Arriving in Seychelles

We left the megalomaniac Chinaman and his crew of murderous Somalis behind us, grateful for the North-West wind which was the reason that we had timed this voyage for this time of the year: to get this long leg of the three part voyage with the best wind possible.

As we sailed further south it was as though the goldfish bowl in which we had been living was being cleaned. In the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden the sky is partially obscured by dust so that you can only see the stars above, rather like a goldfish looking through the top opening of his bowl.

As we progressed it was evident that the sky was slowly getting clearer and the celestial vista was improving each night as though some vast kind soul was cleaning our little bowl and giving us a view of the heavens. When I sailed up the Atlantic many years ago, my sole means of navigation was a sextant and an almanac of the stars. Many of them became friends who I could recognise at a glance and who guided us over thousands of miles of sea.

Now I felt ashamed that I had forgotten most of their names like going to a school reunion and fumbling for memories and names of fellow students that have become vague due to non-use.

The easy ones were there of course and we were in the right part of the ocean at the right time of year to have the plough and the North Star behind us, Orion overhead and in front the Southern Cross acting like a huge celestial clock. It was chance that the Southern Cross was vertical at local time midnight so that each hour of the night was represented by movement across the sky of this well known collection of stars. I found that I was able to time my cups of coffee during the night vigils very accurately, each hour, by merely glancing at the position of this great formation.

Of course the Milky Way lit up a huge swathe across the sky and because we had no clouds it was easy to move around the boat at night just by starlight. There was a New Moon at this time, and I was grateful for that as it gave us twelve night hours of each twenty four where we were almost invisible to any prying eyes.

The motion of the boat with the trade wind was serene so that at night it was as though we were flying on a magic carpet above the waves. The sky was reflected in the sea like an inverse universe and the little flashes of light from small squids and jellyfish seemed to be like shooting stars scooting across this upside-down firmament.

Marlene said, in a moment of poetic inspiration, that “It seems as though you can step off the boat and walk through the stars!”

Rather like some people would like to anticipate death: to be able to step into another reality in a painless and peaceful transition.

Behind us the twin hulls left a trail of florescence in the sea that looked almost like the condensation trails behind a jet aircraft at altitude.

It was a beautiful time to be cruising, marred only by the anxiety of keeping a watch for strange and suspicious boats. It seems to be a rare privilege to have a part of the planet all to oneself, with no vestige of the human race in sight and to be able to contemplate the insignificance and temporary condition of man in the order of Nature and the Universe.

The First of April passed without any pranks, although I had been tempted to attach a plastic bottle to Tony’s fishing line that we had been trailing hopefully but without catching anything all the way from Oman. We crossed the Equator on the Third and we gave Neptune a shot of Brandy which was well received because the wind now backed to the North and we were able to raise the Spinnaker. It was so steady that we sailed over two hundred miles with it flying and pulling us along.

 

I toast crossing the Equator while Marlene shares hers with Neptune

 

Tony caught a couple of fish but they were too big to land and they broke away. Now we were approaching the Seychelles group of islands and the character of the sea changed as we had been cruising with a depth of over four thousand metres and now it was reducing to fifty. The underwater view of this great submerged mountain range would be spectacular and we would seem to be approaching it like an aircraft just skimming over the shallow valleys near the peaks.

We were feeling more relaxed with every mile that we made away from the disputed waters of the north Indian Ocean. We had not expected this following wind at this stage of the voyage as normally we should have had variable doldrums type weather, but it seems that this year the northern movement of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone has been delayed and we only ran out of wind twenty miles from Mahe.

Fine control tuning of the spinaker

We anchored at four in the morning in deep water to await the dawn and the clearance with customs and immigration, who at Seychelles come out to the boat at anchor to do all the formalities.

What a pleasure it was to be greeted by friendly efficient people who got all the paperwork done with smooth competence.

Then we were free to enter the port and see mountains with trees. We hadn’t seen any trees for nearly two months of sand dunes, rock and filth on land and of course trees at sea need to be treated with utmost caution!!

We got reciprocal membership with the Seychelles Yacht Club because Tony had arranged this with the Royal Cape Yacht Club and with Gordon’s Bay Yacht Club during a previous visit to the Seychelles, so in short order we were tied up to an island by the stern with the anchor laid to hold us in position.

Our neighbours are a collection of herons and egrets who have taken a few trees and decorated them with nests all separated by squabble distance.  They dispute their territories with the same vigour as neighbours do all over the world, the difference being that here they are elegant and beautiful. While we sit with a cup of tea we watch a heron coming in to land with a four foot branch that is going to be an extension to his nest. He has to balance the branch in his long bill, position it so that he does not hit it with his wings in flight and then land on a twig with his long legs all the while keeping an eye on the wind flurries and the other birds in flight.

My flying skills of decades of sitting in aircraft and simulators seem paltry by comparison.

Our other neighbour is a Frenchman on his small steel yacht who behaves like a hermit crab. He popped his head out when we arrived, ignored my “Bonjour” and has been hidden ever since.

This is in total contrast to the Seychelles Islanders who we find relaxed and communicative, helpful and happy to share their island with us.

We hope to explore the anchorages and diving places while slowly working on the boat to prepare her for the next part of the voyage.

 

 

I hope to be able to share some of the sights of the Seychelles with more pictures and less chatter when I find a suitable internet café where I can upload them.

 

 

From Salalah to the Chinese War Lord

We left the Port of Salalah grateful to be away from the extorters that we had found there, and steered off into the night.

It was Marlene’s ‘Watch’ and Tony gave her a refresher on the complications of lights at night at sea. She already knew a lot from our voyage together many years ago when we sailed up the Atlantic, but even when you know all about relative bearings and different signals, it can still get confusing.

And so it did!

Later that evening Marlene was confronted with a complex set of lights with long green lights, orange lights and all sorts of echoes from the radar. There seemed to be a big ship ahead with a number of small craft around it which were all moving about, and then some of the lights flew vertically up into the air!

She called Tony who came up to try and make sense of what was going on.

It transpired that a large American Naval Ship was doing a practice night manoeuvre involving small high speedboats and helicopters. It seemed that Freedom was the focus of all the attention, and the helicopters were deployed all around while on the radio a commanding voice told all ships and vessels to stay away from this four mile exclusion zone.

Tony and Marlene were treated to a spectacular display of how a potential pirate would be identified, intercepted and then hopefully subdued.

After an hour the helicopters returned to the long green lights and ‘landed’, if that is the correct word for alighting onto a ship, and I suppose they all went off for a self congratulatory debrief while we sailed on into the night.

I slept through the whole spectacular display… exhaustion does that to you!

The next few days welded together as we sailed a close reach and we were just able to ‘lee-bow’ the effects of the strong southerly current. Then we had a day of calm before the wind settled in from the North-West as we entered the Trade Wind belt. Now was the time for some sailing to make up for all the frustrations of the Red Sea. At last we sailing in wind conditions that catamarans like, and Freedom did ‘like’.

We were about four hundred miles from the Somali Coast and further than that from the Island of Socotra when I saw ahead a vessel that looked like a Coast Guard Cutter. I turned away from it and it looked as though it had not seen us in the poor visibility, but almost when it had passed out of sight it spotted us and turned back towards us.

I immediately contacted the Pirate Co-Ordination Centre in Bahrain via the Satellite Phone

that we were being intercepted by a suspicious vessel. Soon after the UK branch of Piracy Surveillance contacted us and I was able to give them a fairly decent description of the vessel, but I had to curtail the call as the vessel was trying to contact us on VHF.

There was a lot of angry chatter in a language that I could not decipher, so I explained that if they wanted to talk to us then it would have to be in English.

The vessel had a large sign displayed down the side of it declaring that it was armed and that all vessels should keep their distance.

I could not decide at first if it was a coalition naval vessel from a poor nation, as it was decorated with rust, or if it was indeed a pirate vessel.

An angry Chinese voice shouted words that sounded like, “What are you doing here? This is Prohibited Area!”

“No it isn’t!” I replied. “This is Open Ocean!”

He screamed a tirade of which I only understood a part, along the lines of, “I have paid the Somali Nation for this Ocean and this fishing and I can shoot anyone who enter here. You must not be here. Where are you from?”

I answered, “You do not have the authority to ask that question.”

He shouted, “How many on board?”

I said, “You do not have the authority to ask that question!”

He screamed, “Where you going?”

I answered, “Seychelles!”

He didn’t seem to know where that was.

“I put warning shot across your bow!” He threatened.

I replied, “You do not have the right to fire warning shots. You do not have the right to shoot at us. We are free to pass this part of the Ocean. This is Open Ocean!”

All this while there were three Somalis with heavy machine guns positioning themselves into firing positions from the deck, as our relative positions changed. We were still motor-sailing resolutely south. He had a large Somali Bodyguard next to him, also armed with a heavy machine gun.

Now I could hear the satellite phone ringing, which must have been the pirate watch people from the UK wondering what was happening to us.

I don’t know what this little yellow megalomaniac was thinking but after a couple of more heated radio exchanges he shouted something and then “Out”. So we took the hint, shut up and headed away, while he continued his patrol of his curtain of long line fishing buoys which seemed to be strung out more or less East to West.

A curtain of death for the deep sea fish.

I can’t tell if my aggressive attitude was the right thing at the time, but I had the feeling that any sign of weakness would not be in our best interests. Why he didn’t shoot us up I don’t know, he certainly could have. Maybe he thought we were also armed. I am sure that he had other boats in his ‘fleet’ to pull up the long line buoys and to process the fish.

Chinese controlled Somali Gunship with possible large gun hidden below foredeck.

 

Later that evening I saw a radar echo returning along the track that he disappeared on, so we motored at high speed to avoid another encounter. He did have a radar antenna rotating, but didn’t seem to be using it. Marlene suggested that there was a monkey down by the keel whose job it was to turn the aerial array!

It seemed that he really thought he owned the Ocean, but how could he? He isn’t the Royal Navy of the Eighteen Hundreds!

I feel sure that if we had been a fishing boat he would have opened fire without hesitation. He seemed so aggressive that I should think that he will even challenge a warship if one should cross his path.

I hope that happens.

And I hope it is a Russian warship.

They know how to properly convince people like him just exactly who does hold the trump cards at sea.

Salalah, Port of Pirates and Extortionists

“Salalah Port Control, this is Yacht Freedom requesting entry into Port Salalah?”

“Yacht Freedom, this is Salalah Port Control, do you have an agent in Salalah?”

This was our first warning, but we thought that we had moved up a notch from the ‘Third World’ ports where we had been. How wrong we were.

“Salalah, we are only entering port to uplift fuel and then departing.”

Wrong!

“Yacht Freedom, you have to have an agent to enter Port Salalah!”

Second warning, but we did not know it at the time.

After getting a list of agents from the port control we chose one at random and phoned him. He wanted to know all sorts of details like the last ten ports we had visited, our ship’s registration number (only required for ships over 100tons), if anyone had died on board and the Captain’s great aunt’s maiden name. Not quite, but you get the drift!

I explained that we were in transit and only needed to uplift fuel because of contamination, but they were having none of it.

We were given entry permission and we motored past enormous container ships that were in the process of docking, with all their anti-piracy barbed wire entanglements around the deck, and dummy guards which were supposed to give pirates the impression that they were being surveilled, but were in fact looking a bit weather worn, rather like abandoned scarecrows.

Ship with dummy guards and barbed wire protection

 

You have to admire the bravery of these pirates that they are prepared to climb up homemade rickety ladders to scale the towering sides of these ships, while balanced in a slippery skiff pounding along the side of the ship at twenty knots.

Would US Navy Seals do that?

I wonder.

We were directed to wharf 28 which was a dirty place to tie up next to a fishing boat manned by an Indian crew. They helped us into position.

The ‘agent’ from Gulf Agencies was there to meet us with a bill for $3200.

Whaaat?

“Oh yes,” he said.

Fees for this, fine for that and on top of which was a fee of $1200 for entering the port of Salalah.

I protested strongly and demanded to see the port authority and after much haggling got the bill reduced to €1660, which was about a forty percent reduction, but still ridiculous, but it did include a 500 litre fuel uplift. Eventually I decided that we should consider the fuel to be €3 per litre and forget the chagrin.

When I demanded a receipt I got a hand written note. I shall be taking this up with the headquarters of Gulf Agency in due course, because I love a scrap. It seems obvious to me that the port authority and the agency have a scam going for individual private yachts that don’t go on the books, but which are fleeced for cash which goes to line everyone’s pockets.

But it gets more sinister than that.

While we were tied up another large boat arrived, made in Iran and which was the exact duplicate of a ‘mother ship’ pirate vessel which was seized in the Seychelles and pictured in the ‘Grail Guide for Antipiracy’ book, page 19. What finally happened to that ship is not clear, but this one was either a sister ship, or the same one renovated.

The skipper was an Iranian who spent a lot of his time staring at us, rather like a farmer staring at his turkey flock and his fattest cock-bird just before Thanksgiving.

It was a very uncomfortable feeling.

Ian spoke to the crew and told them he was leaving us and going home, which was not the best move as now they knew that we would be only three on board.

That night, late, an unmarked box was delivered to the Iranian boat which was just the right size to hold a couple of heavy machine guns. I know those boxes, having ferried a few in my time, by air, around Africa.

Later, at about 0300 an Agency car arrived and was given a couple of decent sized tuna from the boat, which he put in the boot and drove away.

I knew something had to done.

Ian was due to be picked up in the morning and taken to the airport at Salalah and we were supposed to be given our final clearance documents. We were sorry to be losing Ian as he had been such a stalwart crew member, putting up with all the adversities along the route and rising to every occasion with a sense of humour.

“Only take one hour.” They said.

I saw the Iranian Captain standing on the shore next to the boat, looking like a grumpy grizzly bear that had missed the salmon run.

“Good morning,” I said.

“American?” he said, gesturing towards the American flag at the stern of Freedom.

“No, British!” I answered.

I realised as I said it, that wasn’t much better, ever since Puppy Dog Blair had followed the Americans into the Middle East War.

“We are going to Djibouti.” I volunteered.

He grunted and turned away. I hoped he believed that, because Ian had told them that we had already come from Egypt.

Iranian built boat, sister ship of captured pirate vessel in Seychelles

 

The Iranian boat left half an hour later, while we were delayed for several hours. They needed proof of insurance, because otherwise they were going to fine us another $200. We gave them a sheaf of paperwork which confused them just long enough to sign the clearance, and then we were off.

While in the port we found a small shop that serviced the needs of the sailors of the cargo vessels that stop at the port. This place was like the bar in first episode of Star Wars, with such a wide variety of ‘types’ from all over the world. There were two Somali ex-pirates who now had a job as ‘security guards’ on a commercial ship, and they made the pirates of the Black Pearl look positively handsome by comparison. I wonder if they also had a mobile phone to contact their ex-colleagues? There were Indian fishermen who were being castigated by a Somali Fishing Boat Captain for being in these waters and stealing fish. There were shady looking individuals who came under the general heading of ‘Eastern’ and also the officers from a Chinese Naval Ship that was patrolling the offshore waters. It is fascinating to think that the people rubbing shoulders in this small shop could be shooting at each other next day.

Once we were outside the port the authorities realised that we had given them a complex quote for insurance, and not a real insurance contract.

The reality is that no one can get insurance for running the Pirate Gauntlet.

So they were making yet another scam claim for money, on a certainty, but we were already outside the port and on our way. Of course we promised them all sorts of things, just until we got out of gunboat range. It didn’t seem likely that they would get the Coast Guard to get us back, because then they would have to include the Coast Guard in any future scams that they might run on foreign yachts. The Coast Guard seemed to us to be conducted at a high level, as was the local Police, and not stooping to petty scams on visiting yachts.

We felt sure that by now the Iranian boat had had time to fit his heavy machine guns, and get a good start towards the Omani/Yemeni border at sea. His most likely place for ambush would be, we thought, about fifty miles inside Yemeni waters from ten to thirty miles offshore.

If he has outguessed us, he would position himself about ten miles offshore along the Omani coast which is where most yachts go in order to pick up the following wind and current along the shore, in a wide sweep around towards the Indian Ocean and its destinations.

We decided instead to route out to sea, which would take us towards the recommended safety route and towards possible coalition warships, and also into a contrary current that we would have to battle against, but would be better than confronting a pirate.

The current from the south past Socotra Island at certain times of the year reaches seven knots and is reported to be the strongest in the world. Also at certain times of the year the frequency of gales here is higher than Cape Horn, with its formidable reputation.

Not the sort of place that Pirates like to hang about waiting for the off chance of a passing boat.

If and when we get to Seychelles I will be starting an animated series of emails with the headquarters of the Gulf Agencies and with the Harbourmaster of Salalah, who happens to be a South African who was away on leave during our brief visit. I will also be contacting the Office of Criminal Investigations in Muscat to find out the legality of the port authority levying fines for the list of things they presented to us.

I have also promised a report to the Pirate monitoring bureau in the UK regarding Salalah, with reference as to why the port authority is so interested in insurance cover for passing boats, if it is not to inform the pirates of the valuation of boats for ransom purposes.

There is also the question of if that ‘box’ did contain heavy machine guns, who supplied them and where did they come from? I am sceptical of the aims of Private Armies, or mercenaries, because their objectives are often to ensure their contracts are renewed, rather than meet the objectives of their employers. In this case there is a thriving business in supplying ex military people to act as security guards on ships, armed and ready to fire on any boat suspected of being a pirate boat. They have not had a good hijacking for a year, so I believe that it would be in their interest to have bloody incident involving, not a ship, but a private boat which would hit the headlines and ensure their future employment.

Would they find it worth while to arm an Iranian with a chip on his shoulder, for personal gain?

I know this is a very sceptical view of the situation, but after two months in these waters I have become slightly paranoid.

I hope not with good reason.

I shall be warning the other yachtsmen that I know of the dangers enroute and the dangers of the Port of Salalah.

I have come to the conclusion that when people of most religions lose their faith they still seem to retain a certain sense of morality and a sense of right and wrong, but in this part of the world that does not seem to be the case.

Once you have let slip the chains of a severely restrictive religion, anything is permissible and possible.

And likely!