By NICO CARTALLA
WE departed the island of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean on April 6 for a 21-day trip that would bring us back to the Mediterranean port of Palma de Mallorca in Spain to get the M/Y Teleost ready for summer. The 160-foot private superyacht sails to the Mediterranean in summer and to either the Caribbean or Indian Ocean islands in winter, entertaining multimillionaire clients who pay $240,000 dollars a week for a nice holiday.
Morale on board the ship was understandably low. A few days ago a charter yacht had been seized off Asuncion island a couple of hundred miles south from where we were. It was the first hijacking incident in the area. That night we received another report of an attack 100 miles north of where we were. A maritime advisory warned vessels against traveling 600 miles close to the Somalian coast. Our captain decided to divert the yacht’s course more to the east, away from the pirate-infested waters.
At night we sailed in total darkness. All lights were off, including our navigational lights. We also turned off our Automatic Identification System (AIS), which broadcasts most of the ship’s data such as length, gross tonnage, number of crew and destination. We relied only on our radars’ ARPA solutions to find out what the other ships were doing and for them to do the same. ARPA solutions are the radars’ computer automatic calculations of a target vessel’s speed and distance, among other data. Though not as informative as the AIS, they minimize the risk of collision. (People used to call other vessels to know their intentions, but the computer now does the job for us. In fact, all controls, including engine controls, are on computer monitors.)
Crossing the equator
After a couple of days at sea, we were passing the equator. It’s a tradition for mariners to hold a blessing ceremony every time they cross the equator. We would baptize every new crewmember with humorous ceremonies. This time, it was our 30-year-old captain, and everyone was excited. Our worries about being attacked by pirates momentarily dissipated.
For this ceremony, everyone dressed up as a pirate; well, we were in a pirate-infested area. The first officer was King Neptune. We arrested our captain, bound him and took him to the stern of the boat and read the charges against him. After prosecution, which of course found him “guilty” of all the charges, we got him to eat a plate of sushi and afterwards poured on his head mixed stuffs that the chef had concocted from the galley.
After seven days at sea, we arrived at the Port of Salalah in Oman. The weather was good, and the girls and other crew got tanned from sunbathing every day. Our 10-member multinational crew consists of seven men and three women. I am the only Filipino in the group.
We anchored outside of the port while waiting for the two Special Forces security escorts who would accompany us on this journey. The two used to be part of the French Anti-Terrorism Team.
After loading the two supernumeraries that night, we lifted anchor and sailed to the Gulf of Aden, now known as the most dangerous waters of the world. Even with our armed security on board, we still adopted anti-piracy safety measures.
We could not risk being seen at night since we did not know what vessels we would run into. The most suspicious were the little ones like the fishing vessels which could not be seen on radar. It has been known that the pirates use mother ships then launch small boats to attack other vessels.
Close call
The next day, our security escorts briefed us on what we might get into and taught us what to do in case our ship got hijacked or, worse, we were taken hostage. Shortly before the briefing ended, our captain sounded the alarm.
It was not a drill! Two little boats or skiffs were approaching—one from the righthand side in front of the boat and the other from the stern. We spotted them first at three miles before we could make them out as target on the radars. Five minutes later, three more skiffs arrived from all directions and stayed with us from two miles away.
I stayed as the navigational team in the bridge with the captain and the chief officer and the second engineer as the fire team. According to our security team, the tactic of these pirates is to shoot on the bridge to confuse the bridge personnel. They had fired rocket-propelled grenades or RPGs on commercial ships on a few occasions. That’s why we had the firefighting team ready.
We increased our engine revs to increase speed and the security escorts were deployed on the sun deck with a crewmember to communicate with the bridge. The chief engineer closed down the engine room with him inside. The rest of the crew, especially the women, was sent to the safety room. The pirates are used to seeing an all-male crew, but as our vessel is a yacht with European women as part of the crew, we knew it would be a different ball game.
After 15 minutes the skiffs started heading in different directions, leaving us behind. It was a close call. Maybe they were just fishermen curious to see a yacht like ours. Or maybe they did not sense panic and disorientation in our crew and the sight of the security team carrying automatic weapons made them change their mind.
It turned out we were lucky. Thirty miles south of our location, a commercial ship was fired on with RPGs and automatic weapons by men on board skiffs.
Transit corridor
There is an area at sea where Coalition Navy recommends ships travel in a convoy so they can keep an eye on one another and immediately send for help when an attack occurs. But as we plotted the positions of the attacks, we found they were inside the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor. So our captain, with the approval of our insurance company, decided to take the route north of the transit zone and pass 30 miles off the Yemeni coast. Since the pirates are from Somalia, we thought they would not go closer to Yemen. But you’ll never know.
We recorded at least one attack per day in the transit zone during the few days we were in the area. There was one time I picked up a transmission from another vessel and I knew it was a Filipino on the radio reporting to the Coalition Warship that they could see a suspicious vessel trying to launch their skiffs. Such as brave act can save others.
Piracy and poverty
Why have the Somalians taken up piracy in the high seas?
Piracy is, of course, an age-old problem. It happens around the world, including some parts of the Philippines and the Malacca Straights in Malaysia. The Somalian pirates have already raised millions of dollars in ransom money paid by shipping companies in return of the release of their crew and the ships that were held hostage.
But the Somalian piracy problem is just a symptom of a bigger issue. According to U.S. intelligence reports, the pirates come from the village of Eyl that is home to crumbling houses and rows of ruined boats. Somalia is one of the poorest, most violent and most unstable countries in the world today. Somalians suffer from severe drought, hunger and lawlessness. The ongoing fighting between the Al Shabaab militia that controls Kismaayo and the southern part has turned Mogadishu, Somali’s capital and largest city, into “the deadliest place on earth,” according to foreign journalists who have been to the area.
The situation, journalists say, is worse in Putland in northeastern Somalia, from which most pirate attacks are launched. Village folks flee to Yemen almost every day. Human smuggling flourishes. Some refugees die at sea, their bodies unceremoniously dumped into the water. It comes as no surprise that Somalian warlords encounter no difficulty recruiting people to capture ships travelling this rich trading route.
Protecting RP seafarers
How can the piracy issue affect Filipinos? At least 75 percent of the ships passing Somalia have Filipino seafarers on board. These ongoing incidents can endanger the life and livelihood of our seafarers. If the company decides to stop its trading for security reasons, a lot of Filipino seafarers will find themselves out of a job.
Some of our politicians have proposed a ban on Filipino seafarers passing pirate-infested waters. Seafarers, they say, could choose to take a leave before passing these critical areas. These politicians must be out of their mind or simply misinformed. The shipping companies will not pay these seafarers once they leave the ship. They also have to get replacement for these seafarers to keep the ship running toward the next port. Our government is not ready to subsidize the loss of income for these poor seafarers.
Container ships, tankers and other commercial ships have specific schedules to meet and a slight delay can cause tremendous losses to the company. Not to mention their clients’ losses arising from the delay, including the destruction of, say, perishable goods. Shipping companies are ready to pay millions of dollars in ransom not because of the lives of the crew are at stake but because they stand to lose much, much more than the amount of the ransom money if the ships are delayed. That is the very reason this piracy issue will continue—and keep growing. Ships will still pass the area, no matter what. Shipping firms equate ransom money to a heavy tax for passage.
Instead of a ban, what our politicians can do is to communicate with shipping companies or ship owners through their manning agencies in the Philippines and work for the deployment of our special forces as security personnel for these ships. Even the U.S. Navy has issued an advice to shipping companies to hire private security teams. We send our soldiers to do peacekeeping in war-torn countries, why not send them to protect our seafarers?
Our well-trained soldiers can stop any attack on these ships. They do not need to shoot the people on board the skiffs. Instead, they can target their boats or engines to disable them and stop the assault from being carried out. These pirates are nothing compared to our soldiers. First of all, most of these them are hired out of nowhere and just given a gun to point at somebody.
The suggestion to deploy Filipino soldiers to ships passing the Gulf of Aden will entail logistical and diplomatic arrangements. But this would go a long way in helping guard the jobs and lives of Filipino seafarers.
(The author is the second officer of the charter yacht M/Y Teleost.)