High as a kite

Friday morning, 10am. Muggy, bright and still. Hot, too. It’s October; why’s it still so hot? The crowd on the shore outside the Jumeirah Beach Residences are not an appetising bunch to look at.

Holidaymakers with small children, mainly, that’s why they’re on the beach this early at the weekend. They don’t look like people without a care in the world. Sunburned and frazzled is how they look. Tired, too. Kids sprint around them, screaming.

Anyway, I’m nervous, and getting increasingly so by the minute. Izzet, the friendly young Turk in charge, says I have nothing worry about. It’s quite safe, he says.

That death a few years ago, it was a one off. And besides, it wasn’t his company. It was some other bunch of cowboys, not licensed. He’s licensed up to the eyeballs, he says. I’d be more likely to come to harm getting out of bed. “Ok, Izzet,” I say.

I’m about to go up on one of those parachutes behind a speedboat, attached to a cable. It’s called parasailing. I’ve watched it done hundreds of times over the years, and never felt the urge to do it. Chiefly, I suppose, because I am mortally terrified of heights.

“Don’t worry about that, it’s different over water,” Izzet cheerfully advises. How high am I going to go up? “It’s about 150 metres,” comes the reply. Great. The London Eye, which made my stomach swim and induced a strange tightening in my nether regions, is only 135 metres high.

I find myself asking, as nonchalantly as possible, how long he’s been doing this. Twelve years is the answer. He speaks with an air of calm authority. Afterall, he has parasailing operations in both Dubai and Turkey, and he flits between the two, overseeing the hoisting of rash thrill seekers high into the ether for 250 AED a time. “No accidents?” I ask. “None.”

We’re waiting for the wind to get up a bit. You need a bit of a breeze, he says, you don’t want to be floating about up there with no air moving.

Why, I am not sure. I’d have thought the forward momentum of the speedboat should be adequate, but this is hardly the time for a discussion of basic physics, a subject at which I was always extremely bad at school. Besides, I am no longer nervous. I am now frightened.

By 11am, the gaudy flags on the beach are fluttering. It’s time, Izzet says. “Can I wear my glasses up there?” My voice has become a bit sqawky.  I can. Which is good, because if I am about to take years off my life, then I might as well be able to take in the view.

I wade out into the brine, and then clamber aboard the boat, a massive, custom built yellow speedboat, with a special dock on the back from which humans can take off and land. There are four other wannabe parasailors on the boat with me, their faces betraying varying degrees of trepidation.

I’m first up. It’s ok, I keep telling myself as one of Izzet’s grinning staff straps me into the harness. It’s ok. Izzet says heights aren’t scary over water. But my legs still tremble. As the boat begins moving, I am ordered to the take-off dock. I do as I am told.

The parachute has unfurled, and I am duly attached to it. Now a lever is flicked, allowing the cable to run, and the boat’s speed increases. Not too roughly, I am yanked off the back of the boat and into the air. I begin swearing.

Up I go. Quickly, and often in jolts. I now realise how the harness works. I am seated on part of it. Parasailors ascend seated.

Suddenly I am back at school, in tears, paralysed with fear on a high branch of the giant conker tree in which Mr Benson the Maths teacher who later killed himself had secured a ‘death slide’ that descended vertiginously over the school lake. I want to come down very badly, but as was the case up that tree, I can’t. So up I continue to go. I am still swearing.

The view, it has to be said, is good. Not only can I see all of the construction that is taking place on the Palm, and the shape of the Palm itself, but also the wake of the boat, which now looks tiny far beneath me, seems to stretch out through the water like a sort of milky way.

It is impressive. But looking down is horrid. There are my feet, I think, and then there’s nothing, and then there’s the sea, which from this height would be like concrete on impact.

So up I stay, for ten minutes. They make me go lower, and then they raise me again. The crowd on the beach looks more inviting now – I want to be among it. Eventually, I am hauled down. I land softly on the boat.

“Did you see any sharks?” the boat driver grins. A middle aged lady is next. She looks petrified. “How was it?” she asks as we pass. She wants to hear something comforting. “Absolutely terrifying,” I tell her.

Sky & Sea Adventures Dubai. www.watersportsdubai.com

Blue Banana. www.bluebanana.com