Port Ghalib Marina (Marsa Alam, Egypt)

Two very different numbers for the same marina

That is a wide enough gap that this desk is not going to average it or quietly pick the rounder number. The 1,000-yacht figure is repeated almost everywhere - Port Ghalib's own site, Noonsite, regional tourism guides, even trade directories like Dockwalk - which suggests it originated as a masterplan or design capacity rather than a built count, and has simply been carried forward uncorrected for two decades. The government's own port authority, by contrast, has every regulatory reason to report the actual built number, and its figure is far more specific: a named legal decree (Republican Decree No. 141 of 2003), an exact site area, and a stated maximum LOA of 60 metres for what exists today.

For a buyer, the practical read is simple: treat 225 built berths to 60 metres as the reliable current figure, and treat 1,000 as an aspirational number for a second phase that has no design, no funding announcement and no completion date attached to it in any source this desk could find. A yacht above 60 metres should not assume Port Ghalib can take it at all.

Clearing into Egypt is the real subject of this entry

The sequence, per that account: an agent is contacted roughly a week ahead with the registration certificate, crew list, last port clearance and the last ten ports of call; no visa is needed in advance, since Egypt issues one on arrival, but since the pandemic every foreign yacht must clear in even if it is only stopping for fuel, which used to be an exception. On arrival, the vessel goes to a dedicated Customs Dock and is boarded in sequence by quarantine, immigration and customs, a process the same cruisers describe as usually taking most of the day. Weapons, including spearguns, and drones must be surrendered to Customs on arrival and are returned only at checkout.

The real bottleneck is the exit, not the entry: because the Coast Guard issues departure clearance from Cairo, the local agent has no control over the timeline, and the same cruisers had to apply twice, losing a weather window the first time and needing a costly side trip to Hurghada for a visa extension while they waited. Egypt's Maritime Transport Sector states it launched a digital 'Yachts' Single Window' pre-clearance system in September 2022 aimed at exactly this kind of delay, but no cruiser or press account found in this research confirms whether it has actually shortened the wait in practice.

One cruising couple who checked in here in 2022 called the wait for their exit permit being a prisoner in the marina, paying daily berth rates, until the Coast Guard decided to let them go.

What a berth costs, and what clearing in costs on top of it

Utilities are priced separately on the same tariff sheet: fresh water at USD 5 to 6 per cubic metre, shore power at USD 0.30 per kWh, and a refuelling service fee of USD 5 to 40 per vessel. The Immigration Dock fee - used for the sea arrival and again for departure - runs USD 300 each way regardless of vessel size, which is a meaningfully larger fixed cost on a short stay than on a long one.

The 2022 cruiser account gives a real, itemised example rather than a theoretical one: agent fee USD 150, immigration USD 150, visas USD 25 per person, quarantine USD 40, customs USD 30, and a government marina tax of USD 30 to 50 a month depending on length, with berthing itself quoted separately by the agent. Those figures predate the marina's 2024 published tariff by two years and are not directly comparable line for line, but together they make the point this entry keeps returning to: the all-in cost of a Port Ghalib stop is the clearance process as much as it is the dockage rate.

No chandlery, no fuel for cans, and a fuel dock with its own rules

Provisioning follows the same pattern: the marina's own services page offers food and beverage delivery with two days' notice, but the cruisers who actually shopped locally describe three small grocery stores in the resort's staff village, restocked only once a week from Quseir or Hurghada, with vegetables that did not keep long. A crew planning a real provisioning run, rather than a top-up, should plan the drive rather than expect it dockside.

Dive tanks are trucked nightly to Quseir for filling and returned the next morning, and LPG is available only as a full exchange tank rather than a refill - both details that matter more to a live-aboard crew planning weeks at the marina than to a yacht passing through for a single clearance stop. Against that, the marina does provide round-the-clock security, sewage pump-out, laundry, WiFi, mail handling and airport transfers, which covers the basics of a stay even where deeper technical support does not exist on site.

The marina promenade, and the four-kilometre walk after dark

That gap between the marketing image and the on-the-water reality is worth stating plainly. The promenade itself is real and well reviewed - one visitor review calls it a highly sanitised souk with prices to match - and the resort carries several hotels with their own restaurants, including the Radisson-managed Marina Resort's five venues. The same cruiser account is blunter about the wider town: like a ghost town built by Disney World, with the whole of what there is to see covered in about two days.

None of that makes Port Ghalib a bad stop; it makes it a specific one. An owner who wants a lively, walkable marina town after dark should weigh the south-side berthing and the overnight movement ban before assuming the promenade is a short stroll from every pontoon.

Diving is the real reason most yachts come here

Emperor Divers, based at the marina jetty, runs both day boats to Elphinstone for oceanic whitetip and hammerhead encounters and multi-night liveaboard itineraries pairing Elphinstone with Daedalus and Fury Shoal. The desk could not source a single, dated, maritime-authority wind and season table specific to the Port Ghalib approach - the closest available guidance, from general Egypt climate sources rather than a marine pilot book, points to October through April as the more comfortable sailing window and April through October as the stronger diving season, an overlap that is only partial and worth planning around rather than assuming away.

Khamsin winds - hot, dry, dust-carrying southerlies - are a named seasonal hazard mainly across March to May, per general Egyptian climate sources rather than a yacht-specific pilot chart, and can reduce visibility with airborne dust for several days at a stretch when they blow. Fury Shoal, a third stop commonly paired with Elphinstone and Daedalus on multi-night liveaboard itineraries out of Port Ghalib, did not have an independently sourced distance figure from the marina in this research and should be confirmed with an operator directly. A captain planning a season that leans on both diving and comfortable passage-making should treat the two calendars as genuinely in tension rather than assuming one visit can optimise for both.

Getting there, and the airport nobody outside Egypt has heard of

The airlines actually serving Marsa Alam - Air Cairo, Corendon, EasyJet, Edelweiss, EGYPTAIR, Eurowings, Lufthansa, TUI's various national carriers and Wizz Air among them - read as a European winter-sun leisure network rather than a business-aviation gateway, which is consistent with the airport's short distance from the resort and its origin as part of the same concession that built the marina.

Hurghada's broader, more frequent connections make it the practical fallback for an owner on a tighter schedule, but it comes at the cost of the same three-hour drive that cruisers already use for chandlery runs and visa extensions - so a trip built around Hurghada effectively doubles as a logistics run rather than a pure transfer.

Para quién es: An owner routing a yacht between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean who wants the Red Sea's diving on the doorstep, and a captain willing to budget real days, not hours, for Egyptian clearance