| Fishing Oman |
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Page 1 of 7 Angling for big tuna in the Gulf of Oman, a couple of Yanks discover a new Arabian game-fishing mecca and the friendliest untapped oasis in the Middle East "It’s like an offshore aquarium,” declared Ed Brothers, an ichthyologist from Ithaca, New York, and a longtime fishing buddy of Tom Andersen’s. Brothers had flown to Oregon to visit Andersen, a Salem trial lawyer, for some winter steelheading. After a day on the river, the two were back home talking dream fishing trips over a bottle of McCarthy’s Oregon single-malt whiskey. Suddenly, Brothers’s face flushed, his breathing quickened, and he appeared on the verge of bursting into the Muslim call to prayer. Breathlessly, he recounted tales from the two months in 1995 he’d spent in Oman’s coastal capital, Muscat, to help set up a lab at the Marine Science and Fisheries Center.  > ACCESS > Nothing beats Virgin Atlantic’s new Upper Class service to Dubai via London (virgin-atlantic.com). The fare buys a private mini-suite equipped with a 6.6-foot-long flat bed, a desk and laptop outlet, a ten-inch TV with access to new-release fi... Right then, the two men made an anglers’ agreement: They’d meet in Oman the following November, at the height of big-tuna season. And they shook on it. Slung over the horn of the Arabian Peninsula, Oman is the size of New Mexico with the population of Seattle, and it looks something like Mexico’s Baja peninsula—only more exotic—with the glassy, lapis Gulf of Oman rolling up a coastal plain dotted with mosques and ringed by old gray mountains. The United Arab Emirates lies to the northwest, Saudi Arabia to the west, and Yemen to the southwest. Oman’s eastern edge is nearly 2,000 miles of subtropical coastline on the Arabian Sea, the centerpiece of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said’s brilliant beyond-oil economic development plan. It all started on July 23, 1970, when the future Sultan Qaboos sent a cadre of loyalists, as well as British forces, into his father’s palace and persuaded the backward old man to abdicate the throne and take exile in London. Thus began Oman’s renaissance. When Sultan Qaboos took power, Oman had just three schools and three miles of paved roads, a largely illiterate and warring population, and diplomatic relations with only a handful of nations. Outsiders weren’t allowed into the country without an Omani sponsor—if at all. Given that Oman has substantially smaller oil and gas reserves than other Arabian countries, Sultan Qaboos decided to play the hand he was dealt and hitch Oman’s star to high-end tourism. |
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