After an introduction to the theory, boys and girls over eight grapple with dinghies supervised by Omani instructors.
Those with children to carry bring still less, having paid €1,200 £8755) to make the journey from the Turkish mainland; 40 to 45 people in unsafe, 15ft plastic dinghies, floors lined with plywood, damp with seawater.
The panorama of the town and surrounding hills is gorgeous as you head up the estuary, slipping between the rows of moored yachts and dodging the flocks of sailing dinghies.
It takes 35 minutes to get to Turkey in one of these boats; in the migrants' dinghies it is three to four sleepless hours in the dark.
See article.In this section Politics this week Business this week KAL's cartoon ReprintsThe United Nations said that hundreds of would-be migrants drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean from north Africa when their dinghies overturned.
A media orgy accompanied the send-off late last summer of the Whitbread race, a round-the-world affair of 60-foot, overgrown dinghies which, with their gung-ho crews, were so ill-suited to crossing oceans that one prominent yacht designer called the combination a "disaster waiting to happen".None of this would have wider relevance if the madness were confined to a few.
Spain's foreign minister, Josep Pique, had hinted that Morocco was lax in its policing of the rubber dinghies that pour their human freight across and quite often into the narrow waters between the two countries.In this section Guess who wasn't coming to dinner?
They come in dinghies and rickety boats, and often perish at sea.
Groups who pay €300 ($400) a head to cross are packed into rubber dinghies at night.
And the cow-punchers are human traffickers, pushing them into the river on flimsy dinghies or across fields of sunflower and garlic.
It resents the flow of illegal immigrants in rubber dinghies across the Straits of Gibraltar.
