I've Taken the Red Sea Off Our Route. The Cape Is the Harder Sail, and That's Fine.

The U.S. government's advice on taking a yacht through the Bab el Mandeb fits in one sentence. MARAD's current Red Sea advisory spends several pages telling commercial masters how to go dark on AIS, how to route away from Yemen, and whom to call at Fifth Fleet. Then it gets to boats like the one we're researching and says, flatly, that transit by yachts "is hazardous and may result in capture." The government advises against all operation of pleasure craft in those waters.

I've been carrying two versions of our Indian Ocean crossing in my head for about a year. One goes up the Red Sea and through Suez into the Mediterranean. The other goes down around South Africa and back into the Atlantic. I kept both alive because the Red Sea had quieted down: no commercial attacks from the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire through the first half of this year. This week I took it off the chart. Here's why, and what the Cape route actually asks of a family boat.

What changed this summer

On Tuesday the Africa Center for Strategic Studies published a tally that did most of the deciding for me. Since July there have been 12 Houthi attacks or attempted attacks on commercial ships in the southern Red Sea, including two ballistic missiles into an Egyptian cargo ship in the strait on August 11 that killed four sailors. Separately, the Gulf of Aden has logged at least 23 piracy attacks since April, after two years in which the Somali piracy threat had mostly gone quiet. The Houthis now hold Perim Island, the rock in the middle of the 20-mile-wide strait.

Two things about that list matter more to me than the headline count.

First, the threat stack is layered. It used to be one problem at a time. In 2011 it was pirates, and the Quest, a yacht carrying four Americans, became the reason a generation of cruisers went around Africa instead. In 2024 it was drones and missiles aimed at ships, and yachts were collateral risk at worst. In 2026 it's both at once, in the same 300 miles of water, with reporting that the pirate groups are using Houthi-supplied tracking gear.

Second, flag matters and we can't change ours. The MARAD advisory specifically calls out vessels with a U.S., U.K. or Israeli association as high risk. Our boat will be U.S.-flagged, with a U.S. family aboard, blogging under our real names. I'm not going to reason my way around that.

I'll admit the part of me that manages other people's money wanted to treat this like a volatility problem. Wait it out, the window reopens, you take the trade when the spread is right. That logic works when you can size the position. You can't take half a Red Sea transit with four kids.

What the Red Sea route actually bought you

It's worth being fair to the route I'm dropping, because it wasn't popular by accident.

The Red Sea puts a westabout boat in the Mediterranean. For a lot of circumnavigators that's the whole point of the back half: Greece, Turkey, Italy, a winter somewhere with a hardware store and a pediatrician, then out through Gibraltar and across with the ARC or on your own. It's the route that turns a sailing trip into a European year. For our kids, who will be somewhere between early grade school and preteen by that point, that year was one of the things I was most looking forward to.

It also keeps you close to land. From Djibouti to Suez is roughly 1,200 nautical miles, broken into short hops between anchorages in Sudan, Egypt and (historically) Eritrea. Nothing about it is an ocean passage in the Tonga-to-New Zealand sense.

What it never was: easy sailing. The southern Red Sea in winter gives you a decent southerly push. The northern half is a long beat into persistent northerlies, often 20 to 30 knots, with steep short seas and a lot of motoring from one reef-fringed anchorage to the next. I've read enough northbound accounts to know the phrase "we motor-sailed into it for four days" is the norm, not the complaint.

So the Red Sea trade was: moderate weather risk and hard upwind miles in exchange for the Med. The Cape trade is: serious weather risk and a coastline that punishes bad timing, in exchange for staying in the trade-wind loop and never passing within missile range of anyone.

The Cape route, leg by leg

For a boat leaving the Pacific westabout, the southern Indian Ocean route is the one the rallies already run. The rough shape of it, with the distances I'm planning around:

• Cocos (Keeling) to Mauritius: about 2,300 nm of southeast trades. Usually the fastest, rolliest leg of the trip.
• Mauritius to Réunion: about 130 nm. A day hop, and the jumping-off point.
• Réunion to Richards Bay: roughly 1,400 nm, passing south of Madagascar. Timed for October or early November, ahead of the southern Indian Ocean cyclone season.
• Richards Bay to Cape Town: about 930 nm of coastal passage, done in hops of 50 to 250 nm between Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth, Mossel Bay and Simon's Town.
• Cape Town to St Helena, then on to Brazil or the Caribbean: about 1,700 nm to St Helena and several thousand more in the southeast trades after that. The easiest ocean sailing on the whole circuit.

Two of those legs deserve respect, and the second one is the one people write books about.

The crossing from Réunion to Richards Bay is a weather-routing problem, not a stamina problem. You're crossing the path of fronts coming up from the Southern Ocean, and the approach to the South African coast is where the Agulhas Current starts. You want to arrive between systems. It's the same discipline as the Tonga-to-Opua window I've written about: pick the gap, not the day.

The 930 miles down the South African coast is the real test, and it's why I'm writing this now instead of in three years.

The Agulhas problem, and the rule I'm writing down now

The Agulhas Current runs southwest along the continental shelf edge at up to 4 or 5 knots in its core. On a normal day that's a gift: a 50-foot cat making 8 knots through the water is making 12 over the ground. The problem is what happens when a cold front comes through and the wind goes southwest. Now you have gale-force wind blowing straight against a multi-knot current over a steep shelf. The sea that builds is short, steep and occasionally enormous. This coast has a long record of big commercial ships damaged by freak waves, and a 15-meter catamaran is not a big commercial ship.

The local answer is almost boring in how consistent it is:

• Sit in port until a front has passed.
• Leave on the back of it, as the wind goes northeast, and ride the current down to the next harbor.
• Be tied up before the next southwesterly arrives. Windows are often two or three days.
• If you get caught, get out of the current. That generally means moving inshore of the shelf edge, into shallower water where the current is weaker, rather than trying to run offshore through the core of it.

Here's the rule I'm going to put in the passage plan now, three years early, so that future me can't negotiate with it: on the South African coast, we do not leave port unless the forecast shows us tied up at the next harbor with at least 12 hours to spare before the southwest change. If the gap is 36 hours and the leg is 30, we don't go. If the kids are bored and the marina is expensive and another boat is leaving, we still don't go.

That's a big part of why a family boat makes sense for this route in the first place. The boats that get hurt on this coast are mostly boats in a hurry: delivery skippers on a schedule, crews with flights home, people who left because the harbor was full. We will not have a schedule. We'll have a Christmas in Cape Town to aim for and a lot of flexibility on either side of it.

What it changes about the boat

This is where the route decision leaks into the boat decision, which is the part I actually care about this month.

Motoring range matters more than I'd weighted it. Hopping a weather window down a coast with a current behind you means you'll sometimes motor through a light-air morning to make the harbor before the change. A boat that carries 340 liters of diesel, like an older Outremer 51, is fine for this if the engines are healthy. A boat with small tanks and one tired saildrive is not. It moves engine hours, service history and fuel capacity up a notch on how I'm scoring listings.

Heavy-weather gear becomes a real line item, not a checkbox. I've already done the math on a Jordan Series Drogue bridle for a 50-foot cat. The Cape route is where that drogue is most likely to come out of its bag in anger, and it's where I'd want a crew that has practiced deploying it in 25 knots, not read about it.

Daggerboards earn their keep. Clawing off a lee shore or holding a course inshore of the current in a building southwesterly is easier on a boat that points. It's one more nudge toward the performance-cruising end of the market, where I keep landing anyway.

Insurance language needs to match the chart. When I priced cover for a $1.2 million cat, the real differences hid in the policy wording, and navigation limits are exactly that kind of clause. Some policies exclude the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden outright or push them into a war-risk endorsement. That used to feel like a cost to argue about. Now it's a clause I'm happy to accept, and I'll want South Africa and the Agulhas coast written plainly into the covered cruising area instead.

What I'm giving up, and what I'm doing next

The cost of this decision isn't the extra miles, since the Cape route is the natural path for a westabout loop that ends in the Caribbean anyway. The cost is the Mediterranean. If we want our kids to have a European year, it now has to be a separate plan: an Atlantic crossing after the circumnavigation closes, or a shipped boat, or a year ashore. None of those are bad options. They're just not free, and I'd rather name that now than pretend the Cape is a straight swap.

I'll also say the obvious: this could change. The Red Sea has reopened before and it may again by the time we're anywhere near Sri Lanka. If it does, I'll look at it. But I'm not going to keep two routes alive in the plan anymore, because a plan with two Indian Ocean crossings is a plan that doesn't budget properly for either one.

So the next three things on my list are specific. I'm pulling five years of late-October to December GRIB data for the Réunion to Richards Bay crossing to see how often a clean six-day gap actually shows up. I'm reading every South African coast log I can find from the rally fleets to count how many days boats actually spent waiting in Durban and East London, which tells me how much slack to build into the calendar. And I'm moving "fuel range and engine condition" up the scoring weights on the worksheet, which will quietly reshuffle a couple of the boats on my shortlist.

If you've done the South African coast with kids aboard, I'd like to hear how long you sat in port waiting for weather. That number will tell me more than any chart.