We are officially out of the Middle East. We left Suez at about 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 5 and arrived at Ayia Napa Marina, Cyprus at about 5:00 p.m. on Dec. 7. This post contains information about our Suez Canal transit as well as our arrival in Cyprus.

When transiting the Suez Canal, vessels are required to have a pilot on board. Our pilot was scheduled to arrive at 5:00 a.m. on Dec. 5. He arrived at about 7:00 a.m. We had gotten up at 4:30 a.m., largely to give me time to take the dinghy out to the buoy and remove our line (by the way, the dinghy floats! <smile>) and give us time to eat breakfast. Michael actually went back to bed because he hadn’t gotten much sleep. Anyway, the pilot eventually arrived and we left.

I found some interesting factoids about the Suez Canal, just three quick screenshots. In short, the Suez Canal is a critical waterway for the Planet. It is extremely busy, which we can attest to from our experience. We were the only cruising yacht on the entire canal.

This is part three of the Dec. 2 post. Part 1 was dedicated to the Egyptian Museum, part 2 to the pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza and the Nile River dinner cruise. This post contains information about our visits to Saqqara and Memphis on Dec. 1.

Saqqara contains the oldest complete stone building complex known in history, the Pyramid of Djoser, built early in the Third Dynasty, during the reign of King Netjerykhet, more well-known as Djoser. According to egymonuments.gov.eg, before Djoser’s reign, royal and elite Egyptians were buried in mastabas, a type of funerary structure generally rectangular in shape and built over the tomb proper, which was underground. In contrast, the Step Pyramid is composed of six stacked mastabas, thus creating the step effect. The complex was a landmark achievement for Egyptian architecture. It was the first instance of the mass use of limestone in construction. According to the same source referenced above, Imhotep, its architect, may have been responsible for this major innovation.

There are two large open courts, one on each side of the pyramid. The king held a festival, the Heb-sed Festival, in the south court. The Heb-sed (or just Sed) festival was an ancient Egyptian royal ceremony that celebrates the rule of and rejuvenated the king and regenerated his power. The festivals were celebrated after a ruler had held the throne for 30 years and then every three to four years after that. They kept the king strong and allowed him to rule effectively and claim control over all of Egypt. Its presence in the funerary complex also allowed Djoser to continue to benefit from the ritual in the afterlife. Handy.

The complex is surrounded by a limestone wall over 10 meters high. The wall had numerous false doors which were carved into it after it was built. The single entrance to the enclosure is on the eastern side of the wall through the one doorway that is real. This leads to the entrance colonnade, which has 20 pairs of columns. There are 24 small chambers between the columns that are thought to have housed statues of the King or deities.

I am breaking this into three posts because they will be too long. They are already long! The first two pertain to what we did on Nov. 30. We already shared the Egyptian Museum experience with you in part 1 of this blog. After that, we saw the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx. That, and pictures of the Nile River dinner cruise make up part 2.

The Giza pyramids, as you know, were built by aliens. Okay, not really. They are, of course, amazing, but I am more amazed now than I was before. When you look closely at the stones, you see that they are perfectly shaped. The angles are 90 degrees. Because they are perfectly shaped, there is no adhesive substance between them. It is just stone on stone. (Wikipedia mentions mortar, but I don’t know where it was used.) It was initially 146.6 meters tall and was the tallest man-made structure in the world for more than 3,800 years! Due to the smooth limestone casing being worn away, it is currently 138.5 (some sources say 138.8) meters. You can see some of the smooth casing on the pyramid next to it, but you will not see any in pictures of the Great Pyramid. The stones (primarily limestone) used to build it weighed about six million tons in total. There are three chambers inside the Great Pyramid. We did not go into any of them.

Remember the tiny “statue” we saw in the Egyptian Museum? That was Khufu, the dude who built the Great Pyramid. And that is the only statue they have of him. The irony is not lost on anyone. I should mention that Khufu’s wives, children, grandchildren, and mother were also buried nearby, as were various courtiers. This was standard practice and in accordance with their belief in the Afterlife.

Another super interesting fact is that in 1954 (just 1954!!) two huge boat pits were discovered buried at the south foot of the pyramid. Why? The area right next to where the Giza pyramids were built was completely covered with water. That was true until 150 years ago. So they used boats to deliver the stones. Again, how amazing they were!!

We left El Tor at 12:30 a.m. on November 28. We left at that time to catch the best weather and ensure we would arrive in Suez on the 29th.

We had another “first” on this short trip. We were happily motoring along and all of a sudden our engine lost RPMs. I mean, down to just about no RPMs. It kept running, but wouldn’t rev up. We’d checked the fuel tank filter before we left, but we checked it again to be sure. It was clean. We’d turned off the engine and turned it back on. It started right up but it was shaking a lot. Michael asked me to put it in forward, neutral and reverse while he looked at the engine. He told me he thought we had an issue with the prop.

This happened when we were right on the edge of the shipping lane in a very busy Gulf of Suez. Thankfully (!!) the winds were extremely light and there were basically no waves. The little movement we had while we were working on the problem moved us slightly farther away from the shipping lane. This allowed us to work on the problem without worrying that we would end up smack dab in the middle of the lane.

Michael donned his dive mask and stainless steel knife and dove down. When he came up the first time, he told me that there was a bunch of plastic wrapped around the prop. He went down about four times and then handed a very large bundle of plastic and other stuff (I think it had to do with fishing) to me. He asked me to go down to finish the job, which I did. I only had to unwind a string from the prop to clear it entirely. I dove down a second time just to make sure the prop was clear. It was. We started the engine, revved her right up and went on our merry way.

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.