Early Sailing Experience

For me, boating, sailing, and yachting weren’t always under the red, blue, and white ensign of the RYA. They weren’t necessarily British activities. Nor was life always conducted in English. Before TOEFL, TESL, IGCSEs, and university degrees, there were just people and a fair bit of chaos.

I wasn’t 16 yet and didn’t even have an Egyptian ID card. The question was often, how well do you know yourself? and I couldn’t always say with confidence that I did. If I knew myself so well, there was no need for one, and if that card was the only evidence, the only proof that I’m me, then what a pathetic system I was buying into. But I had a passport, because I was flying to and fro before most Egyptians had heard of aeroplanes. This was the 80s/90s.

It was a basic booklet with a plastic cover and a stapled photograph, laminated onto the page with translucent green sphinxes to show authenticity. My personal details were penned in such poor handwriting that, at passport control, I was often met with a quiet sympathy – for the state of the Egyptian nation, and for its young representative standing patiently, curiously eager to see what the next step might bring.

Limited Knowledge

I knew port from starboard, but sterns and bows – if I’d ever heard those words before – meant something else entirely. A bow was a curved thing, or what a performer did after a good show. Stern described someone serious or a little cross. How those words ended up describing the back and front of a boat still escapes me. As I learned later, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to know why a term came to mean what it does – only that this is that.

Even then, boating had a certain refinement. It belonged to the calm, the composed, and the unhurried – not indifferent, but contemplative. It was athletic and leisurely all at once. I’d been aboard many vessels of varying shapes and sizes – during family outings, school trips, and later with friends and colleagues. To talk about them, though, often required the vocabulary of a materials scientist, an architect, or simply a seasoned sailor.

The term boating truly landed with me in China. There, everything from paddle boats on lakes to sailboats on the sea fell under that one neat word: B-O-A-T-I-N-G. My early sailing experience did not lack depth, only definition.

Not all boats are created equal

No distinction was needed. If it floated and moved with or against water, it was boating. I found that simplicity refreshing. My own distinction was also simple: yachts are boats you can live aboard. If it has a galley, sleeping space, and a toilet, it’s a yacht. Big boat, small home.

My first boat wasn’t mine. It was my father’s – an inflatable, modest but beloved. With its plastic oars and heat sealed seams, we spent hours discussing the technology behind what others dismissed as a toy. Only later did I grasp the difference in attitude between someone who saw a thing as joyful and worthy of attention, and those who saw only a blow-up novelty. Not to overstate the value of a humble inflatable – but that memory stuck, perhaps because of the natural scenery surrounding.

Later, once day trips on motor yachts and weekend tours became a reality, a possibility within reach, the longing for ownership no longer came as a barrier. While the idea of having one seemed daunting – not just because of cost, but because of what came with it: the needs of the boat, and the people needed to keep it afloat, I perceived this too as a potential I could soon approach.

Some of my fondest early memories were jet ski rentals. We’d wait forever. The men in charge -sunburnt, shirtless, and always in their twenties or thirties – seemed perpetually annoyed. Not because of us specifically, teen beach- goers, but the price haggling, the safety concerns, the heat. They wore gleaming muscles and gelled hair like cartoon characters – miscast, misrepresented, strangely performative. Once on the water, though, none of that mattered. The rush was worth it.

One summer, I found myself in Kenya, volunteering on board a newly floated Dhow (Boom). A large vessel made entirely of locally sourced wood – handmade, may I add without the use of adhesives but only long steel nails, plenty of oil and tar, and kalafati (cotton yarns hammered in between the planks designed to expand when wet filling the gaps and rendering the vessel seaworthy). This became the lived expression of my early sailing experience. I had been on dhows before – once memorably during a NYE dinner with family in the UAE. They were not uncommon in the Arabian Gulf.

After a short stay in a local eco-lodge, I met the Musafir group and offered a helping hand, which they eagerly accepted. This developed into a 3 week volunteering stint. During this time, I learned about how it was made and plans for its future use. Most people had limited English, nothing like a BBC documentary. Italians, an American, and many locals were the owners, and operators of the Musafir. It was a big international team, and only few of its members were present that time. Funding such a thing seemed to require euors and dollars, Kenyan shillings weren’t enough. So, most had returned to tend to other business once it was succesfully afloat, many with plans to return for its maiden voyage. The sails were still being sewn and it had ben towed to it’s current anchorage.

The guys operated daily sunset tours for a little fee – just to cover expenses and a little extra for rum and barbecues. Yoga sessions were popular on board as well. I had the pleasure and privilege of rowing the boat a few times. At night, the water glowed with bioluminescence confirming the vibrance of the Indian Ocean waters in Kilifi Creek Bay. My main project as a volunteer was a solid teak staircase from the main deck to the poop, an upper deck built at the stern of the ship. I also made a couple of other woodworking projects such as tables and cutting boards.

Monkey Business on The Eternal Nile

Back in the Nile Valley, along which over 95% of Egyptians live, work, and play, the great river was our afternoon escape from the noise and dust of city life. Most people opted for loud, welded steel motorboats blasting the same playlist on weak outboards. I always preferred the quiet dignity of a felucca ride from a small marina. These sailing boats – sometimes made from locally harvested woods, sometimes imported pine or spruce (Russian, Chinese, Swedish they sometimes made the distinction) – floated gently, carried by wind and memory.

“Whatever floats your boat,” they say. At the time, it was feluccas. Yet I never quite fit into that world. The boatmen were small mysteries – dressed in galabeyas and single-cloth headwraps, as if in costume. I couldn’t tell if they were part of a party I was more or less suddenly invited to or simply stuck in an old self-replicating script. Even as an Egyptian, galabeyas felt like costume to me too. Once a year, maybe. A dress-up moment, like a toga party, or during those visits to the south, again just to get into character. Except this wasn’t Rome, and I wasn’t celebrating the empire. In any case, I preferred shorts.

Most passengers saw the felucca as a chance to socialize – one more extension of Cairo’s (☧) constant sociability. But I leaned toward solitude. Boating became a private pleasure. I still joined rides with friends, colleagues, and on mini corporate outings – but I was there for the water, the wind, the sky. I enjoyed more beer than banter. More smoke too, no more though.

I never managed to learn how to sail one. The boatmen didn’t offer weekend courses. No fees, no forms, no YouTube tutorials. Learning was by shadowing – a follow-and-watch culture I didn’t belong to. Some boatmen questioned my interest: “Why sail? You’ve got a degree, a job, a future” To me, that was exactly why – I wanted to sail for the love of adventure. It isn’t that The Nile wasn’t long enough, but… you’d have to see for yourself.

But they took pride in lineage – who taught their grandfather, who had first given permission, who knew the ropes. I wasn’t a bad student at those unusual moments I was perceived to be one , just an awkward one. And once I learned that these boats weren’t even particularly Egyptian – just the Nile was – I started to wonder what I was really drawn to. 

Negotiation proved another sore point. Was I bad at it, or good? Either way, the outcome often felt hollow. I stood like a statue demanding my right to learn, to sail, to belong. To sail, not to follow. This wasn’t a foreigner trying to belong an Egypt, but an Egyptian, apparently trying to live as a foreigner. Lists of pros and cons, possible scenarios spun into comedy and tragedy and something else altogether – absurdity.

I remained a customer, never a member. You couldn’t just talk and negotiate. You had to step into a predefined role: the eager tourist, the rich kid, the reluctant haggler, the activist. A beer or a cigarette might grease the wheels. If the boatman refused the beer, he was marked an islamist and quietly blacklisted by the boater crowd – my fellow Copts and our friends.