Sailing Stories: The Dhow

We were beating upwind with the mainsail pulled tight, but it felt like the boat was going backwards. It had started blowing early that morning, right on the nose, slamming the hull against the waves, and knocking me around the galley as I boiled water for a cup of tea. Richard turned on the engine, what sailors refer to as the “iron jenny,” to help inch our way forward, but the 33-foot sloop was making little headway. We were in the middle of the Indian Ocean and running out of fuel. Without it, we’d never be able to reach Dubai before the winds would jackhammer the sailboat day and night, marking the official start of monsoon season.

I climbed up the ladder and poked my head out the companionway, trying not to spill what little was left of the tea. “Jesus.” Another wave smacked the boat, jolting me to the spot next to Richard in the cockpit. I braced my feet against the other side. “What are we going to do?” I asked.

“Is that a dhow?” he said.

I looked out to the horizon and sure enough, there was dhow. Just like that, I had my answer.

Dhows are the lifeblood of the Middle East. They transport everything from timber to dates to fish along the ancient shipping lanes that connect the ports of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. The wooden sailing ships come in all sizes, some a sweep of a teak hull with a massive triangle of a sail, others with intricate carvings on their galleon-shaped transoms. I thought this one looked like the Noah’s ark in the book that my Sunday school teacher Mrs. Frantz had read to us. I doubted we’d find animals two by two (although a pair of giraffes that were given as a gift to Emperor Yongle of China in 1414 arrived from Malindi by dhow), but I knew they would have fuel.

Richard brought the boat around as I let out the sail, and we headed for the dhow.

I am a blond-haired woman traveling in the Middle East. It is 1984. Iran and Iraq are at war. Libya is mining the Red Sea with explosives to blow up tankers and disrupt shipping. My mom is back home in Kentucky wondering if I’ve been killed in the crossfire. I am sure of this because when I called her from the phone booth in London to tell her I was doing this delivery through the Middle East, she was doing her damnedest to convince me not to. “Darling, you can’t be serious,” she said as I fed coins through the slot. “I know I thought this would be a great adventure for you a couple of months ago, but they’re blowing up ships for Christ’s sake.”

As we approach the dhow, I am thinking about a story that a fellow sailor we met in Port Said told us over dinner at a Korean restaurant. A French woman was raped by pirates in the Red Sea while she and her husband were anchored off the coast of East Africa, not far from Djibouti. “She was wearing a bikini,” he said. I went below and pulled on a long cotton skirt that I bought at a street market in Athens over my bikini bottoms and put on a shirt that covered my arms, buttoning it up all the way to my neck.

____________________

This wasn’t the first time we had run out of fuel since leaving Cyprus three weeks earlier. It was a beautiful evening when we sailed out of the marina in Larnaca. We were on a beam reach and making good time as the sun made its slow descent into the Med, leaving a tangerine haze in its wake. I felt as free as the seagulls gliding by. I steered the boat toward Egypt, luxuriating in the salt air and steady breeze. But by the time Richard came on watch at midnight, the wind had shifted. The bow and waves had been in a perpetual slap fight ever since. He had turned on the engine and by the time we reached Port Said at the top of the Suez Canal the next morning we were out of fuel.

“Watch out!” I yelled. The hulls of rusty tankers at anchor towered above us. Tugs pushed and pulled container ships. A boat ferrying supplies to one of the ships zipped in front of us. I was oscillating between fear of colliding with another vessel and awe at the spectacle of it all as we tacked our way around the controlled chaos. We were following the pilot boat to the small yacht club where sailboats dock before transiting the Suez Canal. I’m sure the captain thought we were nuts coming in under sail. I did not disagree.

I was poised on the bow, line in hand and ready to jump onto the dock, when a man came running up to take the line. He wore shorts, bleached by the sun and tattered by the sea, and no shirt. He was unshaven and tanned to leather. He looked like he had been marooned on a desert island. As I came to find out, that wasn’t too far off.

He had barely secured the line to the cleat before he asked, “Do you have any liquor?” We did.

The night before we left Cyprus we were drinking in café by the marina with the owner of the boat, a British ex-pat working in the oil industry in Bahrain. He had hired us to deliver his boat to Dubai where he would then take over to sail it into to Bahrain as if the wanker had done the delivery himself.

He had bottles of gin, Ouzo and other spirits leftover from a summer of sailing on the Med with his wife and friends. We discussed the pros and cons of bringing the liquor with us. You never know when you might need a port in the storm, and per international maritime law, a foreign vessel can seek “safe harbor” from a bad storm at any port. However, if we had to take shelter in Saudi Arabia, we could be jailed for bringing alcohol into the country. Hell, we were an unmarried man and woman traveling together and could be arrested for that alone. Ultimately, the thought of not being able to have a stiff drink after making it through a big storm or as a happy hour cocktail on a calm day to toast the sunset won out. We decided we could dump the booze overboard if we needed to.

It is a complicated and maddening process transiting the Suez Canal that involves a lot of baksheesh, bribes, which we paid in cartoons of Marlboro cigarettes and Cadbury chocolate bars. Do you have a rudder on this sailboat? That will be a cartoon of smokes. Do you have sails on this sailboat? That’ll be six candy bars. I didn’t mind. People need jobs. But as a a blond-haired, blue-eyed American woman, I was an anomaly in these parts, a curiosity to be studied, and studied I was.

We invited our new friend—and every fellow sailor you meet in far flung places is an instant friend—on the boat for tea. He told us that he had worked in Ronald Reagan’s administration when he was the governor of California, and that he had also served in Reagan’s administration when he was president. But he was hazy on the particulars, saying only that he decided to retire and sail around the world. He was in the process of doing just that when he got stuck in Djibouti for eight months, while waiting for a part for his boat. Djibouti is a Muslim country on the Horn of Africa as dry as a county in the hills of Kentucky. “What a hell hole,” he said. “Man, can a guy get a drink?

That night he returned to the boat for cocktails. Tagging along was his first mate, a cheerful guy from Sudan, who had prepared a vegetable curry for the occasion. He gave a manila envelope for our new friend. The return address noted that it was from Ed Meese, who was currently serving as an advisor to President Reagan. It was then that I decided that he worked for the CIA. What better cover than to be a retired American sailing around the world? I’ll admit that Ed Meese actually putting his name on the envelope was a bit obvious, but there was something about our new friend that was a little slick.

Over gin and tonics he shared stories of all of the people he knew who had been pirated, in addition to the couple off the coast of Djibouti. “I’d give you a gun, but I’ve already given all of them away except one.” All he had left was a bean bag gun, which as the name implies, shoots bean bags, and apparently packs quite a punch. It is more likely to break some ribs or knock the wind out of someone, but I reckoned that would at least give you enough time to throw a pirate overboard.

The lack of a gun was a sore subject with me. We had debated this with Peter, who owned the delivery company we worked for. It would certainly be handy to have if we were pirated, but we could also be thrown in jail in most of the Middle Eastern countries where we might have to seek shelter if customs found the gun. And customs would board the boat to look around. We had a spear fishing gun, but that was worthless out of the water.

____________________

I felt a low level of dread as we approached the dhow.

I hung two fenders over the side of the boat as a buffer. I tied a line to the cleat and threw it up to the guy on the dhow. The prow of the dhow was high and it swayed like a gourd floating on the sea.

I tossed the line up to a man dressed in a white robe and wearing a turban. Pantomiming was our only way to communicate. Richard pointed at the red plastic jerrycan while raising it up to the man. The man smiled and nodded his head and took the jerrycan and disappeared. The men standing on the deck behind him stared. Everyone smiled. The man returned with a basket of oranges and passed it down to Richard, nodding his head and smiling, an act of generosity and kindness to fellow seafarers. Another man appeared with the jerrycan filled with fuel. Richard held up a fistful of British pounds, but the man shook his head no. He cast off our lines and waved along with the other men as the sailed away.

And just like that, we were back in business. Richard turned on the engine and we headed for Oman.