Red Sea

The Red Sea is geologically the youngest ocean basin on Earth, formed by the Arabian and African tectonic plates pulling apart at about a centimetre per year. The same process is what makes the water among the saltiest of any large body of water on the planet, at around 4 percent salinity against 3.5 for the open ocean, and the biological consequence is unusual reef systems: over 1,000 species of fish, of which around 17 percent are endemic, and over 250 species of coral, with visibility regularly past 30 metres.

Yacht charter on the Red Sea concentrates on the Egyptian coast and on the Saudi Arabian one further south. The Egyptian side runs from Hurghada and El Gouna in the north past Marsa Alam to the Sudanese border, with Ras Mohammed National Park at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula as the historic dive headline. Saudi Arabia, only newly opened to international tourism since 2019, has the Farasan Banks reef system, far less travelled than the Egyptian side and considered by some divers to be the closest the Indian Ocean still comes to undisturbed.

The charter season is northern winter and shoulder, October to April, when the water is calm and the heat manageable. Most Red Sea charters pick up in Hurghada, Marsa Alam or Sharm el-Sheikh, with the wider Sinai land excursions (St Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai) reachable from any of them. The Red Sea is one of the best cold-weather alternatives to the Caribbean for European clients on a five-hour flight, and the diving alone justifies the trip.