Hurghada tide times

Hurghada runs along the western shore of the Red Sea where the Eastern Desert meets the coast in a long strip of resort marinas, the original fishing-port old town at El Dahar, and the modern Marina Boulevard development at the south end. The marina, with the white minaret of El Mina Mosque rising above the harbour wall and the line of dive boats, glass-bottom tour boats, and small-fleet fishing craft moored along the stone quay, is the operational centre of the Hurghada coast. Offshore, the Giftun Islands — Big Giftun and Small Giftun — sit eight to ten kilometres east, the closest of the Hurghada island chain and the standard daily destination for the snorkelling and dive boats that leave the marina each morning.

The Mahmya beach on the western shore of Big Giftun, the long sand spit at Small Giftun, and the reef channel between the two islands are the day-trip standards. South of the city, the Sahl Hasheesh bay holds a separate resort coast with its own arc of fringing reef and the Old Town pier reaching out to the offshore reef edge, and beyond that the Safaga and El Quseir reaches continue south toward Marsa Alam. The tide here is semidiurnal and small.

Mean astronomical range at Hurghada is about 50 to 80 cm; spring tides at new and full moons push toward the upper end of that band, and neaps compress toward 30 to 40 cm. Two highs and two lows of similar size each day, roughly 12 hours 25 minutes apart. That is enough range on a fringing-reef coast to drain the inner reef flat at low water — visibly so on the long shallow shelves at Giftun Saghir, off the Mahmya beach on Big Giftun, and along the reef terrace south of Sahl Hasheesh — and to change the shore-entry depth at the house reefs by half a metre between the highs and lows.

The fringing-reef geometry here is consistent along the entire Hurghada coast: a narrow shore strip, a shallow reef flat 50 to 200 metres wide, the reef edge breaking, and the wall dropping to 30 metres or more on the seaward side. The shore-entry house reefs at Sahl Hasheesh, El Mina, and the El Dahar headland follow the same template. Wind matters.

The prevailing northerly down the Red Sea length stacks water against the southern coast in steady summer weather and relaxes level along the Hurghada reach when the wind eases or shifts. The seasonal Khamsin transition in spring and autumn brings stronger southerlies and noticeable surge against the Marina Boulevard breakwater. Dive-charter operators schedule the day around the change of wind and the predicted slack between flood and ebb at the offshore island sites; the slack window — about 30 to 45 minutes either side of the predicted high or low — is the low-current drift window.

Shore anglers along the rocky points north of El Dahar work the incoming tide for grouper and snapper on the reef edge, and the kitesurf coast at El Gouna and the bay between Hurghada and Safaga sees its strongest sessions on the steady summer northerly. The Egyptian Hydrographic Department operates the gauge network along the Red Sea coast and is the authoritative source for tide and water-level data — the reference to consult for any reef navigation, marina pilotage, or commercial dive-boat scheduling. The predictions on this page come from Open-Meteo Marine, a gridded global ocean model.

3 metres on height. For a coast with mean range under a metre, that uncertainty is a non-trivial fraction of the total signal. Treat the predicted highs and lows as the rhythm of the day and weight the Egyptian Hydrographic Department gauge data and the local dive-operator briefing for any decision that depends on precise water level.