in the regatta, manned by sailors who had come down from the Alexandria Yacht Club for the two-day event. Even the tiny Optimist could be seen sailing among the behemoths, with the youngest sailor a girl of just twelve years old.
And yet, all of this very nearly did not happen.
The tacking dilemma played out again between eighth and ninth with a different ending. A Bali 4.6 catamaran was comfortably ahead of the trailing Sun Odyssey 440, but was on a course where it would need to tack. The Odyssey, which rounded the previous marker less tightly, did not. The catamaran followed a similar strategy as the Hanse had earlier, sailing past the finish line first before doubling back, but here the difference between catamarans and monohulls showed. In the time it took the Bali to complete its wider tack, the Odyssey overtook it and finished one spot ahead.
On Day 0 of the event, just hours before the scheduled opening ceremony, a familiar sentence diffused among the Red Sea Sails staff like a bad dream: the sea is closed. It arrived via phone calls from friends and connections. The navy had decided to stage drills the following day from their base in Safaga, just south of El Gouna.
When the news arrived, I was in the marina helping a small crew of volunteers place sponsorship stickers onto participating boats. I returned to the Red Sea Sails office to find it quiet, sullen. It was past five and only a few staff members were inside, shock painted on their faces. The freshness of the news, or the absurdity of it, meant that their shock was still tinged with disbelief—a smiling, sober sort of expression. I had assumed a postponement of the event by a day or two, but the lack of clarity regarding how long the drills would last meant the regatta would have to be canceled. The opening ceremony was called off.
I had come to El Gouna to write about this regatta and offer my help as a volunteer, and though I could not have been as frustrated as the organizers of the event, I shared in their disappointment. Just the day before, the office was a frenzy of activity. People came and went and stepped outside for phone calls and sponsors arrived for meetings. Faisal, a Lebanese national who founded Red Sea Sails and its older, diving-oriented sister, Red Sea Explorers, was putting on a commendable balancing act. He had just finished a tense meeting with a sponsor when he came over to the table where I was sitting and plopped down an unusual looking, 3D printed propeller. It was the size of a hand, dark in color, and heavy. Its most distinctive feature, however, was its blades. Propeller blades are typically smooth, meant to slice through the water. These ones had bumps along their leading edges, like they would beat the water into submission.
My background was in engineering, which Faisal could not have yet known. As he sensed my curiosity, he took me to the one room inside the office I hadn’t yet seen. The office was a small, cool space abound with photos of sailboats and liveaboards. Countless laptops and adapters and other electronics were scattered about. Through a back door, which I first assumed led outside, Faisal revealed an entirely different kind of space. Where the office was a sleek white, this semi-enclosed room was composed almost entirely of wood. A neatly arranged tool board hung up on the wall, but everything else—a large worktable, the floor—were in a state of complete chaos, and all sorts of things were strewn about. A diving tank was on the table with modifications hanging out of it, like a patient mid-operation. This, Faisal said, was their workshop.
The propeller he showed me was designed here but 3D printed in Cairo. Pointing to the blades, Faisal said it was a biomimetic design inspired by the pectoral fins of humpback whales.
Before he could say any further, he was needed elsewhere. He pulled out his phone with a video for me to watch. In it, a person explained that the bumps on the blades, like the bumps on the whale’s fin, make the propeller more hydrodynamic—a phenomenon called the tubercle effect. It is an experimental technology, but if the sea is your livelihood you may care that such a propeller is more fuel-efficient than conventional ones. If the sea is also your passion, then you may note, as Faisal did, that it produces less sound pollution for marine life.
That was how the day passed. The next day, after the sea had been closed and the regatta canceled, the office was transformed. Mo, a longtime friend of Faisal’s who has been part of Red Sea Sails and Red Sea Explorers since their inception, brought me and the other volunteers to a beachfront bar where some of the team had gathered to absorb the news. Mo is also Lebanese but grew up on several continents. He used to run a surfing lodge in Sri Lanka, and rides around on an antique motorcycle that he restored himself. Mo should have been the most disappointed—he’d been organizing the regatta for months—but he took the matter in stride. Around the bar, there were plenty of smiles and consolatory laughs. The matter was truly out of anyone’s hands. Perhaps only in places like Egypt could the sea be closed with a phone call.
But only in a place like Egypt would another call arrive five hours later bringing salvation: the drills are off, the sea is open again.
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Sometime between 4000 years ago and today, the Red Sea stopped attracting sailors and their boats, and began instead to repel them. An essay in Cruising World (published, curiously, the day after 25 January 2011) details in length how transiting the Red Sea and the Suez Canal is a nightmare, and why the author of the essay—a celebrated sailor named Gary Goodlander who has published several books about his adventures—would rather round the southern cape of Africa than traverse the Red Sea again.
According to Goodlander, the shortcut was not worth the threat of piracy near the Bab el-Mandab strait, nor was it worth the bureaucracy and petty corruption encountered at the Suez Canal. “Like most sailors, I’m apolitical,” he writes, though he also writes such sentences as “…in between Southeast Asia and Europe is the dreaded Mideast. This is an unsettled, war-torn area where, in my humble opinion, racism and intolerance are glorified.”
While the author’s self-awareness may need revisiting, his experiences are telling. There are two sets of challenges one encounters on a sailboat: those imposed by humans, and those not. Paperwork, ambiguous rules, and suffocating regulations fall under the former. They may not sink a sailboat the way rough seas might, but they are no less dreadful—and much harder to forgive. Egypt’s government has in recent years signaled its intention to become a major yachting destination, and has introduced measures to streamline and digitize the experience for boat owners, but such changes do not happen overnight. Egypt, like much of the rest of the Global South, is a place where sailing culture has in the preceding century been largely erased, and where the economic conditions which precipitated recreational sailing in the Global North have not yet arrived.
Yet, it is worth knowing that before the Hanses and the Variantas and the copy-paste Bermuda rigs, it is from Egypt that we have humanity’s oldest surviving depiction of a sailboat. The Naqada II jar, pottery from five and a half thousand years ago, depicts a reed boat with a square sail. Sailing was in the very language of Egyptians, who found in their environment the perfect conditions to sail: the waters of the Nile flow north to the Mediterranean, while the prevailing year-round wind along the Nile valley blows south. Thus, the hieroglyphic phrase for traveling north included a sail-less boat, while the phrase for traveling south depicted a boat with square sail raised.
The environment of the Red Sea—that is, the natural environment—is also characterized by favorable sailing conditions. A strong breeze driven by the differential cooling of land and water in the sun-soaked latitudes of the northern Red Sea blows from the northwest throughout most of the year. It is a powerful, dependable breeze, and yet the swells it stirs are far calmer than the average conditions of the Mediterranean. Twelve months a year the sky is almost always sunny, and the weather almost always warm. There is comparatively little risk of being caught in a storm, much less the kinds of tropical storms that sweep across the Caribbean and South Pacific. Of course, recent events mean that it may be a while before Goodlander deems these shores worth his trouble, but when the rest of the sailing world makes it to the warm waters off Egypt’s eastern coast they’ll find Red Sea Sails there to welcome them.
