Yachts and Pirates
I saw a blog posting this morning that gave me great pause: a report that “several fishing vessels chased and tried to board a yacht off Southern Sri Lanka” as the boat made its way from the increasingly popular Maldives charter area toward Malaysia.
Now, several charter brokers have told me recently that their clients are concerned about piracy during cruising vacations. Reports like the blog post I saw today about a foiled piracy attempt are undoubtedly the reason why. These stories sound quite scary.
The thing is, though, these reports are often incomplete or inaccurate–specifically in terms of the word “yacht.” This particular story, for instance, didn’t give a boat length or name, so I was immediately suspicious that the boat might not have been a yacht at all. I called the International Maritime Bureau over in Europe, where the piracy division confirmed for me that the boat, the Flying Germania II, was “a quite small and private vessel.” The bureau also confirmed that piracy attempts in that particular area east of the Maldives are extremely rare.
I checked with a few more sources, and none had evidence that the Flying Germania II was a larger vessel. So the odds are that this might not have been a yacht at all–and certainly it was not a yacht on charter, as charter yachts don’t cruise with clients in open waters like the Laccadive Sea, where this incident occurred. It’s in fact highly possible that the handful of fishing boats that approached the Flying Germania II may have known it was carrying some kind of cargo and attacked it specifically because of that, not because it was a yacht at all.
My point in relating all of this to you here on CharterWave is that when you see reports about “pirates attacking yachts,” you should question their authenticity. Much of the time, there is far more to these stories than meets the eye–and almost always, the truth is that they have absolutely nothing to do with pleasure yachts in general or charter yachts in particular.
For my money, private yacht charter remains the safest way to vacation at sea.