Sailing Tiny Boat 200 Miles, 5 Westerners Escape Iraq : Detainees: After missing rendezvous with a tugboat, they are rescued by a Japanese ship off Saudi coast.

In a daring escape from Iraq, five Westerners who told their hosts they were going fishing took their tiny boat across more than 200 miles of the rolling Persian Gulf in a 25-hour dash for freedom that ended when they were picked up by a Japanese vessel off the Saudi coast, members of the party said Thursday.

The escape, four weeks in the planning, turned into a tense odyssey when the group missed a rendezvous with a tugboat off southern Iraq and zigzagged, at one point almost going ashore in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, three Britons in the group said.

“It’s a trip I wouldn’t like to do again,” said Mike Teesdale, a 40-year-old marine worker from Kent. But after being trapped in Iraq for more than two months and fearing the worst if war came, Teesdale said, “it was well worthwhile.”

The group carried fishing poles as a subterfuge, and beer and whiskey for sustenance. They made their way with the help of a compass and the stars through the narrow waterways of southern Iraq and into the gulf.

“Navigation was very hit and miss,” said Ivan Manning, 44, the oldest British member of the group.

The Britons, who were accompanied by two Frenchmen, said they were working in Iraq when the crisis erupted and that they “pretended to work” afterward. They said they had not been held as human shields against a possible attack.

But they said they had been prevented from leaving Iraq and were restricted to their quarters every night under a strict curfew beginning at 6 p.m. Food was not withheld from them, but they said their supplies were “dwindling fast.”

They timed the escape to coincide with the Iraqi celebration Monday of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday in the hope that scrutiny of foreigners would be relaxed. They were rescued the day after they set out, about 25 miles off Saudi Arabia. The British members of the group gave the first public account of their flight at a news conference in Dhahran on Thursday.

The Britons, who had been working south of Basra, said they had “some information that will be passed on” about Americans held in Iraq. But Manning declined to provide any details other than that “they’re OK.”

Although they were not mistreated, the escapees said they had become increasingly concerned about being made the targets of retribution if there is combat.

“If we had failed, we would have tried something else,” Teesdale said. “What we feared most was that if trouble started, then who knows what would happen?”

In planning the escape, the Britons said they had arranged for the tugboat to meet them off Iraq and tried to persuade other Westerners to join them in what was expected to be a short boat trip.

But they said the other Westerners feared the trip more than they feared staying in Iraq, and they described a frustrating journey guided by outdated charts in which the party found itself “totally off course” for the rendezvous.

They were jammed into a 10-foot lifeboat with a five-horsepower engine and were “quite uncomfortable.”

They said that after mistaking the lights of Kuwait city for Saudi Arabia and nearly putting ashore there, they moved out from the coast until they were sighted by the Japanese vessel.

Asked what he felt when he and his fellow crew members were plucked out of the gulf, Manning said, “Elation.”