Steve Piscina is a manager at Mubadala Oil & Gas who ventures into the desert most weekends to go dune bashing. He explains why he recently had to be rescued by the police.
How did you get into it?
I was planning on buying a sports car when I got across here … and then another guy from work told me there was no reason to have [one] over here, much more interesting is a four-wheel drive. So I went down to the Jeep garage, saw mine in the window and pretty much bought it on the spot.
Have you every got stuck or lost?
Never lost, but stuck plenty. Getting stuck is part of the fun, I suppose, and getting recovered safely means it's not a big deal at all. But recently it didn't work out that way.
What happened?
We were in Liwa, where the dunes are very big, probably about 100 feet tall. The lead guy lost his four-wheel drive due to a mechanical fault with his car, so he was only using two-wheel drive. It was about two hours in when we got ourselves seriously stuck, at about 11am. The lead guy got stuck coming up this big dune and we recovered him once and he got stuck again. We probably spent about two hours and we had made no more than 100 metres or so progress. At that point we said this is turning into a problem.
Did you call for help?
Yes, we called the Abu Dhabi Police. They would normally send out a land patrol to drive us out. We were expecting them within an hour or so, but that never happened. What we found out later on was they had despatched a guy, but he also got stuck on the way. We contacted some other friends in Abu Dhabi to see if they could get their Arabic-speaking friends to contact the police. That did happen as well, but we didn't know that because we only had reception when we were at the top of the dune. We were all stuck at the bottom and trying to walk up it in the heat was very difficult. Our water was also running out.
So when were you eventually rescued?
It was a good four hours or so that we were waiting there. The chopper came around at about 2.30pm and took the kids back to the hotel. They left us there with a couple more bottles of water and we were expecting the land patrol any minute. But it was another three or four hours before they came. We eventually got out at about 5pm.
Has it put you off going out again?
No, what I've done is drawn up a few pointers so we'll know what do to the next time, and that's like a minimum equipment set that we need to take, which will include a lot more water and things like that. It's not put me off at all. It was never scary, but it was on its way to being scary.
* Gillian Duncan
