Biking and Diving the Coloured Seas

Motorcycling and scuba diving represent two great forms of freedom where you can enjoy exposure to nature first hand. If it’s not the wind on your face or experiencing the open air while riding a powerful KTM bike then being underwater with the fish, corals and shipwrecks with a tank on your back is closer still. The Coloured Seas Trip begins in June 2011 in Sharm El Sheikh. Yann Vautrin and John Kean are dive instructors and motorcyclists.

They will cover 16,000 km and dive the leading ship wrecks of the Coloured Seas from Egypt to Murmansk in Northern Russia. The Red Sea, Black Sea and White Sea are included in their ten country trip, each with a unique diving and land-based story to tell.

With no support vehicles and only the luggage they carry, the entire trip to is on two, KTM 990 Adventure S Motorcycles equipped with modern communication systems and GPS. Follow this first-of-its-kind long distance dive and motorbike journey here where you can obtain daily updates.

The main intention is to stay with the divers and bikers we meet on the trip.
This is a much better way of learning about a country and what life there is really like. There is always written material but nothing is more realistic than being there and hearing the spoken word. We have many leads and contacts as a result of meeting thousands of visiting divers during the time spent here in Egypt. Hotels will be for limited occasional use and for some of the journey we will camp near to the roadside. 
Places of interest are many, but the aim is to pick up information along the way, speak to people about exciting places and leave some things to chance. The emphasis is on independent travel and exploration.

We don’t believe that a self-supporting, scuba diving and biking dedicated trip of this distance has ever been done before. We will expand upon our own efforts in uniting these two pastimes by encouraging the dive centres we visit to open their doors to bikers and offer special introductory dives between members. We hope there will be an exchange of sports to some degree along the way!

It all comes down to attitude with these two pastimes. Many top technical deep divers in the world ride motorbikes. We have both dived beyond 100m on trimix gas and that requires a healthy sense of self-preservation and approach ideally suited to long distance motorcycling too.

 We consider our lengthy ex-pat stay in Egypt ideal grounding for this long trip where we expect to be greeted with varying levels of incidents and obstacles. Our trip is a reminder of what can be achieved through life outside the brochure, a sense of adventure, a lot of creativity and some help from our friends. What better way to achieve that with a tank of petrol ...and a tank of air!