We have been busy at our anchorage. Well, not like y’all are busy, but busy for an anchorage.

El Tor is one of the four major fishing harbors on the Gulf of Suez. There are numerous fishing boats here. They leave in the early afternoon, fish all night, and return the next day. As each boat leaves, the men (I haven’t seen any women) do this thing that almost sounds like a cheer. It is really quite cool. I can’t help but wonder what kind of life it is to be a commercial fisherman. I hope they are paid well.

We were asked what type of fish they are fishing for. . . and we do not know. I am relying on Google, which informed me that: “Horse mackerel and scads, family Carangidae, are the most abundant pelagic fishes inhabiting the Gulf of Suez, Red Sea where they constitute about 77% of the total purse-seine catch in the Gulf.”

Since I didn’t know what purse-seine meant, I looked that up as well. It is fishing by net. “Pelagic” means midwater. Tuna are also pelagic fish, in case you were curious.

The fishing boats are pretty, as much as commercial fishing vessels can be, I suppose. They have bright colors and some have designs. Here are a few pictures of individual boats plus the collection of most of the boats at the dock.

We arrived at the El Tor, Egypt anchorage at about 10:00 this morning. This was supposed to have been a short passage from Port Ghalib if the weather held up as predicted. It didn’t. What should have taken less than two full days on the water ended up lasting 63.5 hours.

The weather was not *at all* what was predicted. Not even close. We averaged about 1.8 knots for 25 straight hours. Talk about painful. Yuck. Bouncy, uncomfortable, wondering for the umpteenth time when the wind and waves were going to die as predicted by six different sources. . . .

Anywho, we are here. We didn’t know when we started this journey where we would be on Thanksgiving. Now we do! We will make a decent meal with what we have on the boat. (No, I did not look for a turkey and if I would have, I wouldn’t have found one.)

We hope that we can leave El Tor on Sunday and arrive at the Suez Canal on Monday. . . and that the weather will be wonderful and perfect and smiling on us. We also hope to take a two-day trip to Cairo from Port Suez before heading up the Canal.

We wish all of you a wonderful Thanksgiving, wherever you are!! Please have a piece of pie for us. We will miss the pie the most. 😉

And now, it is time for this sailor to take a nap!!

It is another sunny, warm, and breezy day in Port Ghalib. We are enjoying the moderate temps during the day and the slightly cooler temps in the evening. It’s about 79 degrees during the day and getting down to 71 or so at night. We hear from our friends in MN that it is snowing there.

We finally went scuba diving. 🙂 It was good to get back underwater again as we hadn’t been diving since March of 2019. We took videos but have no still photos from the dive, so here are a couple of pictures of the dive boat. It was a really nice boat. I was particularly thankful for the hot shower on board as my lips were blue after the first dive and I was shivering quite a bit. (This tends to happen to me, so nothing new.) The people working on the boat were absolutely *wonderful*!! We met a quartet of divers from Sweden. They were super nice and very funny.

Michael drove to Hurghada with our agent today to pick up the dinghy motor we ordered and visit the doctor. He fell a couple of days before we got here and his knee was still bothering him so it seemed a prudent move to see the doc. He got an anti-inflammatory med.

Meanwhile, I stayed on the boat and did some housekeeping. I thoroughly cleaned our head (sink, shower, floor, etc.), the saloon floor and other floor areas, defrosted the freezer for a third time (it sucks), tried to unlock the valve on the port head (no luck), topped off the water tank, and gathered more info about Israeli ports. Super exciting . . . not. I listened to good music while cleaning to make it a more enjoyable experience.

We won’t leave here for another week or so but we are gathering information for the next passage (the rest of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez, then the Suez Canal). That includes adding anchorage waypoints to the chart should we need to stop and wait for a weather window in the Gulf of Suez.

As I write this, Michael is on his way to the boat. I am sitting on “the back porch” of Seahike listening to classic rock and enjoying a glass of red Egyptian wine. Not a bad way to spend an evening.

The holiday are nearly upon us. We hope you find ways to celebrate that feed your soul. ❤️❤️

This post will be a whirlwind tour of the past several days.

We spent two days at Port Ghalib then two days in Luxor and are back at Port Ghalib. As for Luxor, if you like ancient Egyptian history, ancient temple ruins, and ancient tombs, you should absolutely go. Part of our enjoyment of this outing included seeing a fairly wide variety of “vehicles” on the road vying for space. I am impressed with how they get around without running into one another. I would not want to be the one behind the wheel or reins.

We spent the majority of the first day in Luxor on the east bank of the River Nile (as they refer to it in Egypt). We took a boat named “Ghost” to the west bank for a short visit. We stayed overnight at the Lotus Hotel – very nice, but we were so tired we didn’t take advantage of the beautiful swimming pool. In fact, when we got to the room after a long drive and full day at Luxor, we took a nap and woke just in time to go out to dinner.

The Karnak temple was the most impressive, in my opinion. There is SO much history over such a long period of time contained in it and one could probably develop a semester-long course just to cover all of the information. Since I am not an educator, I humbly recommend that you utilize your online tools to learn a bit about it. Quite incredible, really.

We spent the second day on the west bank of the River Nile visiting three tombs. I perhaps, maybe, possibly, but I am not sure I enjoyed the tombs a tad more than the temples. The tomb of Ramses IV was beautiful. Sadly for him, he died a mere six years into his reign. The chamber was intended to be a pillared hall but was converted to a burial chamber when the king died sooner than expected.

Sailing vessel Aquarius came to Port Ghalib two days ago. The couple on board are very nice. . . and experienced sailors. They invited us to their boat for wine and conversation last night. We did the same on our boat tonight. It is delightful to spend time with other sailors. We have SO much to learn from them. It seems that every day or two we are reminded what newbies we are. But that is part of the fun. It is also part of the learning process, even when the lesson isn’t entirely pleasant.

We will go to Hurghada tomorrow to provision and hopefully find some of the other things we need.

We ordered a dinghy sight unseen today. We have all of the details but they are “making it for us” so we do not have a picture of a completed dinghy. This is 100 percent new territory for us and a bit nerve-racking, especially given language challenges. But we need a dinghy. We should receive it in about 10 days. We also purchased a Yamaha 2-stroke engine for the dinghy. Now we just need some more nylon dock lines. We are on our third attempt at getting the right material and size. But we trust we will get there!

We arrived at Port Ghalib at approximately 6:30 a.m. It took the morning to check in and whatnot.

We initially moored quayside while the various officials joined us. After all of the official stuff had been completed, we were led to the place where we would med moor. This was going to be our first attempt at med mooring so we didn’t know what to expect. We soon learned that the port was sending five guys and a tender to assist. (Well, they actually did all of it, except for the captain’s part, which Michael did.) It was kind of comical because it took quite some time and a fair amount of yelling among the dock guys. After all was said and done, we had two lines off our bow to the mooring ball and a total of five lines off our stern to three bollards. We don’t have a passerelle so we are “renting” a piece of board from the port. Actually, if we had just moored closer to shore we could have stepped off and on, but since we didn’t manage the lines, we are walking the plank, which is completely fine.

We took it pretty easy in the afternoon since we were both a bit tired. We also planned to go out to eat and listen to live music in the evening, so taking it easy seemed a good choice on a couple of fronts.

We learned fairly quickly that we weren’t alone on the boat. When Michael came up from his nap a cat was on our counter. It had eaten through the plastic and was having a snack of our breadsticks. Michael shooed it away . . . and we tossed the breadsticks. (This would not be the first time a feral cat decided to visit our boat during our stay at Port Ghalib.)

The restaurant was lovely and the music was superb!!! I am not sure if we enjoyed it more because we hadn’t had a night out since September 13, or if it was just that good, but we enjoyed ourselves tremendously nonetheless.

I am a jinx.

The last time we wrote we told you that we knew that the winds would pick up. What we didn’t know was that the wave height would also increase and the wave period would decrease. Since we were heading into it, it all made for bad conditions.

Yet the conditions were the worst when I was at the helm. What the hell?

Here is the rundown:

Michael at the helm during his watch from 8:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m. Oct. 31-Nov. 1: Over three kts 100 percent of the time. Yes, that is slow, but given the conditions, it wasn’t awful.

Cindy at the helm 2:00-8:00 a.m. Nov 1: Never above two kts. Also Cindy at the helm from 8:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Nov.1: Never above two kts.

Before you disregard just how slow this is, think about how long it takes you to walk one mile. One nautical mile equals 1.15 land miles. If you can walk 3.5 miles in one hour you would have left our boat in the proverbial dust. Sad.

I was frustrated enough at noon that I told Michael that I needed to leave the helm station and was going to take a nap.

When I awoke from my nap Michael told me that we had been motoring at three or more kts the entire time.

That is when I realized that I was a jinx.

All kidding aside, *this really happened.*

Anyway, because we had finally picked up speed it was clear that it would not take two days to get to Port Ghalib as we had once thought. That was the good news. The bad news was that we would likely arrive at 11:30 p.m., which one simply cannot do.

So, we went beyond Port Ghalib and motored back to it so we could arrive after the sun rose. Ironic, really. It seemed at one point that it would take forever to arrive, and in the end we arrived too soon and had to kill time.

But we made it. Info about our first day in the next blog entry.

We are still enjoying a nice passage. Our speed is slow, but *sort of* acceptable. The winds picked up this evening. We know we will slow down as the winds increase (as noted in the Post-It note we shared yesterday). 😉

It is Oct. 30 – or, as many of you think of it – the day before Halloween. 🧙🧛🧟🦸🦹.

We should have one more day of calm weather before the winds and waves pick up a bit. We expect the final 24-36 hours heading to Port Ghalib to be less pleasant.

Had a bit of a scare yesterday. The starboard engine (the only one that works) shut off. My heart and stomach did that thing they do. Luckily, we had several things going in our favor:

1. The seas were almost flat, so we didn’t lose a lot of ground while we were troubleshooting
2. It was daytime
3. We had been down this road before

We first took the opportunity to check the oil. We topped it off. We then added some diesel to the tank because it was low anyway. We also weren’t sure how much we could trust the fuel gauge. (Yes we could have looked at the tank.). After adding some fuel we started the engine again. It ran for about a minute and stopped. We were eerily reminded of the problem we had before when the engine seemed to be starved of fuel.
So, the next (really the first) thing to do was to check the filter on the hose that leads out of the fuel tank. Yep, it was messy. We cleaned it up, put everything back together and have been motoring since then.

I told Michael that our previous problems might have been a blessing in disguise because we knew what to do. He just looked at me.  😉  Now, if the filter hadn’t been the problem, I might be telling a different tale. We are glad it was an easy fix.

My dear friend, Ann Reilly, sent me a BUNCH of different types of puzzles from The New York Times newspaper. She sent them when COVID was at its peak.  Luckily, I never worked on them, so I was able to bring all of them on the boat. I’ve worked on several during these calm days. I love doing them and they help to pass the time enjoyably.

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We are now on Plan C. 👍

As you know, weather forecasts are only good for the upcoming few days. Actually, in Minnesota they might only be good for a few hours. 😆😉 The GRIB files are now showing more wind on the northern end of the Red Sea. Our plan as of today is to stop at Port Ghalib, Egypt. We hope it will be a more pleasant experience than sailors have had in past months. There is a new dude in charge and he is determined to make Port Ghalib friendlier to foreign yachts. Fingers crossed!!

We added 125 liters of diesel to the starboard tank last night. We also topped off the oil on the starboard engine. We are good to go for a few days. We have *lots* of additional diesel, so we have zero concerns about running out before our next stop.

We saw another “boatload” of dolphins 🐬🐬 last night. ❤️❤️ We started and ended the day with them (they actually arrived just after sunrise and just before sunset). We love dolphins (who doesn’t?) so it made our day!!

We are still on the first canister of propane. We use very little. I heat water for coffee in the morning and we use it again to cook dinner.

The temperature reached 95° yesterday. We are looking forward to being farther north with its cooler temps. I might even have to wear something other than my bikini! (Cindy, that is. Michael doesn’t have a bikini.)

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