1000 km Offshore RIB Race accross the Red Sea
Recently I found this video about offshore powerboat racing by coincidence typing Red Sea into my Video Search further below. Having a passion for travel and sports I started a bit of research about RIBs, Rigid Inflatable Boats and it's amazing what kind of highly specialized active community has built around RIBs.

The Red Sea usually is known for strong northern winds and rough choppy waves which make it an excellent place for extreme water sports like windsurfing or kite surfing so I wondered why they took the Red Sea as destination of choice, but participating RIBs powered up to 2 x 300 horse powers are special, they can also cope even with rougher seas like the Red Sea and due to their low weight RIBs often out-perform other similarly sized and powered boats.

The 2006 Red Sea Rib Rally seemed to have been such a success - it was broad casted by Sky News and EuroSport - but I could hardly find any blogs or flickr photos, I hope the 2007 remake will provide a better coverage, best coverage provided Google AJAX search, a combined YouTube/GoogleVideo search further below (Red Sea Rib Rally).

The race from Sharm-El-Sheikh to El Gouna (Abu Tig Marina) to Marsa Alam (Port Ghalib) then north against wind and waves to Soma Bay and back to Sharm also reminded me a bit of the famous Paris-Dakar Off Road Rally.

There will be a repeat in October 2007 (starting on Oct. 27th - Nov. 4th 2007) and since there is no other comparable event around I think that it could become the water equivalent of the Paris-Dakar Off Road Rally for RIBs.

Labels: events, red sea, rib, travel, videos

  ¶ '1000 km Offshore RIB Race accross the Red Sea' posted by eA : 1:10 PM  2 comments links to this post