Battling Venezuelan Pirates
…Captain Hook has been glorified, but I can tell you from first hand experience that pirates are not cool, they are not fun, you do not want to run into them, and no one has a wooden leg or a hook for a hand...
13 December 2023
I was up at 02:30 because I could hear the sails flapping like crazy. That meant that Esteban and Harm were making some changes to the boat. I got up to see what was happening. Harm said in his Australian accent, “Well, the engine will not start, and the sails are giving problems. But other than that, everything is okay.” That meant that nothing was okay. Harm and I worked to try to figure out the wiring in the ignition to start the engine and spent a couple of hours on it. We were inside of the engine room trying to make things happen, though we still came out with nothing working. But, we kept at it until 05:00. I was so tired. Esteban went to bed. We were more or less just sitting ducks in our boat, Kanyaka, just bobbing in the water. We were about 10 nautical miles from Aruba at the time, but we were stuck where we were stuck. There were other boats 2.5 nautical miles from us, so Harm was on watch to make sure we did not drift into them while I slept for about 30 minutes. Then I relieved Harm and he slept for about 30 minutes while I was on watch. We were waiting for daylight so that it would be easier to see what we were working on.
We were never able to get power to the ignition, and then the main sail was stuck half-way up the mast and we were unable to get it to move. Everything was going awry. So, we tacked back and forth to try to get closer to Aruba. However, the current and the wind were strong, and both were pushing us in a direction further away from the island. We could not gain on Aruba at all, and we were drifting south towards Venezuela. In addition, we were heeling at about 35-40° while we were tacking making the water so rough to ride. We needed shelter to be able to work on the boat because the sea was too choppy where we were. Everything that was on any table or shelf on the boat could be found on the floor. I was getting a little seasick from the intensity of the waves were battling. As well, I learned that trying to sit on a toilet that was at a 35-40° angle is a tricky way to get any job done. Things were difficult.
At 10:00, I called the Aruba Coast Guard through the radio. The referred to themselves Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard when they responded. We told them our problems: having no engine and having mainsail issues. We had a back and forth over the radio for about an hour. Finally, we asked for a tow to Aruba. At this point we were about 15 nautical miles from their island. They asked us if we could get to 1 or 2 nm from Aruba and then they would just haul us in. We told them we had been tacking back and forth for a couple of hours and could not get closer. They eventually told us that they could send help in the form of someone in a helicopter to rescue us from the boat, but their coast guard could not bring the vessel in for us. We would have had to abandon Kanyaka if they were to save us. We told them we would take our chances with pirates in Venezuela. We had no idea how prophetic that statement would turn out to be.
Aruba knew that we were coming to their island ahead of time via forms Harm had filled out in Grenada. But now, we were going to show up in Venezuela unannounced. And I was sure there would be no customs or immigration to speak to wherever we wash up on the shoreline somewhere. I have always wanted to go to Venezuela, but maybe not in this way…
As we were getting close to the Venezuelan coast line, Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard called us to tell us that they have let the Venezuelan Coast Guard know that we are having boat problem and we are on our way. At least they did something for us.
We cruised on Kanyaka for about 10 hours straight, heading through the mouth of sea at the top of Venezuela that eventually leads to the city of Maracaibo. All we had was our head-sail to carry us and half of our mainsail. I did not understand why we were going so deep into Venezuela. At about 22:00, we were cruising along at 5.5 knots when shift change was about to happen and it was going from Harm’s turn at the helm to mine. Just as I sat down in the captain’s chair, the boat stopped moving. We looked around and eventually figured out that we had sailed into some fishing nets. There were three nets trapping our boat. One was hooked on the prop, and the other two were further up towards the front of the boat… Great.
The mainsail was flapping like crazy in the wind where it is stuck. So, Esteban and I were fighting with the sail in the wind to try to wrap ropes around it to take the forward pressure off the sail holding us in the fishing nets. It was a real fight and we were battling with it for an hour. While we were figuring out what to do about this problem of us being stuck in the nets, we saw the lights of a small boat heading our way. Harm asked me if I had any suggestions about how we might get out of this. Everything seems to be as difficult as possible and I know nothing in this field.
The lights were of the fisherman who owned the nets. We had lights on our boat, but we were of no concern to him as he seemed to just continue checking his nets. It took him three hours to get to us. I ended up having a nap, and then suddenly I heard Esteban talking in Spanish, so I pulled out of my slumber and got up as well. Were they our saviors? It was three men in a little wooden boat who owned the nets. Would they help? Nah, they just wanted money for the nets. Harm was sleeping, and Esteban did not have any cash, so I went to see what I had. I found some USD $20 notes in my money belt, but I did not want to give those away. I found a $5 and gave it to Esteban who was in charge of these negotiations and conversations with the locals in his Argentinian accent. They said they wanted $300 USD for the wrecked nets, but they were not going to help us remove the nets from our boat. Esteban woke Harm and got another $60 in cash from him. He gave that to the fishermen. They were not angry, but they said that we had just made them broke as they left us stuck in their net.
At 02:00, the fishermen came back, pulling in their net, and once they got close to the boat, they cut us free from their netting. Things were a little tense between Harm and Esteban and I was in the middle, translating Harm’s Australian English to my English so that Esteban could understand through his Argentinian accent what Harm had told him. The fishermen were in a small wooden boat with an outboard motor and they had to use a pail to keep bailing the water out of their boat about every ten minutes. It did not look like they had too many fish, so maybe we were financially crippling them by wrecking their nets. I assumed that they are probably resourceful enough to be able to sew them together again.
When we were free, we sailed on until we were about three miles from the coast of Punta Codore, Venezuela. It was about 05:30 by then. We were all by ourselves in the water with no boats or anyone around anywhere. We dropped anchor and decided to bed down for the night. The three of us are totally exhausted from the past couple of days.
Dec 14
Harm woke us up at 09:00. He said, “There are three guys here who want money or food.” Esteban got up a little before me. Yep, there was a small wooden boat outside. One of the guys was wearing a mask. Pirates? If they were, they seemed to be friendly pirates. They hung around as Esteban put on goggles and fins. Then taking a knife with him, Esteban cut the netting free that was hanging onto our boat. The friendly pirates were kind of helpful, as they collected the cut netting to take away. They even took our garbage. But, of course they wanted something for helping. I tried to sneak a photo of them but they caught me and said, “Hey, photo!” while they smiled and posed. The driver of that boat, who was the leader, gave me a huge smile for the photo. We would not give them money, but we gave them two cans of soup, and a box of tea. It seemed to satisfy them. They were telling us in Spanish, “Yeah, if you need a mechanic, we can bring someone to you from the coast.” They left happily.
Harm and I had the engine cover lifted, and we were trying to figure out how to get the solenoid to work on the starter, by running an extra power wire to it. We ended up blowing two fuses in a breaker box to try to make it work over the next hour. I looked up at the water and saw that there were two small wooden fishing boats coming our way. I said, “Oh, great,” and turned my head so that Esteban and Harm would see what I was looking at.
There were eight men in masks who arrived in those two small boats. One of the boats contained three of the member of the friendly pirates, and I could recognize them by the tattered clothes they were wearing earlier, but now they were all wearing masks. But, this time around, their same leader was very aggressive, while hiding behind his mask. I was thinking about how he had posed for a photo for me earlier when he was not wearing a mask and I was pretty sure I would end up losing my phone over photo. Former Friendly Pirate leader who had changed his prerogative to Aggressive Pirate leader was telling us that they wanted money. All of this as being translated through Esteban. The leader was saying to us, “This is how it is. We are not trying to extort you. But, it will be much worse if you do not give us money because we will call the owner of these nets. It will be dangerous if he comes.” Esteban was fighting the battle for us with his language. He was telling them that we had already paid for the nets last night from the real owners. We were now about 10 nautical miles from the nets, so why were they the nets of these pirates? The leader was pointing at the cut nets in his boat, the nets that he was there for while we cut them off our boat when he was a member of the Friendly Pirates, and he was saying, “We have evidence that you broke our nets!” Yes, we gave those to you…when you were unmasked…
Two more boats showed us. Now there were four wooden fishing boats surrounding us, demanding money. Everyone was masked and there were at least 15 men in the collection of boats. Sometimes they were all yelling and yelling together at us. Esteban was doing the negotiation and holding them back. They were hanging onto the side of our boat. Harm and I were working to try to get our boat started, but we were having no success. Esteban said that we did not have any money, as we had given it all to the net owners last night. The pirates said that they wanted our valuables. They wanted the outboard motor from the dinghy, or gold, or whatever valuables we had. We did not have any gold, and we were keeping our motor. This battle went on for at least an hour. It was pretty uncomfortable to be sort of at their mercy as we were all alone, with no engine, and down a sail. We were stuck. A lot of Spanish was being yelled back and forth. It was difficult for Harm and I to concentrate on what we were working on because there was so much yelling. They continued threatening us with the owner of the nets, saying that he is a very bad man, and he will cause us a lot of problems. Then they told us that if we tried to pull up our anchor and make a run for it, they would hook ropes around our boat and drag us to shore. Then they would go through our boat to get at least $5,000 worth of valuables from us. They were also threatening to take the captain of the boat, Harm, with them to shore to make him get money for them.
I was on the radio, trying to call the coast guard to try to get a handle on this. There are two different emergency channels to use, either channel 16 or channel 9, but no one would respond on either of the channels. I even pushed the ‘distress’ button on the radio, but all of this resulted in nothing. Unbeknownst to me, Esteban told them that they coast guard had been contacted and were on their way. The reality was that we were on our own and there was no one to help us. There were not options, so we stated to get the boat ready. Even if we could only sail at 5 knots per hour and they could easily overtake us, we had to at least needed to try to leave. At that moment, Harm and Esteban got the head sail out while I started to use the winch to pull up the anchor. Usually, when pulling up the anchor you use the motor for assistance to stay above the chain. With no motor as an option, I was pulling the chain up, and pulling the boat along that had the force of the sail pulling against the chain. As a result, I overloaded the winch and blew the breaker thereby stopping everything. It was really not a good time for that to happen… All of the pirates were yelling at me to get my attention thought I just ignored them and would not make eye contact. Harm re-set the breaker, and I stated pulling up the anchor with timings of the swells so that it was not so hard on the winch. When the wave would swell, I would wait, but then as the boat dropped and there was slack in the chain, I would winch the chain in. It was slow going, but we eventually got the anchor in after about 15 minutes, with 15 masked men in boats circling around us and yelling. Eventually, we started sailing away, the pirates began to retreat and headed back for their shoreline. They left us alone.
Apparently we called their bluff. If any of them had a weapon they had brought out we would have been in a really bad way. Or, or any of those masked me had boarded our boat, that also would have been very bad for us and we would have completely lost control of the situation. We were very lucky on both of those accounts not happening.
I went back into the boat and started calling ‘mayday’ on the emergency radio again. Esteban caught me doing so and asked me what I was doing. I said I was calling for help. He said, “That is just for life and death situations.” I said, “We were just dealing with 15 masked men in 4 boats, making threats to us.” He knew I had a point, but he was right that it was not an emergency anymore. My intention was just to tell someone about what had just happened. But, none of the emergency calls responded anyhow.
What a past couple of days.
We headed north towards a port of authority close to the entrance of the mouth of Venezuela towards Punta Cardón. Our boat has three modes of transportation: a headsail, a mainsail, and a diesel engine. Two of our three modes were down. If we blew out our headsail, we would be stuck and unable to move at all. And, without an engine, things were very difficult. It is the reason we were unable to get to Aruba. It is the reason we were unable to leave the pirates very easily. And, it made getting to specific points extremely difficult. We had to tack back and forth and back and forth for three hours to get anywhere close to the port of authority we were aiming for. It took hour and hours to make any headway once we were close to Punta Cardón.
Eventually we arrived at an area with two oil refineries on the shores. There were at least 30 giant tankers from all over the world lined up. Esteban spoke with the Venezuelan coast guard and discussed our situation with them. Once we were only about 5 nm from the shore line, and they sent a boat to come and tow us into shore. Pulling us into a harbour there were at least 8 officials waiting on the dock for us. They were likely very excited to have someone like us show up to change their day. The three of us were in the cockpit of the boat with three officials who were sitting down and then two more who came in, one of which took Harm’s blood pressure, and then mine, but did not bother with Esteban as he was too far away. Different officials just kept on coming to write down things and look at passports. They were all very official about everything. It seemed to be new protocol for them. So, they were thorough, even checking the boat to see how many fire extinguishers we have, all of which they did not realize are expired.
All of that took about 90 minutes. We did not get passport stamps, which we will have to do tomorrow, but we were told we could go to the bar just on shore with no hassle. There was a Christmas party taking place there. Harm and Esteban said they were going to have showers before going out, but I was not waiting. I had shoes on and I was off the boat so quick that I actually passed the last official who was on the boat as I beat him to the end of the dock. I am ready to feel the earth. Punta Cardón is a small village, and it looks quiet here. But, the beer were $.79 USD in the restaurant. Wonderful. I had two of them and then I went to find Harm and Esteban in a secondary beach bar as they were not stealthy enough to sneak themselves in to the local Christmas party where I was. Everybody seems to be very friendly here and very sweet. Well, everyone except for pirates once they have masks on.
