Quote:
Originally Posted by kd3pc
In this months issue of the magazine we have an article purporting to be a strategy for transiting "pirate territory"...where the "primary defensive tactic will be to" throw polypropylene lines into the pirates props..and to plan to spend "a couple of months" crossing "pirate alley". Is this a game that they can simply reset or warp out of when need be....and get a redo?
After practice they get this down to a mere 9 minutes prep ...are the pirates going to wait while this happens?
Me thinks that this writer has been watching too many of the failed attempts of the weekly reality clowns and whales and japan, oh my!?!
And to be in a mainstream sail magazine of all places as a realistic approach to piracy. Too many hits? American arrogance? Naive? Stupid? AND choosing to bring along the kids.
Perhaps this was written before the latest slaughter by the pirates, but still no excuse to encourage such stupid behavior on the water.
People who will choose this tactic, are going to be killed ....or worse....much worse.
Sheesh, when will America learn that some people simple want to kill you..and take what you have.
Thoughts?
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It appears you may have misunderstood what the author was saying…
Their “primary defensive strategy” was to have all the boats traveling together in a diamond-shaped formation close ranks by having the lead boats slow down, and the rest of the formation converge to the center… At the distance between each other they were maintaining, the entire procedure took approximately 9 minutes… I took the reference to the use of tossing floating lines to simply be to one of many things an individual boat might resort to if being threatened, certainly not their primary strategy…
All in all, I thought it was a fairly good account of how one group of sailors chose to deal with the threat. If you’re gonna choose to sail through those waters, their strategy seemed about as good as any, I suppose… The article certainly makes clear the difficulties involved in traveling in such a convoy, and I suspect the joking reference to posing as great a threat to each other at night as the threat posed by pirates is not all that far from the truth…
I certainly don’t view SAIL’s publication of this account as any sort of “endorsement” that the Red Sea route can be safely transited by taking proper precautions… I think the story speaks for itself, although I do wonder why no mention was made whatsoever about the question of whether to travel armed, or not.. That’s usually the first thing to arise, at least when a group of American boats are involved – I suspect the author was simply using her discretion on that, perhaps not wishing to identify or imply that certain boats may have been traveling armed…
In fairness to these people, they were committed to sailing this route prior to the recent rash of attacks against yachts this season (they learned of the murders of the crew of QUEST during a stop in Yemen) I would never sail that route myself, but I don’t see anything in that account that suggests doing so involves anything less than an extremely high level of risk, and that they were indeed very lucky to have made it though unscathed…
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