Sean O'Brien, Pro Windsurfer – seanobrien.com.au™

I had to make a separate post for the windsurfing photos as there were just too many taken in Egypt! Dahab is an incredible place to sail and over 2 weeks we had conditions from super light to nuking +35 knots and sailed in many locations from the flatwater freestyle spots of Speedy Bay and Kamikaze (near the surf-clubs in the tourist areas) to driving north past the famous dive locations like Blue Hole, to find our own private reefs! I brought with me all my new Starboard iSonics to test and a bunch of sails from slalom to wave kit. Travelling with me was Markus Bouman and of course as always, the 400kg we managed to check-in for FREE with AlphaStar airlines also included all the camera gear I could muster.

Sadly, I lost one of my small cameras when I stupidly let a tiny piece of hair fall in to the waterproof housing which broke the seal whilst I was snorkelling (hello, waterlogged camera) and also took a full-wave over my Canon 7D which did actually manage to survive somehow! Good times. Enjoy the pics!

This is a video I shot on a recent trip to the Sinai Desert in Egypt. Travelling with some Dutch and Polish friends, we spent 2 weeks based in Dahab then with an old-school rented Jeep, we travelled as far as we could north in to Bedouin country to explore this amazing country and culture. Dahab really is an amazing place to windsurf with plenty of reefs and secret spots you can get to by car; windy everyday and still with the revolution fresh in everyone’s minds, there are barely any tourists around.

Most of the footage was shot by Markus Bouman (NED-6) and myself, completely handheld (tripod broke and we couldn’t get a slidetrack or dolly on the plane).

We used a combination of Canon 7D, Canon SX210 and a GoPro HD for the moving car and helmet-cam shots. No housings were used during shooting and as a result we nearly wrecked all 3 cameras!

The sequence of me throwing a hat and sunglasses on whilst standing on the roof of our villa is actually a series of 257 individual photographs I processed with Topaz Adjust 4 plugin in Photoshop and stitched together.

Go to Egypt one day and ride a camel. You won’t be disappointed.

Music used is “Complacency No Vacancy” by a favourite Australian band of mine called Children Collide.

Looking for some places to do some slalom training before the PWA Pro Tour event in South Korea next month, I discovered my good Dutch buddy Markus Bouman’s family has a house in Dahab, Egypt. 12 hours drive from Italy later I was sitting with Markus in Warsaw airport with 400kg of windsurfing gear and ready to go stalking camels.

We got super lucky with this trip, as the wind was perfect nearly every day of our 2-week stay. The house is away from the tourist areas where the surf-clubs and hotels are located, in the Bedouin town of Assalah, so we really got an opportunity to explore this amazing culture, away from the cliche tourist perception of Dahab. We rented a very old-school and falling-apart jeep, and despite the fact we spent more time learning how to Macguiver broken engine parts back together, we got amazing opportunities to drive north through the desert and windsurf in places no tourists have likely windsurfed; our own private reefs with only desert Bedouins for miles and miles. Mix in some snorkelling, camel rides, parties with the plethora of English tourists who frequent this town and plenty of late night Vodka escapades with our Polish friends and this was a perfect way to spend two weeks. Stay tuned shortly for the windsurfing pics and some movies that we shot during our stay…