The genuine risks of kitesurfing on the Egyptian Red Sea are coral and urchins under your feet, extreme sun and heat, busy boat traffic, and offshore wind at the wrong beach. Sharks and jellyfish, the two things visitors ask about most, cause almost no incidents here. Wearing booties, drinking properly, checking the wind angle before you launch and being able to self-rescue removes most of the risk from a week on the water.
Coral, urchins and why booties are not optional
The Red Sea is one of the most coral-rich seas on the planet, which is wonderful for snorkelling and unforgiving underfoot. Even inside sandy training lagoons there are reef patches, coral rubble and animals in the sand.
What you will actually meet:
- Sea urchins, particularly long-spined Diadema in shallow rocky patches. Spines break off inside the skin and are difficult to remove
- Fire coral, which looks like harmless yellowish-brown branching coral and produces a burning welt on contact
- Stonefish and scorpionfish, camouflaged, motionless, and venomous if you step on one. Rare, but the reason you never walk barefoot on mixed sand and rubble
- Sharp reef edges that shred skin, canopies and fins alike
Water booties handle almost all of it, which is why they are included with our courses alongside kite, board, harness and helmet. Wear them every session, including the days the bottom looks clean, and shuffle rather than stamp when you walk in shallow water.
If you are stung by a stonefish or scorpionfish, immerse the limb in water as hot as you can tolerate without scalding and get to a doctor. Hot water denatures the venom, which is a genuinely useful thing to know in advance rather than to look up afterwards.
Sun, heat and dehydration
This is the hazard that quietly ends more sessions than anything else. Summer UV index in Hurghada regularly reaches 11 or 12, air temperatures hit 38 to 42°C in July and August, and the sea breeze makes you feel cool while you burn.
Practical rules:
- Wear a long-sleeve rash vest. It is cooler than bare skin under this sun, not hotter
- Reef-safe SPF 50 on face, ears, back of the neck and the backs of the hands, reapplied between sessions
- Around two litres of water per session, more on a three-hour day
- Take the shade during the middle of the day if you are on a multi-session schedule
- Sunglasses with a retainer for the beach, because glare off the water is severe
Early signs of heat exhaustion are irritability, clumsiness and a headache, all of which get mistaken for tiredness. If you are getting sloppy on the water, come in.
Wind direction and the offshore problem
The prevailing wind here is northerly to north-westerly, which at most Hurghada beaches arrives side-onshore or side-shore. That is exactly what you want: if you lose your board or your kite, the wind pushes you back towards land.
But the coastline is not a straight line. A bay or lagoon whose beach faces west or south-west can take that same northerly as a side-offshore or offshore wind, and offshore wind is the single most dangerous variable in this sport. It looks calm because the water near shore is flat. It is not calm; it is just sheltered, and the further out you go the harder it blows with nothing between you and open sea.
Rules that hold everywhere on this coast:
- Never ride offshore wind without boat cover, regardless of your level
- Learn the specific orientation of the beach you are on, not the general regional wind direction
- Note your downwind landmarks before you launch, so you know where you end up if it goes wrong
- If in doubt, ask the school which way today's wind sits relative to their beach. It changes with a fifteen degree shift
Boat traffic and current in the Strait of Gubal
Shipping and dive boat traffic
The water off Hurghada is genuinely busy. Dive boats, snorkelling day boats and safari liveaboards run out to the Giftun Islands and the northern reefs continuously through the morning, and the Strait of Gubal carries commercial shipping into and out of the Gulf of Suez.
You are small, low, and fast-moving, and a boat helmsman is not looking for you. Stay inside marked riding areas, cross channels deliberately rather than drifting into them, and assume you have not been seen. On downwinders and boat-supported sessions, the tender is also your visibility to other traffic, which is one more reason to stay near it.
Current around the northern islands
Around the islands north of Hurghada, particularly in the narrows near Gubal, Tawila and the Ashrafi group, tidal and wind-driven current runs hard through the channels. It matters for two reasons: a current running against the wind stands the chop up steeply, and a current running with the wind will move you further downwind than you expect while you are body dragging for a lost board.
On kite safaris this is precisely why launches happen from lee-side flats rather than open channels, and why the tender stays on the water. If you ride these areas, ask the crew about the current at that anchorage before you go in. They know it; you cannot see it.
Marine life: what actually matters
Some perspective, because the internet is unhelpfully dramatic about this.
- Sharks: encounters involving kitesurfers on this coast are effectively unheard of. Reef sharks are shy and stay near reefs at depth. This is not a factor in your planning
- Jellyfish: occasional, seasonal, and usually a mild sting. Rinse with seawater, not fresh
- Titan triggerfish: genuinely worth knowing about. During nesting season they defend a cone-shaped territory above their nest and will charge and bite. They mostly bother divers and snorkellers rather than kiters, but if one comes at you, swim horizontally away rather than upwards
- Lionfish and moray eels: only a problem if you put a hand or foot where you cannot see
The realistic marine injury on this coast is an urchin spine or a coral graze, and both are prevented by footwear.
Self-rescue is the skill that covers everything else
Every other item on this page is a hazard you avoid. Self-rescue is the one thing that saves you when avoidance has already failed — kite down, board gone, and drifting.
The sequence taught in the VDWS syllabus, in order:
- Activate the quick release so the kite is flagged and depowered
- Keep hold of the bar and the leash. Everything you need is attached to it
- Wind the lines onto the bar as you pull yourself towards the kite
- Grab one wingtip and hold it, which turns the kite into a controllable sail
- Either sail yourself downwind towards shore or the boat, or roll the kite down and pack it into a floating bundle you can swim with
- Stay with your equipment. It floats, it is visible, and it is what rescuers are looking for
Practise this in shallow water with an instructor before you need it in deep water alone. It is Level 5 material and it is the reason schools and rental centres require that level before letting you go out unsupervised.
If something goes wrong on shore
Egypt's national ambulance number is 123. Hurghada has private hospitals used to treating water sports injuries, and hyperbaric chambers serving the local diving industry. Carry your hotel name and the school's phone number on you, and make sure your travel insurance names kitesurfing explicitly. A large number of standard holiday policies list it as an excluded extreme sport, and that becomes an expensive discovery in a treatment room.
- safety
- red sea
- self rescue
- reef
