What a shame it is that the theme of our final ocean crossing is the issue of piracy. It’s an issue that few people understand, so a few words on its history are in order. Since the Somali government collapsed in the mid 1980’s, the Somali coastline was left undefended as anarchy ruled. Foreign fishing trawlers seized the opportunity by illegally fishing throughout the Somali seaboard, while western corporations used the opportunity to dump toxic waste along the Somali shores – a cheaper alternative than legal methods of disposal, and without risk of prosecution under the laws of any nation state. This devastated the fish stock in Somalia, and with fishing being one of Somalia’s biggest industries, it also left many Somalis in a desperate situation. Fishermen began taking hostile action towards illegal foreign vessels operating in Somali waters, which eventually morphed into the piracy industry that continues to disrupt ship traffic for about 1000 miles around Somalia today. Decades later, hijacking remains a risk today, despite the coalition efforts of 21 countries to patrol the Horn of Africa region with warships and a variety of military assets onshore, offshore, and in the air.

This security situation has made preparing for our Indian Ocean voyage a major challenge . The bulk of our passage literally takes place inside a war zone, and as one of the first private sailing boats to attempt this passage since 2012, it would be stupid to underestimate the threat. Increased security has caused a major decline in the number of piracy incidents since 2012, but whether “soft targets” like us are safe in these waters remains an untested theory. So we chose to go with a security plan that prepares us for the worst, which means we had to prepare for a gunfight if necessary. In Thailand we installed bullet proof metal shielding around the cockpit and made a pan for embarking high caliber assault rifles prior to our entry into the HRA. But like pretty much every other plan we’ve made in the past three years, this one too went pear shaped soon after we set it into motion.

The plan went like this. First we linked up with another boat in Thailand, Shapirit, whose skipper (and his ex-Army crew) had similar intentions to ours and agreed to join forces with us for the Indian Ocean transit, essentially providing mutual support to each other in a convoy format. We also called up our friend Lee, who used to serve as a sniper in the Israeli Special Forces, and asked him to come aboard as our security officer. He agreed, the only thing missing in our combined plan with Shapirit was the sourcing of weapons.

So we and Shapirit made a deal with a supposedly reputable security contractor to rent the weapons from an armory in Sri Lanka. Shapirit was to pick them up and meet us at sea following our week or two of cruising around the Maldives. But on arrival in Sri Lanka the contractor couldn’t deliver the weapons as agreed – whether it was a money making scheme or a problem with the Sri Lankan authorities still isn’t totally clear, but once we realized the weapons weren’t coming aboard, the reasons didn’t much matter. We were in a situation we called a “clusterf*ck”… sitting in the Maldives with a Special Forces soldier aboard, Shapirit departing Sri Lanka unarmed, the wind direction leaving us little option other than sailing into the HRA, and not a single weapon among us. With the help of a resourceful agent in the Maldives, the frantic calls went out to all the security contractors with weapons in the Maldives armory. Within 24 hours we had found one that agreed to rent us some weapons, we signed the contract, made the payment, and were making a mad dash for Male, two days south where the armory is located. En route, the questions from the security company started flying at us about our maritime security credentials (we have none), Lee’s registration with a licensed security firm (also none), and so on…. apparently their usual clients are security firms, and they just assumed that’s what we were. The closer we got to the weapons, the more questions came at us, and the less certain our weapons deal was. Eventually the dreaded email arrived from the security contractor. This is how it unfolded from there… via email:

Jason,
I do apologize as there is a misunderstanding, we need to have a custodian for this transit. We need to cancel the weapons rental and we will transfer the funds to you right away. I truly apologize for this matter.

Please do not load the Weapons.

Best Regards,

Charles

And upon learning from our agent we had already loaded the weapons and were sailing away, the security company replied:

Jason,

Please turn back and return the weapons to Male. It is serious, you might be arrested. You are not allowed to use the weapons without a custodian. Kindly sail back.
Thanks,
Charles

And with that chaos occurring on our computer screens, we put Male astern and motored away into the sunset in gorgeous but windless conditions. We were armed and thus safe… a major victory.

So it’s been a mostly smooth 12 days since then crossing the Arabian Sea and first half of the Gulf of Aden. We saw few ships of any type for the first 10 days, and our only hiccup was some broken sail rigging that took our mainsail temporarily out of commission for a morning. Asier was able to fabricate a replacement part in the engine room, which we installed on the mast that afternoon, and by the end of the episode we had given Asier his official nickname: the Maestro.

Here in the Gulf of Aden, things are getting more interesting as the land masses push all transiting ships into a narrower and narrower bottleneck, where the piracy activity is more concentrated. The wind also has forced us to travel further south than we had hoped, pushing us to within 50 miles of Somalia’s coastline at one point. We see an occasional fishing boat and work hard to avoid any near approaches and try to avoid detection all together, preferring to run without nav lights most of the time, and with our AIS system switched on only occasionally. We try to stay within a mile of Shapirit in case we need to converge quickly, which is our plan in case of any approaching skiffs. We see warships on the horizon and hear their chatter on the VHF – their purpose is to protect the merchant ships inside the transit corridor, but their presence offers us additional comfort.

But for the time being, we’ve had no worrying incidents other than a few close passes with fishing skiffs, and we’ve felt mostly safe, but in a slightly nervous and unsure way. So we sail on at full speed towards the entrance to the Red Sea, where the risk goes up by several orders of magnitude. We’re enjoying flawless sailing conditions and couldn’t ask for a better start to our 2015. Next stop will be a quick stop in Aden, where we hope to buy diesel and bread, then onward and westward into the most risky section of the voyage, the straits of Bab Al Mandab.

As we concluded our last update we mentioned we were hoping to make it all the way to Maldives unless a fuel shortage forced us into Sri Lanka. As it turned out fuel wasn’t a major issue, but a communications failure was. We lost our satellite communication system and our SSB radio at the same time, the combined loss of which prevented us from getting any weather forecasts or communicating with anyone on shore for five days (our longest blackout ever). Without working comms, we had no way of communicating with Maldives authorities, no way of seeing if a storm was in our path, and no way to know if continued calms or headwinds would cause a fuel shortage. So here we are tied to the pontoon in Galle, Sri Lanka, for better or for worse.

And although we wouldn’t put Galle on the “must see before you die” list, we’re finding our stop here to be unusually interesting for various non-touristic reasons. Galle happens to occupy a strategic location being just outside the piracy affected area (“High Risk Area”) that begins at the Red Sea and ends at the Maldives, and is on an almost direct route for boats heading east from Suez to Singapore… one of the most heavily trafficked commercial shipping routes in the world. Sri Lankan officials were clever enough to realize they could make lots of money managing the loading and unloading of weapons and security teams from passing merchant ships. With a converted cargo ship serving as a large weapons depot just 100 meters from us, we find ourselves in the middle of one of the largest security hubs on this side of the HRA.

Another group that’s attracted to Galle is the megayacht crowd, which is now fleeing the European winter and migrating towards the warmer waters of Asia. The four megayachts in the harbor with us, with a combined value of around a billion dollars, look peculiar inside this small third world fishing harbor, where many local fishermen row their boats beyond the breakwater for lack of any motorized propulsion. The 71 meter Flying Fox megayacht, on the other hand, is shadowed by its 67 meter “support vessel” called the Sea Axe, which houses a full dive center, submarine, helicopter, jet skis, wakeboard boat, various sized launches, decompression chamber, and 30 support staff. Apparrently for the world’s uber-wealthy, a single megayacht simply isn’t enough to impress these days… we wonder how long it will be before some oligarch or prince adds a private warship to his personal fleet. With extreme poverty and extreme wealth placed in such close proximity here in Galle, a heavy dose of Kalishnakov-carrying security guards surrounds the harbor to ensure order is maintained. It’s a bizarre world indeed.

With forecast now in hand, fuel and water topped off, fridge and freezer full of Indian and Sri Lankan treats, it’s time for us to get back underway for Maldives.

It was the early explorers from Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and Britain who first ventured across the world’s great oceans to discover what was beyond the visible horizon. Before that time, the European belief was that the world was flat, with the oceans ending at a cliff-like precipice. As we begin our last major ocean crossing here on the east side of the Indian Ocean, with our modern navigational systems, accurate charts, satellite data connections, and daily weather forecasts, it’s difficult to imagine today the courage it must have taken to put the “spherical Earth theory” to the test in those early days of nautical exploration. Instead of iPad apps and satellites, they used the moon, the stars, the sun, and a simple watch to fumble their way around the planet, yet somehow they made it all work.

We don’t pretend that our endeavor today bears much resemblance to those of the early pioneers of these great oceans…. most of the danger, thrill, and romanticism has been lost over the decades. But still, as we find ourselves sitting amidst a seemingly endless sea of calm, what we see around us, above us, and below us, hasn’t changed the slightest bit since those early voyages. And so it’s a nice feature of these big ocean passages that we have time and opportunity to ponder these things from such an unusual vantage point. We wonder about the clues we see around us, the planets and stars, ocean currents and swells, clouds and weather patterns… with the benefit of modern science the workings of the Earth and the universe are so easy to understand, but how did they appear in earlier times? In a calm sea today, with a clear sky, dolphins jumping on our bow wave, and nothing to do other than think, we discover some interesting mental voyages that seem so elusive in a modern city life. And we appreciate them while we still can.

The Indian Ocean is the last of the great oceans we need to cross before our circumnavigation is complete. Just a few days before departing from Thailand, we bumped into yet another Spanish adventurer, Asier, who’s been “hitch-hiking” his way around the globe by sea for the past two years, nearly crossing paths with us several times, but always just missing us by a few days. Our paths crossed in Phuket, and we’re happy that Asier will join Rupe (who crossed the Atlantic with us) and Tarzan (who joined us for the Pacific) to be the third “Spanish” adventurer (in quotes because Rupe may technically be British) to cross one of the big oceans aboard Tamarisk. Learning about the adventures of Rupe and Tarzan, and watching their own voyaging dreams come true, has been a joy, and we’ll hopefully see the same with Asier by the time we arrive on the shores of the Med.

Speaking of dreams come true, an update on Tarzan is long overdue. One afternoon when we were in French Polynesia on the island of Moorea last year, we were late returning from a volcano hike, and found ourselves hitchhiking back to the boat. The first car to pass us pulled over and picked us up; the driver a beautiful French speaking woman from Reunion Island, living on Moorea with her two young kids. Fortunately for Tarzan, he’d been studying French the whole way across the Pacific, and by the time we arrived back at the boat five minutes later, Tarzan had her contact info in hand and a “love at first sight” type of twinkle in his eye. We had no time to spare, and we jumped on the boat and immediately headed west towards the Society Islands. But since that moment, Tarzan never stopped thinking about his encounter on Moorea, the unlikely circumstances of their paths crossing, and he mentioned several times how he regretted in some ways that he hadn’t had just a bit more time to see where where life might have gone under slightly different circumstances. Fast forwarding two months, we arrived in Australia, and as we sat there on the Queensland shore in our first days, we got an email from Dan, the shipwrecked catamaran captain we met back in the Cook Islands shortly after leaving the Societies. Dan wanted to offer Tarzan a job rebuilding the broken cat, which happened to be laying in Tahiti, which also happens to be just 20 miles from Moorea, and thus Tarzan’s favorite hitch-hiker-picker-upper. Tarzan, being a big believer in things like fate, and that everything happens for a reason, saw this as a sign from the universe, perhaps more so than a job opportunity, and without much hesitation Tarzan was quickly Tahiti-bound. We’ve of course been tracking Tarzan with some lingering hopes he might return to join us for these final legs of our voyage, but as the months elapsed we sensed perhaps Tarzan’s sailing adventures might be taking a pause for a while. And that’s exactly what happened. Today Tarzan lives in Tahiti, happily married to Sandrine (with 2 kids), and living almost the exact dream he described to us when he first boarded Tamarisk back in the Panama City harbor. So congratulations to them both, and thank you for writing a real-life fairy tale into the story of our voyage – we’ve already told it a thousand times and will no doubt tell it thousands more!

OK, where were we… back aboard Tamarisk here in the Bay of Bengal, the task at hand is to reach the Maldives. The challenge is the wind, or to be more accurate, its complete absence anywhere since we left Thailand four days ago, and anywhere in our five-day weather forecast. With a 1600 mile passage, and just 1300 miles of motoring range, diesel fuel is the critical issue we’re wrestling with. So after four days at sea, our destination remains unknown – with a bit of luck we’ll catch a puff of wind to push us to the Maldives, otherwise we’ll be diverting into Sri Lanka for a diesel top-up.

Another cyclone and another delay. When we left Townsville last week, our intended destination was Kupang, Indonesia. It was an ambitious non-stop passage to attempt still inside cyclone season, but we figured what the hell…. not that we had much of a choice, given our expired Australian visas. The plan was still looking solid five days after we left. Coming through the Torres Straights at the top of Australia, we had good currents and good winds, and managed to lay down a personal best: 215 miles in 24 hours. We don’t like to toot our own trumpets, but let’s be honest, we were flying. Then something ominous began to appear on our seven day forecast. A low pressure system expected to deepen into a severe cyclone, on a track directly for Kupang about 24 hours after our estimated arrival there. We did a quick check with Bob McDavitt, the undisputed guru of weather forecasting in this part of the world at New Zealand’s Met Office, and his advice was to play it safe given the high possibility of fierce westerly winds and no good shelter in Kupang,

Darwin is the most northerly major city in Australia and a place we didn’t expect we’d have a chance to see. Being the only real city on the northern coast, it was the obvious place to wait out the storm. Invoking our new favorite maritime rule, we entered Darwin without valid visas “seeking shelter from storm or tempest”, and the Australian authorities were again welcoming and understanding given the circumstances… good ‘onya mates!

As it turned out, the cyclone never developed into anything serious, and Kupang escaped the nasty winds that were forecasted, so in the end our detour was unnecessary. Being such a historic city, and the site of a WWII bombing blitz courtesy of the Japanese, we found the city worth the visit from a curiosity perspective, but probably would skip it next time around (absent another cyclone). With the weather now all-clear for the three days remaining in our passage to Kupang, we’ve pulled the anchor and are now watching Darwin (and Australia) disappear into the distance behind us.

Since rounding the top of Australia, we’re in the Indian Ocean now, meaning the entire Pacific is astern (contrary to my earlier comment, where I wrongly said the Pacific reaches all the way to Singapore). The water is a different color over here, deep green instead of deep blue, and we have no clue why that is. The winds, which prevail from the southeast, are generally lighter than on the Pacific side as we’re in the wind shadow of Australia. So with the stormy weather now gone, the skies clear and a steady gentle breeze, the spinnaker is flying and it’s time for some relaxation on the deck.