Pirate passage

Over the past weeks we have been repeatedly asked why we would ever consider sailing the Red Sea right now. A better question would be why do we feel compelled to sail around the world?

It’s complicated.

Weighing us down constantly are the obvious and immediate decisions to be made regarding the next stage of our voyage. The reports of fellow sailors being executed, being taken captive, and being shot at are not unknown to us. Despite previous “pop star nipples” type comments, I assure you that we recognize that things have changed. These events cause more sleepless nights and dominate more of our conversations than you could imagine. It is after all, our own lives we are talking about. We may be idiotic but we’re not idiots.

Here’s what has been scrawled on our cocktail napkins over the past weeks:

-          Sail around the Cape of Good Hope

-          Sell the farm, ship our boat and meet it in Turkey

-          OPERATION: RUN AND GUN

-          Stay here or travel India or South East Asia

-          Sail to Australia and sell the boat, use the proceeds to do something else fun

Africa represents an additional 5000 nautical miles of sailing. It doesn’t look like much in a sentence, but using 100NM’s/day for planning purposes that’s 50 additional days of open ocean sailing. Fifty days! What were you doing this time last month? Imagine if the answer was, ‘exactly what I was doing today, sitting on a boat in the middle of the ocean.’ Not in itself a show stopper, but significant enough to land on our con’s list.

There’s the weather factor. This area used to be called the Cape of Storms. The name change to Cape of Good Hope gave it an optimistic slant that read a little better. ‘Cape of good luck sucker!’ may have been a close second. The Mozambique/Agulhas is a powerful current that runs Northwest down along the eastern coast of Africa. Cold fronts generated below push in from the opposite direction. This combination of wind against water has been known to create some of the biggest waves on the planet. That said we could handle the weather. It comes down to being at the right place at the right time, something we’ve been practicing at for almost 4 years now. The 4 fronts we experienced on our way to and from New Zealand aren’t much different and on that trip we sailed further south than the Cape of Good Hope. Crossing that Agulhas current is the tricky bit but, by watching the weather and timing your passage to the East coast accordingly, it is more than doable as demonstrated by the small boats that do it every season.

Then there’s the third consideration, and it’s the same reason we’re even discussing the Cape option at all; piracy. Yes, it’s there too. Not as popular with the media at the moment and less concentrated, but it’s there. Remember that British couple (Paul and Rachel Chandler) in the news that were taken from their boat and held for over a year before eventually being released? They were taken off their 38 foot yacht near the Seychelles. If you don’t have an atlas handy, the Seychelles are pretty well exactly between where we are sitting right now and South Africa.

Lastly, you will need to hang out for months somewhere like Madagascar or Mozambique watching your bat rot while waiting for the right season to round the Cape (Dec/Jan). We would love to see these places, but not while stressing out about our boat. Being trapped for months in one of the poorest countries in the world could either be the best experience ever, or a nightmare. We loved Sri Lanka, but coming back to the boat in Gale harbor was always demoralizing. Oily crud crawled 18 inches up above the waterline and sooty black pollution had settled into every nook and cranny and turned our white topsides black.

So, you’ve successfully avoided the area of piracy currently being reported on and have decided instead to change your plans to one that your heart’s not in, expose yourself to an additional 50 days of open ocean sailing, infamous weather and seas, another ITCZ crossing, and still have the potential of being hijacked?

So the real question is not could we, it’s do we want to. Frankly, no we don’t .We wouldn’t sail to New Zealand again either. It was gnarly, uncomfortable and cold. It’s a significant point, we could take this on but if our hearts aren’t in it?

Conclusion: It’s on the list, it’s a real option, and we’ll do it if we have to (like eating your vegetables).

Now let’s talk shipping.

We could ship the boat and stay on schedule. If you manage to find a shipping company that has room, that you can afford, that is leaving from a place you can get your boat to, and is going somewhere that you want your boat to be then you are among a tiny fraction of small boat sailors and can consider yourself lucky.

We have found one. The agent we found working on behalf of the shipping company is a good one and we`ve been in daily contact with him for nearly two weeks. The cost is significant, the timing is significant and the meaning is significant.

First the cost; by the time all ancillary expenditures (like flights and hotels) are factored in this option sits in a haughty 30 thousand dollar neighbourhood. Like the additional ocean miles stated above, not the end of the world but certainly carries enough significance to factor in at the top of our decision making process. The boat leaves from the Maldives and drops in Turkey. We would need to have the boat in the Maldives ready for loading which is not a problem. The boat would be shipped to Turkey where we are required to meet and unload.

There is a definite ‘neat’ factor involved in this option. I remember watching them load one of these ships up on a discovery program once and thought that it was pretty cool. Divers attaching straps underneath the hulls then watching Slapdash dangle beneath one of those giant deck cranes from the side of a freighter before it`s slotted into place on deck like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle would be totally gut wrenching. It would also be a very unique, completely unexpected, and a somewhat colourful addition to our circumnavigation.  But the price of admission for this ride might blow it out of the water.

Speaking of blowing things out of the water; the next  option (which we`ve dubbed SLAPDASH: OPERATION RUN AND GUN) has some merit. We`ve been looking into two options. The first is acquiring arms equal to what the pirates are using and making it a fair fight. Who hasn’t wanted to have their very own AK? Even Jaime is warming to the idea, although I did lie and tell her that hers would be pink. We’re thinking a little NWA to run along with the  video montage. The downside to this plan is that acquiring automatic weapons on the black market in a country that has just emerged from a three decade long civil war is as difficult as you might think. That and getting into a firefight with a bunch of drugged up Somali’s.

View at Picasa 10-Apr-2011 09:24, Canon Canon PowerShot SX20 IS, 3.2, 7.437mm, 0.017 sec, ISO 640

That’s where Private security forces come in…

Mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, dudes that come with their own guns. Their industry claims that no boat with a private security force has ever been hijacked. As with the above there are logistics and cost to consider. Three soldiers of fortune with the tools of their trade on Slapdash? We only have one head. Trained killers riding shotgun on your vessel doesn’t come cheap, it can cost as much (or more) than shipping your boat. We have found a way to mitigate the cost but it’s a really long story.

On the other hand our guests are bound to have some great stories, and to kill some time there’s always the chance of some high seas weapons training. We really like this plan and are pursuing it aggressively.

We could also stay here, ‘here’ being somewhere in South East Asia. We would spend the same amount of money bumming around that we would have on shipping or mercenaries, and we wouldn’t be any closer to home. A high probability of fun travel and buying time but no guarantee that anything will change. Given the international response to the pirate problem so far, all we are likely to encounter next year would be more, better armed, wealthier pirates. It was fun talking about all of the places and ways that we could kill off a year here but in the end this one just doesn’t make sense for us.

The last option that received some air time around the Slapdash settee was to sail her back to Australia, turn the boat into cash, and set off on some new adventure. The season would be right for the passage and the market there is good for a sale. It was fun talking about it and we came up with a bunch of crazy ideas but in the process realized how much we both hate backtracking and what finishing what we started really means to us. In the end this was nothing more than some fun conversation over big Lion Lagers.

We’re left with the following scenarios listed in order of most likely to least:

1.       Operation run and gun

2.       Sell the farm, ship the boat

3.       Cape of good luck!

The options I’ve described are the same for anyone living on a boat in this part of the world trying to get home. None good, all with major downsides. Some horrifying things are being said of those few sailors who are captured and/or killed trying. The media has been quick to criticize Quest and ING without seeing the other side of this story. Why? Nine out of ten die trying to summit Everest. Far worse odds than a boat faces sailing through the Gulf of Aden. Yet climbers are welcomed back like conquering heroes. They go on the speaking circuit, make money, speak to school children and inspire them. Light a candle for the dead climbers, but curse the Johannes’s for trying?  We are totally confused by the media’s portrayal, its idiotic discrepancy.

Here’s some stuff we’ve learned about the Somali pirates while wading through all of this crap:

Pirates are foot soldiers of adventurous capitalists, frontline operatives of a criminal organization interested in making money. From that perspective their model is excellent; high returns and low investment. Recruits? An endless supply of hopelessly poor Khat chewing kids with nothing to lose. Risk of capture and prosecution for Jin al Bar (Demons of the seas, as the guys in boats like to call themselves) might as well be nil. Get yourself a sat phone and 100K of start-up capital and you too could become the celebrity director of your own fleet of Somali pirates. Benefitting from all of this are the insurance companies (charging huge premiums to shipping companies), the mercenaries providing escort detail, and the land based pirate bosses. Everyone else is a victim of circumstance.

Every year 23,000 ships with billions in cargo pass through the Gulf; financially speaking the crumbs the Jin al Bar pick off barely justify the show of international Keystone Cop style prevention we see now. Apparently more than 28 warships are operating in the Gulf of Aden and Somali Basin today.

The majority of the warships operating in the Gulf of Aden (GoA) and the Somali Basin are under the control of MSCHOA (www.mschoa.org).  MSCHOA; the Maritime Security Centre – Horn of Africa. There’s also MARLO (Maritime Liaison Office) which is the American version of all the above. Not enough acronyms yet? How about EUNAVFOR, the EU Naval Force for Somalia.

No offence at all intended towards the military forces that we are so happy to see out there, far from it. They are doing everything they can within their means to protect this corridor and have the lopsided task of dealing with a ruthless enemy in ways that will read well in the headlines sure to follow. These insane directives end up lending rationale to the enterprising Somali’s business plan.  Imagine what the combined money, people, effort, and equipment associated with a fleet of this size could do towards the problem if well directed? It’s like the collars for dollars fiasco; wrong targets! Leave the hopped up dime bag teens alone and take out the Ray Ban wearing asshole with the sat phone whose comments and opinions are so happily publicized worldwide through Reuters!

I digress.

Should all be decided in the next week but we have pushed this sailing season to its limits. If the ‘run and gun’ plan doesn’t work out we will either sail around the Cape of Africa, ship the boat, or sell Slapdash and partner with Pirate Inc. Anyone in the market for 75,000 pairs of Nike’s?