Page 260 - The Tigris Expedition

Tigris and the Superships: the Voyage to Pakistan
turned Tigris stern to wind at the anchorage and sailed straight off

^Thc faint wind blew from sse, and there was no sign of the s,t]rongf
ne winter monsoon we could have expected in the mi c °
January. Our sailing speed was so slow that we found ourselves
unable to tack with our small sail, and we had to take the feeble
wind in from starboard and sail north again in a direction that barely
cleared a lofty black cape jutting into the sea north of Port Qaboos.
Jokingly I suggested to the crew that we had been to Makan, and
that we ought now to sail back north again to visit the Indus Valley
we had missed. In reality we had planned to sail southwards to
Africa, hoping to get the winter monsoon at our backs.
We had the tall mountains and rock islands of Oman within sight
until dusk. Then we could see only a few bright lights which soon
sank into the sea, and as night fell only the faint glow in the sky told
us the direction of Muscat and Matrah. But long before dark we
began to see a familiar sight: the masts and bridge-houses of distant
ships forming an uninterrupted line along the eastern horizon.
What had looked like white houses soon rose from the horizon and
became parts of large ships, one behind the other. Wc were once
more in the very midst of the shipping lane, trying to cross it. The
horrible, brutal and unrhythmic side-rolling in the deep, shortly
spaced wakes of the superships began again, and so did the ferocious
hammering and unmelodic cat-orchestra special to an irritated
reed-ship. On my midnight watch with Detlef we barely escaped
collision as a small cargo ship came straight for us and we were both
able to turn aside only at the very last moment.
The next day, before sunrise, the wind changed from sse to nnw
and we turned to steer 130° with sail filled and at good speed. In the
afternoon we adjusted our course to steer just clear of Ras al Hadd,
the easternmost cape of Oman, where thc Arabian peninsula forms
a right-angle corner and falls off in the direction of the Gulf of Aden.
Only now did we begin to realise that a serious problem was
brewing on board. Norris, usually happy and cheerful, had sud­
denly become sullen and quite beside himself. We all knew why.
On our last day ashore, travelling in Paolo Costa’s Land Cruiser
through the prehistoric Coppermine area, we had lost our way in the
network of wadis and canyons, and the bumping over rocks and
gravel banks had been so rough that something in Norris’s specially
constructed sound camera was shaken to bits. He had been fiddling
with all his spare parts almost without food and sleep until it
became clear that nothing could be done except in a laboratory.
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