Cruising the Persian Gulf Well-known world cruiser and author Eric Hiccup discovers a unique and newsworthy gunkholer's paradise.

fter 15 years of touring the globe in my 42-foot ketch Wandering Wind VI, I recently decided to leave the well-beaten cruising track and make

for more adventurous waters. I'd heard intriguing rumor.s about the Persian Gulf- about fabulous wealth, serene dune-enclosed anchorages, smugglers, war. Well, never having seen a war zone, and never one to acoept a rumor with­out a firsthand look, I decided to give the Gulf a try.

Navigation, Gulf-style (above). At right, Wandering Wind approaches the stark and forbidding Strait ofHormuz.

rose vertically from the sea. That's when we had our first encounter with a tanker.

It came up astern without a sound.

In Singapore I cashed in the royalty check from my 16th book, The Insuf­ficient Sailor (Porpoise Press, $14.95), and picked up a couple of crew. After outrunning a typhoon up the Malacca Straits, weathering a string of Bay of Bengal gales and dodging waterspouts in the Arabian Sea, we thankfully slid into a glaring Gulf of Oman calm. The next five days, in which we made only 12 miles, gave me time to read up on our next leg through the infamous Straits of Hormuz-lair of gunboats, supertank­ers and terrorists. We also found time to recut and resew our Bve headsails, re­paint the topsides, inventory our hard­ware and canned goods and carve a

chess set. With the help of the northerly cur­

rent, we eventually sighted the rugged coast of the magical kingdom of Oman. Sawtooth mountains and sheer cliffs

The wind suddenly died just as a shadow feU across the sails. ~ turned our beads and stared in horror at a great black and rust-red wall that seemed to be toppling over on us. Caught in a mael­strom of white water, we were burled to the side of the vessel at express-train

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1:-\.lliTING, A Parody

Once you've been roused before d~ b~ the amplified chorus of dozens of mueZZin calhng the faithful to prayer, or seen the pre-Biblical spectacle of a public execution, then you're hooked.

speed, emerging from the confusion with only a few scratches on the hull and a rust stain on the genoa. As the ship left us wallowing in her wake, we were treated to the sobering sight of her name-PETROX LEVIATHAN­painted in 30-foot-high white letters across the stem.

Several hours late.~; we sighted the famous Strait-that strategic bottle­neck exit to the Gulf which is the only way out for much of the western world's oil, and was the only way in for us. In the distance it looked like an open door among high barren cliffs-mysterious and treacherous. Then we heard a clunk against Wandering Wind's hull. I ran forward to find the water dotted with Boating mines. Fortunately, they were the magnetic sort and hadn't been trig­gered by our cypress-and-oak hull. Us­ing experience gained while dodging lobster pots in Maine, we snaked our way through the minefield without inci­dent. About half an hour later, though, we saw a small freighter far astern lifted out of the water by an explosion; all you steel-hulled sailors take note (see my eighth book, A Wooden Boat for the Long Haul, Porpoise Press, $8.95).

As might be expected, the real trou­ble started after dark. Unbeknownst to

me at the time, we ghosted into the five­mile exclusion zone around the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Indulgence. They had ap­parently been bailing us on the radio for 30 minutes, demanding our identity. I, of course, have never carried a radio or other electronics (see my third book, Sailing for Simple People, Porpoise Press, $12.9.5).

Our first inrucation that something was wrong was the Bare. We heard a hissing whistle. Suddenly, a star was hom directly above us. A blinding white light slowly drifted out of the sky. show­ering us with sparks. The second indica­tion was the w.aming shot: a shrill, hollow whine, a thud and a waterspout 30 yards off the starboard bow. An amplified voice boomed out of the night just as the carrier's deck lights flashed on. It looked like we were sailing to­ward midtown Manhattan.

Quickly taking in the situation, I grabbed our tattered American ensign, leaped to the foredeck and started wav­ing it back and forth in the glare of the searchlights that blazed from the two attack helicopters now flanking us. We soon got things straightened out. They even tossed us a CARE package of sirloin steaks and Budweiser before dis­appearing into the darkness.

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Crude appears in many fonns on the Gulf, from outbound oil (above) to nath·e craftsmanship (below).

Rather than continue on that night, we decided to put in toward shore, anchoring over a shoal in the lee of a jagged island beneath the cliffs. The only sounds were the lapping of the waves against the rocks and the echo­ing, hollow screech of some birds, ap­parently nesting high on the cliff face.

At dawn we saw a great flock of massive vulture-like creatures wheeling and gliding high above in the shadows. We couldn't identify them, though, not even using my seventh book, Bird­watching for Boat People (Porpoise Press, with color illustrations, available in oversize, spiral-bound paperback, $15.95). The deck, howeve~; looked like someone had dropped half a dozen cans of white house paint on it. And it smelled far worse than it looked. Need­less to say, don't anchor near the cliffs! It took us hours to clean up the mess.

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If you have to haul out, Dubai has the best facilities. The drydock can haul out any vessel up to 500,000 tons.

That afternoon we finally made it to the Strait. After all we'd heard about Iranian gunboats and Iraqi missiles, it was a bit of a letdown: just a gap in the rocks. We were so busy looking for man­made dangers, we forgot the natural kind-that is, until the wind started to pick up. Suddenly the sun dimmed, turning a strange yellow-brown. Before we knew what was happening, a blister­ing gust knocked Wandering Wind flat. With a fiendish bowl, a second gust swept toward us, ripping off wavetops as it advanced. But it wasn't the force of this wind that worried me; it was tbe color-beige. Sandstorm! Grabbing a diving mask and foul weather gear, I told the crew to lower the sails and get below. I hunkered down behind the wheel, and within minutes the flying sand had etched the mask's faceplate to a milky translucence. Heaven knows

A Parody. YAAHTING / 1984

launch driver against a colorful Mideastern backdrop.

hat it would have done to my eyes. I was beginning to get used to the grit m~· teeth and the rapidly rising dunes the cockpit when the wind dropped uv<UUJ~:.. But my sigh of relief was

by the rain. It only rains, on .-:rage, three times a decade in the

but when it does rain, it comes in truckloads. That's when I

ound out what happens when desert j.md mixes with water. The deck dunes ~tantly acquired the consistency of

utterscotch pudding. .\)most as quickly as it had started,

.;ue rain stopped; the sun came out once -::ain and with it, the burning desert "'!Ild. In no time the pudding had hard­r.ed into a kiln-baked clay. Then I ;.eard a muffied thumping. It took a JlOment before I realized that the crew I ~ become entombed below. Wielding "tlr small fisherman's anchor like a pick-

:14 1YAAHTING, A P.arody

'A blistering gust knocked Wandering Wind flat. With a fiendish howl, a second gust swept toward us, ripping off the wavetops as it advanced. But it wasn't the force of this wind that worried me; it was the color-beige. Sandstorm!

axe, I soon chipped a passage through to the companionway.

After this harrowing experience, we decided to put in toward Abu Dhabi Doo, an isolated cove about 15 miles inside the Strait to clean up and repaint. A mistake. Pirates .

You know how I feel about pirates. I've linked every one of those wildly exaggerated horror stories to a single incident that happened in the Red Sea in 1971, when Swedish singlehander Jan Borkedlorfer was boarded by Laotian refugees masquerading as a cruising couple from Indiana (see "Food & Peo­ple," p. 22) who ate his dog and burned his nautical almanac.

Well, I've changed my tune. While pulling in around the sandy peninsula that makes up one side of Abu Dhabi Doo, we were overtaken by a high­powered dhow. Through binoculars, I

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could see shrouded faces, the glint of mirrored sunglasses and gun barrels. A sudden burst of machine-gun fire churned the water ahead of our bow, one bullet neatly splinte~g the teak toerail I had just installed in Singapore. I decided to implement Pirate Defense NumberS.

You see, even though I had totally downgraded the threat of piracy, I didn't totally discount it. Several years ago I secretly put together: a series of pirate defenses, using simple tech­niques and readily available materials. They are as follows:

1) Plague Defense: Paint bright red spots all over skin surfaces of the crew. Paint lips blue. Have crew lie around moaning, spitting, gagging, glassy eyed.

2) Modified Joshua Slocum De­fense: Dump several boxes of short tacks on deck, along with several boxes of ball-bearings. Then go below and plug your ears.

3) "Kill them with kindness" De­fense: Break open the ship's store of booze-whiskey. rum, gin, the lot. Leave it all on deck, but not before you've laced each bottle with mega­doses of Dramamine, Ex-Lax and Sominex. Bar the companionway from within, wait an hour, then all you have to do is roll the snoring scum off the deck.

4) Flaming Funnelator Defense: This is my personal favorite; it keeps them at a distance and keeps them distracted. If you've ever been be­calmed during a Labor Day Weekend Regatta or the like, you're probably familiar with the funnelator-an over­size slingshot, made of a heavy-duty funnel and stretchy surgical tubing­that is capable of heaving water bal­loons great distances with remarkable accuracy. With slight modifications, this can be a devastating pirate stopper: Fill several balloons, condoms or baggies with gasoline or lighter fluid. Set your loaded Bare gun nearby. Let fly toward the attackers, aiming for the deckhouse, a sail, or an open batch. Fire a flare at the splattered spot where the balloons hit, and voila-Pirate Flambe!

Because the pirates we were dealing with looked particularly vicious-and because they'd ruined our new toerail - 1 decided to employ my fifth No Nonsense Defense. I have picked up lots of valuable hardware for bargain­basement prices at CIA Counterinsur­gency surplus gear auctions: a ship's taffrail log, a gyro-compass from an

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rd heard intriguing rumors about the Persian Gulf-about fabulous wealth, serene dune­enclosed anchorages, smugglers, war.

F-15 and a radar detector. But the best buy was a multipurpose grenade launch­er and a box of assorted grenades. I stow it deep in the bilge, but I soon had it out and loaded. With a ftash and a thwump I launched the first grenade. It landed square in their tender and blasted off the transom. The next two I fired were gas grenades. The approaching dhow was instantly enveloped in a pall of choking chemical fog. We tacked away to windward and were soon out to sea, safe and sound.

ou're probably now think­ing that the Gulf is a pretty unpleasant place. Well, you're wrong. We did have a bit of bad luck at the begin­ning. But you all know that

every cruising ground has its bad points-Maine's mosquitoes, lobster pots, soupy fogs; the Med's charter fleets and fickle winds. The Gulf is different. Once you get to know its secret spots, once you get a handful of pearls from a local diver in trade for a couple of tacky T-shirts, once you've been roused before dawn by the am­plified wailing chorus of dozens of muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, or seen the pre-Biblical spectacle of a public execution, then you're hooked. It's a truly magical place.

Here are a few of my favorite spots: For sheer adventure, you'd be hard pressed to beat the Shatt al 'Arab water­way. a deep channel through the marsh­lands between Iran and Iraq which has been contested for more than a century. It can be dicey. but if you go between offensives (these usually occur in the spring), you shouldn't have much of a problem.

Local knowledge also helps you steer

clear of trouble. For txample, we learned a simple trick for warding off guided missiles from a friendly Kuwaiti dhow captain: At the first sign of trou­ble (most attacking aircraft make a pre­liminary pass to look you over), send someone up the mast with a big bag of shredded aluminum foil (always keep a pile handy). Have the crewman toss handfuls of the metal confetti into the wind. We befuddled the radar guidance systems of two missiles that way.

To experience Islam in all its raw fervor and color, pull into some of the small coastal towns of Iran. We found Khawr Khomeini, Ras al Khomeini and Bandar Khomeini all particularly fasci­nating. One proviso. Keep your Ameri­can Bag out of sight. And female cruisers should pick up a chador or two-these are the black potato-sack cloaks worn by Iranian women in public.

If you have to haul out, Dubai has the best facilities. The drydock there can haul out any vessel up to 500,000 tons. (If you're cruising with friends you can all haul out together and have a bottom­scraping party.)

Of all the stops we made, the Abu Dhabi Sailing Club was the best. I like my sailing simple, but when I pull into port, it's nice to have more than just the creature comforts. At this sleek country club of a marina, we found what w~ needed. and much more. Each slip has shore power outlets, hot and cold run­ning water, cable TY, telephone and telex hookups, even an intercom to call for bar, meal or maid service. Watch where you plug in for power, though. We spoke with one Canadian sailor who accidentally tied in to the shore power outlet of the Abu Dhabi Minister of Culture and Finance. The unknowing sailor was sentenced to amputation of his right hand. Fortunately. after his embassy intervened, his punishment was reduced to the loss of two fingers.

We finally dragged ourselves away from Abu Dhabi, and after four fas­cinating months, headed out of the Gulf. As the sun set behind us, slowly sinking into the cloud of smoke rising from the gas bumoff of the offshore oil rigs, I couldn't help but wonder when I'd be able to return to this fascinating place. Even before the Strait of Hor­muz dropped over the horizon astern, I got out my battered typewriter and in the fading sunlight started work on my 18th book, Wandering Winds Arabian Adventure. ~

A Parod)l YAAHTING I 1984