Page 203 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
otherwise cabins and all would have been washed overboard. But
we danced about like a duck, preventing the seas from getting any
sort of grip on us. Our only dangers were land or ships.
It was Carlo’s mountain-climbing fingers that eventually
loosened the jammed rope while half a dozen of the men hung with
all their bodyweight on the halyard to reduce its drag on the knot.
Deep imprints of the twisted rope were left in the wood of the
bridge rail as the halyard was untied and the sail came down.
Norman replaced the broken block, and, with HP lashed on to the
waving mast-top, the sail came up again at an adjusted angle,
enabling the two helmsmen to turn Tigris on to course. Breakfast
porridge was now consumed standing, as the choppy sea sent heavy
spray into cups and pots left unguarded. A single wanton cross-
wave managed once to chase across from side to side between the
two cabins, sweeping everything off the table and leaving us all
drenched to chest-level.
If the little spot we had last seen ahead at sunrise was our dhow, it
was not heading for the Hormuz Strait, but for some part of the
Arabian shore further south. With this westerly wind we were now
in a perfect position to sail for the Hormuz Strait but we could not
abandon Rashad penniless among unknown sailors. We turned
more south-easterly, in the approximate direction taken by the
dhow.
This was a desperate situation; the sea was now so rough that the
two helmsmen had to pay the utmost attention to every wave and
deviating wind-gust in order not to lose steering control once more.
We trailed our red buoy aft in case anyone should be washed
overboard, but each of us had a personal lifeline tied around the
waist, with strict orders to lash the loose end to any part of the rig or
superstructure except when in a safe location inside the basketry
walls of either of the two cabins. A six-foot shark came for a while
to play seemingly in a friendly manner with the dancing buoy. It
was the first big fish we had seen in this area apart from some tall,
sharp fins that on a few occasions had emerged from the waves
around us, resembling those of swordfish.
By midday we found ourselves for the first time in a terribly
polluted area. Small clots and large slices of solidified black oil or
asphalt floated closely packed everywhere in a manner that clearly
testified to recent tanker washings. But the black tar soup was all
mixed with bobbing cans, bottles and other refuse, and an incred­
ible quantity of solid, usable wood: logs, planks, boards, cases, grids
and large sheets of ply wood. One such sheet carried a deadly yellow

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