Sailors, with their built in sense of order, service and discipline, should really be running the world.
- Nicholas Monsarrat
What is it about the sea that drew Shaikh Abdulla bin Khalifa Al Khalifa away from an important job as a civil servant? What lured him from public life to become a sailor?
There’s a mysterious force in the universe that draws certain men to the sea. Not even the seamen can tell you what that force is. They simply follow it.
A few of the world’s great writers have also been drawn to the oceans, and have described their experiences — never fully, but always captivatingly — so that their readers could feel something of the magnetic attraction of the sea and sailing.
Occasionally, it seems, men go to sea merely by accident. In the opening to Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote, “Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
Shaikh Abdulla must have felt that same powerful attraction, though he hasn’t said so, when he decided to buy a fishing yacht outfitted to sail the oceans and to pursue the biggest catches like the blue marlin and tuna.
Telling of a time when he was fishing off the coast of Mexico, Shaikh Abdulla saw a very large fish leap out of the water about half a mile from his boat. He asked a friend who was with him “Is that my fish?”
The friend said “Yes!” It was so large and so far away, recalled Shaikh Abdulla, that it would have taken him two hours to reel it in. He let someone else have the honour of pulling in the biggest fish caught in Mexico. How many fishermen would tell a true story like that?
Fishermen are notorious for making up stories about the fish they caught or about the huge catch that got away. Not Shaikh Abdulla. An honest fisherman, he tells of the one who was too big and too far away!
Shaikh Abdulla expresses great disappointment that there’s no more fishing in Bahrain mainly because, he says, “of the lack of planning, no future vision, no strategic thinking or plan for the future. All the reclamation destroys the fish habitat.
“On top of that,” he adds, “the unskilled fishing people on the water, like all the Asians coming for low wages, scrape all the reefs and destroy all the breeding grounds, year after year. This started in the eighties. We’re talking about 25 years of destruction.”
Noting that Bahrain is unique, Shaikh Abdulla explains, “It’s the second most populated country in the world. We have no ground. It’s only 600 square kilometres. That’s nothing.
“On top of that we’re limited in resources and wealth as well. Bahrain is the poorest country in the GCC and the most populated, with the least area per capita.”
He complains about corruption: “Instead of preserving the source of food, they’re reclaiming land for greedy VIPs or foreign investment, misusing the land and the sea bed. There’s a lot of ignorance and lack of vision for the future.”
Shaikh Abdulla mentioned that there are no regulatory laws and he praised Oman who, “for so many years stopped the cages for fish because they would drain the fish stocks. By contrast, in Bahrain, whenever you see a dhow, there are ten storeys of cages on top of it and we look at that and say ‘Here we go again, they’re raping the sea, and nobody’s looking at them.’”
Pointing to the central fish market, Shaikh Abdulla notes “they’re selling hamour that’s only seven to 10 inches long, which is against all human laws for fishing catches. When I go fishing in America, in Nantucket and Fire Island, everybody measures the fish, and if it’s less than the regulation, it goes back.”
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