It was a bright afternoon in 2012 when we sailed into the Musandam Peninsula — the small bit of land that juts out in the north of Oman — at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz.

At the time, the name meant little to us and we did not yet know the significance it would acquire in the years ahead. What drew us instead was the landscape itself. After a day and a half of sailing past the flat desert coastline from Dubai, mountain cliffs suddenly rose straight out of the deep indigo sea.

The waters of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea seemed to meet uneasily there. The currents were restless, the shifts beneath the boat sudden and hard to anticipate. In sheltered inlets, the water turned clear green, revealing stones, coral fragments and swaying seaweed below the surface.

There was something ancient about that strait. For centuries, it has carried merchants, conquerors, fishermen, smugglers, pilgrims, fleets of empires and oil tankers through its narrow passage. Yet the mountains remained indifferent to all of them. They stood over the water with the same hard stillness with which they must once have watched Arab dhows leave on the monsoon winds for India and East Africa.

Nadeem Khalid recounts a sailing trip which took him to the mountains of Musandam at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, long before it became a byword for a global energy choke point

It was difficult to sail through those waters without thinking of the countless vessels that had passed there before us — Portuguese warships guarding imperial trade routes, British gunboats policing the Gulf and, in more recent decades, endless columns of oil tankers feeding distant economies.

The silence of the mountains was deceptive. Beneath the water, there was life everywhere.

We saw flocks of seabirds diving at shoals of flying fish skimming across the surface of the sea. We immediately tacked towards them and dropped our lines into the water. Within a few hours we had caught dozens of great barracuda, kingfish and mackerel; enough to feed us for days. At times, dolphins appeared without warning, escorting the boat before vanishing again into the blue water.

My fellow sailors, Rahil and Khalid, and I were so absorbed in the excitement of the catch that we failed to notice an Omani coast guard boat approaching at speed. Our Mauritius-born deckhand, William, disappeared inside the cabin at the first sight of it and refused to come out, despite repeated calls, leaving the three of us to answer the polite but curious questions of the coast guards.

By dusk, we needed to find safe anchorage. We chose a quiet bay near a cove, enclosed by mountains on three sides. It took us nearly an hour to secure the anchor properly and, just as we had settled down for the evening, we heard the rattle of another engine approaching through the darkening water.

A young boy in a small dinghy came alongside our boat. He asked us not to throw litter into the sea and requested that we hand over our garbage bags, so he could dispose of them properly at a waste site nearby. He spoke Arabic but was of Baloch origin and knew a little Urdu. Perhaps that explained why the waters around Musandam were still so remarkably clean. The encounter reminded us, sadly, of the sea near Karachi, where hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated sewage and industrial waste are dumped every day.

At night, Musandam became almost unreal.

The mountains disappeared into darkness, leaving only faint outlines beneath a sky thick with stars. Around the boat, the sea glowed softly with phosphorescence. Every movement in the water, whether a fish or a wave, produced brief flashes of blue light. It felt less like floating on water and more like moving through darkness itself.

We were woken very early the next morning by a short storm and struggled to keep the boat away from rocks jutting out of the water. Gradually, thin streams of golden sunlight began filtering through the mountain gaps and fishermen started appearing across the bay. Dolphins leapt through the water while schools of fish scattered ahead of them. Dawn seemed to bring the entire sea briefly to the surface.

As we sailed out of the bay, the wind funneling between the mountains rose to nearly 25-30 knots, making the passage back into the Gulf difficult and exhausting. In the distance, we could see small white speedboats racing across the water towards the coast of heavily sanctioned Iran, carrying cargo through one of the busiest and most politically charged waterways in the world.

The journey became inspiration for another much longer 10-day voyage from Dubai to Karachi the next year in 2013.

The writer is president, WWF-Pakistan

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 17th, 2026