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THE HIJACKING OF "QUEST"
After several years sailing around the world and distributing bibles to
communities in remote locations, the skipper of "Quest", a large US-flagged
yacht, decided to join the Blue Water Rally in Phucket to sail in company during
the dangerous transit of the Gulf of Aden.
Bob and Phyllis, two old friends who had sailed-along with us in the Blue Water
Rally 2007/09 on their yacht "Gaia", had decided to "relive the experience" by
crewing on several of the 2009/11 BWR yachts, and in Phucket they joined "Quest".
Phyllis and Bob in happier times, at the end of
the Blue Water Rally 2007/09
Quest" sailed with the Rally until in Mumbay, an unplanned stopover that was
decided by the Rally management in order to sail towards Salalah in Oman staying
close to shore, to avoid the ever-expanding area of pirate activity in the
Arabian Gulf.
We will probably never know exactly why, but in Mumbay the skipper of "Quest"
decided to sail towards Salalah on his own, instead of sailing in formation with
other BWR yachts, and taking the direct route which was several hundred miles
within the area of pirate activity.
Maybe the skipper grew impatient of group discipline, or under-estimated the
danger of a pirate attack to a yacht, albeit large and US-flagged.
We will never know, and we will also probably never know what happened exactly
on board "Quest", fact is that 300 miles before reaching Salalah they were
boarded by an unusually large group of pirates (19 people, quite uncommon) and
were detoured towards Somalia, while an US warship quickly came near them to
monitor the situation.
Some days after, when "Quest" was few hours from the Somalian coast, disaster
struck: two pirates, invited to come aboard the warship for last-minute
"negotiation" were detained (an euphemism for "arrested") and the pirates
remaining on the yacht, apparently after an internal dispute that ended in a
gunfight where two of them were killed, decided to shoot the hostages in
retaliation.
A SEAL party soon boarded the yacht, killing two more pirates in the process,
but the hostages had been wounded lethally and died shortly thereafter.
Besided the doubts on the official version of the events, this sad story
reconfirms how limited are the options once the pirates have successfully
boarded a vessel, and also how ruthless the latest generation of pirates have
become: they killed the hostages just to make the point that attacks on an
hijacked vessel would cause the death of the prisoners.
... and unfortunately this also reconfirms that lately yachts have become fair
game for the pirates who previously were focusing only on ships, while attacks
on yachts were mainly high-seas robberies, not followed by an hijacking.
Obviously, these sad events have been particularly felt by those who knew Bob
and Phyllis, two cheerful and life-loving people who met their fate at the end
of an ordeal that we can only vaguely imagine.
We do not sail the seas to take this kind of risks.
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