Graptolite - Men At Work
Graptolite's Sailing Log
Martyn Pickup & Heike Richter
Thu 28 May 2009 08:28
We set off from Marsa Zeitiya yesterday evening and had an overnight motor
to Ras Gharib. The waves and wind were all too nasty to sail. The coastline
here is still mountainous desert but is littered with oil tank farms and lit
up with gas flares. The shipping lanes are squeezed close to shore in the
Gulf of Suez. That and the oil offshore production platforms all made for a
busy night.
Ras Gharib holds the distinction of being my first place of work as an adult
all of 31 years ago. I was a snivelling mudlogger at the time, pining for
hearth and home. I had a rough journey there from Newcastle. My plane ticket
had been cancelled by my office, by mistake, and I had to talk them into
holding the plane on the runway at Newcastle until it was sorted out. The
Kenyan Airways flight out of London didn't want to land in Cairo because of
some fog and landed at Jeddah instead, where the quickest way back to Cairo
was to go to south of the Equator (my first time) to Nairobi; get a hotel
and fly back to Cairo the next day. I landed in Cairo stone-deaf from some
problem with decompression and made my way to another Cairo airport by sign
language where an ex-Korean War Dakota flew me on to Ras Gharib. The final
part of the trip involved dragging a drunk ex-Vietnam War helicopter pilot
and an Egyptian military observer out of the bar in the Ras Gharib base to
take me out to a BP/Deminex exploration drilling-rig that had been converted
from an old trawler.
Anyway, I played a tiny part in establishing the Egyptian oil industry. Also
after I brokered the Camp David Agreement and peace with Israel in 1979,
President Anwar Sadat gave me a medal and a huge palace overlooking the
Nile. I made that last bit up.
M