Sailing downwind along the palm-lined coast of Sinai, a region of awesome and incredible beauty, where row upon row of barren, jagged, brownish-red mountains fill the horizon, surrounded by relentlessly dry, yet colourful, desert plains.
Bumping into an Egyptian Navy corvette, about 3 nm off Nuweiba, being stopped by force and eventually being able to talk its skipper out of going alongside and boarding SY “Kamu II” in order to check our papers.
"Soldiers
will always do what soldiers always do."
Re-entering the Egyptian territorial waters with valid multiple-entry tourist visas from the Consulate of Egypt +96232016181 in Aqaba/Jordan and clearing uneventfully into Egypt at the Taba Heights Marina+20693580046, a new official port of entry for cruising yachts, paying the agent fees of US$ 40.- in cash for the full-scale arrival procedure (immigration, customs and harbour master), passing the wily Muslim counter-espionage guy's sly language test (“Ah-tah m’dah-behr ee-vreet?” - "Ah-neelo m’dah-behr ee-vreet!”) and buying a relatively cheap Egyptian cruising permit, valid for eight months for US$ 10.- per month; shalom aleichem, Mitsrayim!
Following the serpentine camel path uphill to the top of the 2,285 m high summit of Mt. Sinai where Moses, according to the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religion, received allegedly the Ten Commandments (at Mt. Sinai, God and the Hebrews clinched a deal: in return for their rescue from the Egyptians, and deliverance to the promised land of Israel, Jews would follow only one God and his laws, as outlined in the Ten Commandments and the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament), and taking thereafter the 3,750 Steps of Repentance, laid by one monk as an act of penance, back down to the ancient 4th-century CE St. Catherine’s Monastery where we plucked a leaf from the Burning Bushfrom which God had supposedly spoken to Moses.
"If I thought the Lord was speaking to me I'd check myself into Bellevue,
if he would become a believer if the Lord spoke to him)
"Jesus is great - is there a better role model? No. It's religion, it's the people who get in between - the bureaucracy, you know ... It's the way people abuse Jesus. Was there ever a greater victim of name dropping?"
Discussing the five great linguistic distortions in the history of the Old Testament, as we know it today, (i) the 3rd-century BCE Septuagint, the allegedly oldest rendition of the Old Testament, from Old Hebrew into Old Greek, (ii) the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th-century CE manuscript used by later scholars to confirm biblical texts, (iii) the Vulgate, the first “translation” from Hebrew directly to Latin and its major revisions in the 16th-, 18th- and 20th-centuries CE, (iv) Martin Luther’s tinkering with the Vulgate, removing parts for his Lutheran faith, and last but not least, (v) the 17th-century CE King James Bible which proclaims itself authorised and genuine but whose translators never saw the original in Old Hebrew, renewing our principal doubts about the authenticity of the Bible, an ancient novel full of murder, corruption, bestiality, incest and cruelty and the most widely used form of propaganda and control in the world, and watching afterwards Bill Maher on Larry King Live on our laptop.
Short-tacking into 30 knots of head wind, bang on the nose, along the edge of the Sinai reef, between 10 m and 100 m east off the fringing reef, thus avoiding the bigger ones of the infamous short and steep waves of the Gulf of Aqaba/Eilat and sinning against one of our own sailing rules: “If the wind is forward of the beam and twenty knots or more, forget it.”
SY "Kamu II" at anchor, west of a low sandy spit in the eastern part of the bay, at 10 m of depth, on sand and coral (near the big, rusty mooring buoy).
Passing the southernmost point of the Sinai Peninsula, Ras (Cape) Mohamed (the dividing point between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba), and watching numerous dive boats at Shark Observatory and Beacon Rock.
Entering the 1,800-m deep Gulf of Aqaba, which varies from 7 nm to 12 nm in width, and is actually part of a rift (a crack in the earth’s top layer) that stretches for some 6,000 km starting at the Dead Sea on the border between Israel and Jordan, continuing across the Red Sea, Ethiopia and Kenya all the way down to Mozambique in southern Africa.
Motoringthrough the Grafton Passage of the infamous Straits of Tiran (from S to N), with its many threatening reefs and conspicuous wrecks, and encountering huge swell on the nose of SY “Kamu II” thus getting a first taste of what we could expect a bit further up N in the Gulf of Aqaba.
Bumping into 40 knots of wind on the nose and three metre breaking waves which forced us to find shelter in the lee of El Kura where we had to sit at anchor for seven days, waiting for a better weather window.
Meeting Harry, the very helpful and friendly German owner of the Harry Nass Surf Center Dahab +20693640559, who generously supplied us with fresh fruits and vegetables whilst we were waiting at anchor for more favourable winds.
