Aswan Felucca Sailing Experience

Overview

An hour and a half under sail on the Nile at Aswan, in a private felucca with a local skipper, going out in the late afternoon for the light on the water and the islands.

What to expect

• Boarding at the felucca docks on the Corniche.
• A safety briefing and life jackets before casting off.
• Sailing out among the islands and granite outcrops.
• Time drifting or briefly at anchor for photographs.
• Return to the Corniche after around ninety minutes.

The wind goes one way and the river goes the other

This is the single most useful thing to know before you get on a boat here, and it shaped Egyptian civilisation.

The Nile flows north. The prevailing wind blows south. That coincidence means a sailing boat can go upstream on the wind and downstream on the current, so the river worked as a two-way road for thousands of years before anybody had an engine.

The ancient Egyptians built it into their writing. The hieroglyph for travelling south is a boat with its sail up; the hieroglyph for travelling north is a boat with the sail down. Direction and method were the same idea, and the symbols were used even for journeys that had nothing to do with the river.

Your felucca is doing exactly that. There is no motor. It goes out on the wind and comes back on the water.

The sail that lets you go where the wind isn't

A felucca carries a lateen sail — a long triangular sail hung from a spar set at a steep angle. It is old, it is not Egyptian in origin, and it changed navigation everywhere it spread.

A square sail pushes you downwind and little else. A lateen sail generates lift, like a wing, which means the boat can make progress at an angle to the wind and reach a destination the wind is not blowing towards. Watch the skipper work: the tacking, the boom swinging across, the constant small corrections. It looks casual and it is not.

Aswan is where the river changes character

You are sailing on a stretch that behaves differently from the rest of the Nile, because granite comes to the surface here.

Downstream the river runs broad and slow between fields. At Aswan it breaks around black granite outcrops and islands, shallow and fast in places, and historically it was unnavigable further south without portage. That is why Aswan was the frontier for most of Egyptian history — the natural limit of easy river travel, the trading post with Nubia, and the quarry that supplied obelisks to the whole country.

The rocks you sail past are the reason the town is here at all.

Practicalities

Feluccas depend on wind. In a flat calm the skipper may use a small motorised tow to get clear, and on a still evening the sail is more atmospheric than fast.

There is no shade on board beyond a canopy, no facilities, and the boat leans under sail, which is normal and disconcerting the first time. Boarding is a step down from the bank onto a moving deck. Take a layer for after sunset, when the temperature drops quickly on the water, and agree the arrangement with the skipper before departure rather than at the end.