Recently, my boss Maha very kindly invited Jenny and I to join her on a family day out on her friend’s boat. Although using the word boat does not seem to do it any justice. The term “gin palace” would seem much more appropriate. For anyone interested, the boat was a 56 foot Gulfcraft, aptly named “Majesty” and was absolutely stunning.
We left Marina Banda Rowdha early on Friday morning and headed along
the coast to Bandar Kharan, where we were one of the first boats to park up in
the crystal clear waters for a dip to cool off. Our swimming was shortlived,
when we discovered masses of jellyfish swarming round the boat. It turned out
that these were actually only baby jellyfish and were not harmful as they
didn’t have any tentacles, but still it had put us off a little bit and so we
moved on to find another spot.
It turns out that swimming and relaxing in the sun is very tiring
work and we headed further down the coast to Sifah and my favourite restaurant
As Sammak. You may have seen from my previous posts that the restaurant is
right on the beach, and this being a big boat meant that we couldn’t just pull
up to the beach, jump out and paddle to the beach. After a number of phonecalls
we were met by a fisherman on a small boat who was able to ferry us to the
beach.
After a very hearty lunch (I love this restaurant) we convinced
another fisherman to take us back to our trusted steed and made our way back to
Bandar Kharan. This time it was quite busy (nearly as bad as Castle Court on
the last Saturday before Christmas) with many other boats looking to make the
most of the weather and the weekend. A
bonus for us, was that the “Flyboard Oman” guys were down there and gave us a
demonstration and one of the guys on our boat Samir, a chance to test it out.
This looks a lot of fun.
As the sun started to set, we headed back to MBR and Muscat after a
very relaxing day, which was long overdue!
