ADVENTURE RED SEA DELIGHT

Despite its reputation for pirates, Tom Dymond discovers a warm welcome as he cruises up the Red Sea to Suez

- Tom Dymond

The warship lingering at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden was a soothing sight as our Nicholson 32 Blue Eye tentatively tiptoed into the waters that precede the infamous Red Sea. Red and Sea. A decade ago these two words were synonymous with one thing. Pirates. This infamy though is quite unwarranted. The Red Sea itself has, with the exception of its very southern end, next to nothing to do with piracy; it is just next to something that very much does, the Gulf of Aden, or Pirate Alley as it is otherwise known.

Blue Eye’s crew was staring into it with no small degree of trepidation and now had 500 miles of sailing ahead, with civil war-torn Yemen to starboard, and the pirate breeding ground of Somalia to port. The warship was a source of comfort to both James and I but we harboured suspicions that they were not present solely for our benefit, and that an escort service for the remainder of the gulf was perhaps not on the table. Indeed, after a couple of hours, they were over the horizon and out of sight. As curious as it might seem, however, it was at this point that we began to relax.

When my friend James and I left Falmouth in 2016 to sail around the world we had talked about cruising through the Red Sea, and now, after months of preparing for it, and three achingly slow weeks of sailing to it from Sri Lanka, we were here.