When I heard the news, it was one of those “oh, my” moments. A captain running his boat on to a shoal and having to abandon it.

Oh, my.

In this case, it was the Team Abu Dhabi boat in the Sailing Arabia competition. In the darkness of Wednesday night/Thursday morning the boat apparently hit a shoal in the Gulf and became stuck north of the island of Halat Tinah.

No one died, and it seems as if no one was hurt, and the captain, Adil Khalid, and six crew members were air-lifted to safety by the UAE Coast Guard, flying the final 75 miles to Abu Dhabi.

It was a reminder of how tricky this business of sailing a boat can be, especially at night. Especially in a sea dotted by small islands.

We had a spectacular reminder of this a year ago when a veteran captain of the cruise line ship Costa Concordia struck a reef and eventually drifted onto the rocks of on an island in Italy last year.

At least 32 people died in that incident.

Team Abu Dhabi was created in December, rather late in the preparatory period, and for its captain selected Adil Khalid, who had been a crew member on the Abu Dhabi team for the grueling Volvo Ocean Race, in 2011-12.

Just ahead of the Sailing Arabia race’s start, in Bahrain, he had cautioned that the event could be dangerous.

Organizers said the Abu Dhabi boat, one of the nine Farr 30 boats in the fleet, got stuck in the darkness late Wednesday or early Thursday, on the leg from Doha to Abu Dhabi. The rudder was damaged, but it was not clear if that was before or after getting stuck. It was five hours before the captain and crew were rescued, and that had to be a fraught length of time.

We at The National had hoped to speak to the captain today, at an in-shore race in Abu Dhabi, but neither he nor his crew were available.

Two days ago, the captain spoke of his hope that the boat could be salvaged and the team could resume the race, which lasts for two weeks and continues north along the UAE coast, and concludes in Muscat, in Oman, on the Indian Ocean side of the Arabian Peninsula.

The Gulf is not known for high seas and, for such a large body of water — about 600 miles from end to end — it is quite shallow, with an average depth of about 150 feet, a maximum depth of about 300.

However, shallow water can be treacherous for navigators, because even a boat with a modest draft, like the Farr 30, can easily get stuck.

(I conjure the area around Abu Dhabi Island, hundreds of square miles of low-lying land and shallow water. Sometimes it is hard to differentiate between land, marsh and sea.)

Losing a ship, then, can be easy to do. But it has to be hard for the captain and crew, no matter the circumstances.