PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN? ? ?

 

MARCH 21, 2015

THE BOAT ON THE RIGHT LOOKS LIKE
OUR WOULD BE PIRATE BOAT 

HITCH HIKER ON THE BOAT

Saturday morning dawned clear and bright, the calm Caribbean Sea is a beautiful dark clear blue.  Everything on It's Perfect is working great and our watch routine has settled into 6 hour shifts.  We have just made the turn to the NW and are passing east of the Gorda Bank.  This is a long stretch of shallow water is about 125 miles off the coast of Nicaragua.  We have seen no ships since yesterday.  Rod is on watch and saw two fishing buoys in the water off the boat.  With buoys there should be fishermen, it was 12:30pm.

Scanning the horizon he saw 2 old fishing trawlers about 60ft long, less than 2 miles away.  They are just barley showing on radar and have no AIS transponder.  The boats do not appear to be moving so we should pass over a mile away from their position.  As we watched one of them appeared to begin to move.  I took the helm and Rod got the binoculars to take a better look.  Yes one of them was moving and was on a course to intercept It's Perfect. 

We had the sails up but the wind was light and we were motor sailing at less than 5 knots.  Rod increased the speed and we were doing over 6 knots, the fishing trawler increased speed and kept coming.  We have never felt threatened in the 3 years we have been out.  As they drew closer 3 men were visible on the boat, this did not look good.  Rod went below and retrieved our flare gun, loaded it and stood on the side of the cockpit, gun in hand.  He was prepared to shoot a warning shot over the oncoming boat and then shoot straight into the pilot house if necessary. 

We increased speed again to over 7 knots as they pulled along side our starboard quarter less than 50yrds off.  Rod stood his ground gun in hand.  As he was preparing to fire a warning shot over their bow they finally pulled off and turned back to join their other trawler.  We finally began to breath, what might have been a disastrous outcome had been narrowly averted.  We kept up our speed for more than 2 hours, putting as much distance as possible between us and them.

ON WATCH

This encounter seemed very threatening to us. The boat approaching looked much like the one chasing Captain Ron, it just lacked the machine gun on deck.   They made no effort to contact us by radio or to signal us.  Another thing that added to our anxiety was the fact that before we left San Andres there were Jamaican fishermen letting it be known that there were some opportunistic poor fishermen off Nicaragua.  It was said they would sometimes prey on unsuspecting cruisers and fishermen. 



On our travels we have never been approached at sea by a boat.  We were both shaken by this experience.  The remainder of the trip we saw many other fishing vessels, none of which made any attempt to approach us.  Seeing Roatan on the horizon was a wonderful sight and we were once more loving our life.