The young man and the sea
Sheikh Fahim bin Sultan bin Khalid Al Qasimi juggles weighty responsibilities as executive chairman of Sharjah’s Department of Government Relations. In his rare downtime, he heads to the water—sailing, swimming and diving. When he rescued a turtle he named Farah, his passion for the sea really caught fire.
By Catherine Mazy
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNA NIELSEN
Sheikh Fahim bin Sultan bin Khalid Al Qasimi was freediving—without tanks or equipment—when he witnessed the crisis of the oceans firsthand.
“Since I was a kid, I lived in the ocean,” he says. “I grew up sailing, surfing, snorkelling, scuba diving, swimming. When I wasn’t at home doing homework, I was at the beach. As I got older, I got into freediving, where you hold your breath and just discover the underwater world with a snorkel and mask. I fell in love with it. It’s the most free you can be underwater.”
In the summer of 2020, Sheikh Fahim and two friends, Sean Dennis and Scott Chambers, were freediving at Dibba Bay Oysters. The oyster farm’s nets attract sea life and make for a magical experience.
“Sean started screaming and holding something white in his hands,” Sheikh Fahim says. “It was a juvenile turtle, only about the size of a plate, who had started eating a plastic bag and was wrapped up in it.” Turtles eat plastic bags because in the water they resemble jellyfish, a favourite food.
“We spent about 20 minutes cutting this little guy free and then had a magical moment as friends where we got to put this little turtle we called Thiago back into the water and see him swim off. That was special. I was touched—it’s quite personal when you see it firsthand.”
A few months later, the friends were diving near Sir Bu Nair Island in the Arabian Gulf when Sheikh Fahim saw a turtle that behaved strangely. He was concerned but also knew that divers shouldn’t interfere with marine life. He went back later and saw the turtle still there, then felt the tug of something—a fishing line. It was wrapped around the turtle’s head and flipper.
Witnessing firsthand the dangers turtles face led to a passion for their protection. Photo by Chrisophe Chellapermal.
Sea turtles live in the water, but they aren’t fish—they have to come up for air, like we do. When they’re active, they need to surface frequently, but if they’re resting, they can stay underwater for four to seven hours. If held down for too long, they drown.
Sheikh Fahim called to his friends on their boat to bring a dinghy closer. He cut the lines trapping the turtle. They placed the turtle in some water on the dinghy and covered it with a towel to keep its shell moist. The fishing line had cut the turtle’s flipper back to the bone.
The friends took the turtle to the Turtle Rehabilitation Sanctuary at the seven-star Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, which has three huge aquariums and has opened its indoor critical-care facilities to turtle rescue—about 2,000 in the past two decades. Dr. Panos Azmanis, a specialist in avian medicine at the Dubai Falcon Hospital, came to operate—birds’ wings and turtles’ flippers have similar bone structure. One flipper had to be amputated.
Sheikh Fahim named the turtle Farah and visited her frequently. She was about 20 years old—just becoming an adult—and was recuperating, but considering her injury he figured she would live out her days in captivity. However, she healed so well that she was able to be released, with Sheikh Fahim sending her back into the sea.
Sheikh Fahim’s enthusiasm led the Dubai Turtle Rehabilitation Project to ask him to be its ambassador. The initiative is based at Jumeirah Al Naseem, a luxury hotel next to Burj Al Arab that provides outdoor rehabilitation pools, and is a collaboration with the Emirates Wildlife Protection Office. “I said 100 percent, as long as we could invest more in turtle tracking to understand where they go. With more information we can make better policy. Our mission is to get to 100 turtles tracked by 2024. That’s 100 trips that would help us appreciate turtles.”
Farah was equipped with a tracker whose sensors relay information about whether she is in or out of the water and where she’s swimming. Recently, she showed up at the border between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Jumeirah, a massive male green turtle, went from Burj Al Arab to the Musandam Peninsula at the tip of Oman in two weeks, while a 30- or 40-year-old loggerhead turtle named Nacar swam to Iran. Another turtle swam 8,283 kilometres from Fujairah to the Andaman Sea. Turtles, like the pollution that threatens them, know no national boundaries—why protecting the sea must be a global effort.
Turtles, like the pollution that threatens them, know no national boundaries—why protecting the sea must be a global effort.
Global cooperation is important to Sheikh Fahim as executive chairman of the Department of Government Relations in Sharjah. His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohamed Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah, asked him eight years ago to leave the investment world to establish an international cooperation office at the local government level. The Department serves as a diplomatic window for international partners that want to work with Sharjah. It also does international outreach, such as visits or exchanges with cities or countries. Sheikh Fahim also serves as a diplomat. “I represent His Highness as needed around the globe,” he says.
He is extremely qualified, speaking Arabic, English, German, and French fluently and a few others “well enough to order off a menu.” He has a bachelor’s from Lancaster University and a master’s from the University of Cambridge, both in international relations.
“I have the easiest job in Sharjah,” he says. “I have wonderful colleagues who do all the hard work, with publishing, the book fair, museums, the Institute for Heritage, Sharjah Tourism. They build and work on all these projects and I get to go around the world and share the stories of the hard work my colleagues do.”
For example, in 2014, the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization collaborated with the Vatican Museum on an exhibition, titled So That You Might Know Each Other. The exhibition was “this idea of bridging the history of Catholicism, specifically, and Islam, and the history of the conversations that happened throughout the one and a half millennia between the two religions. Very, very important messaging across the world today—the coexistence of religions and acceptance,” he says.
In 2018, the National Museum of Australia hosted the exhibition. “I got to talk about how I grew up celebrating both Christmas and Eid and Ramadan,” he says—his mother is German, his wife, Anna, is from New Zealand, and he lived for a while in the UK. “We can provide this model of diversity and coexistence.”
The Department of Government Relations focuses on Sharjah’s strengths: culture, education and innovation. The emirate is home to two of the region’s biggest universities, with 45,000 students, a huge innovation programme, the biggest arts programme in the region, and the biggest book fair in the world. “We go abroad and try to find places where we can build on those three areas. We think trade and tourism will follow suit,” he says.
For Sheikh Fahim, time on and under the water is magical. Here with his wife, Anna.
Sheikh Fahim also established the Higher Committee for Digital Transformation in Sharjah to bring smart government services to residents. He’s a fervent proponent of the power of digitisation. “I do believe technology will enable us to be better citizens of our world,” he says.
Technology plays a role with turtles, too. An important facet of tracking turtles is following their nesting habits. Only one in 10,000 turtles survives to sexual maturity, which is around 20 to 25 years old. At that time, they go back to the beach where they were born to nest, somehow finding it decades later. “It’s why beach conservation is important to turtles,” Sheikh Fahim says. “The worst is destroying a beach or marine environment for port development. Less impactful is something like a hotel.”
The UAE is home to nests of hawksbill turtles, though other species come and go while nesting elsewhere. Last spring, His Highness inaugurated the Khor Kalba Turtle and Wildlife Sanctuary on the east coast, near precious mangrove forests. “They found a way not only to protect turtles and the beach, but to turn it into something with economic value,” Sheikh Fahim says. “His Highness has been extremely clear about protecting the environment.”
Most of the threats to turtles are man-made. “Turtles have thrived and survived since the age of the dinosaurs to the point where humans decided to start polluting the oceans,” he says, listing the threats. Plastic, from bags to micro-particles. Fishing lines or nets lead to drowning. Strikes from power boats and jet skis—sailboats and container ships move slowly enough that turtles can get out of their way. Pollution, whether toxins dumped into the water or products that lead to algae blooms. The one natural menace is cold snaps—as reptiles, turtles’ body temperature is affected by their environment, and sudden cold water can make them sluggish and prone to drowning.
“People ask me how to help,” Sheikh Fahim says. “Not everybody can or should go and grab a turtle, even if that’s the thing everybody wants.”
He has other suggestions. Anybody can join turtle tracking, pulling up satellite feeds of where different turtles are migrating. Beach cleanups are important. A step further is organising freedive or snorkelling trips to hunt for and gather rubbish that has gotten stuck underwater.
“When you’re seven to 10 metres underwater, you feel at home. You’re at one with the fish. You can swim through or around corals. If you stay still, the fish come right up to your face.”
“The most impactful part of what I do at the project today is workshops with kids,” he says. “When they hold a turtle, and it’s a magical creature, or when we do a turtle release and they get to release them into the wild again, those memories are what stick in their minds the next time they think about throwing some rubbish on the street, knowing it could end up in the oceans.”
His own twin sons, now age four, have been to the turtle rescue centre many times. “I don’t think they had a choice because Dad saves turtles,” Sheikh Fahim says. “My boys will pick up rubbish now and put it in a bin and they’ll say, ‘because we don’t want the turtles to get hurt’. The most fun time of my life is when I’m with my boys, saving turtles.”
For Sheikh Fahim, time on and under the water is magical. “When you’re seven to 10 metres underwater, you feel at home. You’re at one with the fish. You can swim through or around corals. If you stay still, the fish come right up to your face.”
He speaks of the swimming prowess of young Emiratis of the past who dove for pearls. “When I’m on my boat, sailing out in the Gulf, not that far from shore but far enough that you can’t see land, I think of the journeys my forefathers took. When I sail out of that creek and look back on the coast, I wonder what it would have been like for my great-great-grandfather. The Al Qasimis had the biggest fleets in the 1600s and 1700s. Some of my friends ask me why I care about the ocean so much and I think some of it has to be hereditary.”
Sheikh Fahim doesn’t have a motorboat but a sailboat, christened Belle Epoque. It was an abandoned yacht destined for landfill when he found it. “As a keen sailor and to prove that it could be done, I took on the task of restoring it. It took 18 months but is now on the water.”
Belle Epoque had a diesel motor to pull it in and out of the marina, but Sheikh Fahim wanted to make it green. “Electric propulsion is the way forward on the water, so I contacted Oceanvolt of Finland and purchased the first electric inboard system to be installed in the UAE. The boat has a battery bank that is recharged from shore power or solar panels and is technically free of carbon emissions. Being a restored, electric sailing yacht, I am confident that it is the ‘greenest’ yacht in the Gulf.”
Sometimes, while out on the sea, he fishes—only as much as he will eat and using a spear, so he doesn’t risk leaving lines or nets. Making fishing sustainable is so important to Sheikh Fahim that he and diving buddy Sean Dennis co-founded Seafood Souq, a global marketplace selling sustainably caught seafood to businesses. The idea is to stop illegal fishing by using technology to fully trace seafood through the supply chain. Each shipment has a QR code showing where it was caught, as well as its entire provenance.
“One in five pieces of fish are mislabeled or misstated,” he says. “The supply chain is so opaque. With meat, usually the seller can tell you the name of the farm. We don’t treat fish the same way. Every other protein source we farm. Half of fish eaten today is farmed—the jury is out whether that’s good or bad. The other half is caught wild. We extract fish like we extract oil, gas or mining. We can over-extract. We have to be cautious to make sure we still have fish for the future.”
More information will improve our understanding of the sea, so important to Sharjah’s history, but which remains mostly unknown. “We’ve discovered more about space than about our oceans,” he says.
People look at the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea and think it’s empty. “But all you have to do is look under the surface for a few minutes and you see the huge amount of biodiversity.” It’s so impressive that this busy 35-year-old is looking forward to the day when he can devote his days to soaking it in.
“I’ll probably end up retiring on my boat and living on the ocean.”
