Travel with Indigo

For a vessel to travel from Bombay to Dubai it must pass through the Arabian Sea, a sector of the Western Indian Ocean, then along the coasts of Pakistan and Iran, through the Gulf of Oman and the Straits of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf. It was for Indigo a voyage of six days, longer than it might have been thanks to high winds and heavy seas, and was filled with more memorable episodes than I had imagined. Here they are.

Hot Lasagna
All was well aboard Indigo as she departed from Bombay. Grime from the city’s fetid air had been washed away so that she now glistened in the morning sun. She looked refreshed as though just stepping from a bracing shower. The crew went about their duties with a noticeably jaunty step, and there was an air of eager anticipation at the prospect both of leaving Bombay and arriving in Dubai. It was only when we got fully out into the ocean away from protecting landmass that things began to go wobbly.

Few events in the insouciant life aboard a yacht at sea more discommode the passenger than looking up from a page of pleasing literature, gazing across the salon through a window that had heretofore displayed cheerful skies, and finding himself staring instead into the inky gloom of what is known in nautical circles as an angry sea. Even the dimmest of minds is galvanized by a vision so unexpected. There is before you troubled waters where untroubled sky had recently been. A keen awareness that you have just slid off the sofa onto the floor as a result of the salon having been quite suddenly upended does nothing to restore your accustomed repose.

It is to the formidable monsoon winds of the Arabian Sea that credit is due for this abrupt departure from Indigo’s usual posture of uprightness. The southwest version of the monsoon brings with it a steady and all too brisk wind that, as winds customarily do, conspires with the sea to form waves of considerable agitation and impressive force. These, when they assault the hull, cause it to roll sharply much in the nature of a barstool inexpertly sat upon by a man in the later stages of a festive night. It was one of these rolls, and a particularly vigorous one at that, which had interrupted my composure and deposited me on the floor.

It is not the everyday sort of man who goes about with an inclinometer in his pocket, but there is nothing about our Captain Watson to suggest the ordinary. With the instrument neatly embedded as an application in his iPhone, he was able to measure the angle of the roll that had so abruptly interrupted my reverie at twenty-eight degrees.

That’s quite a lot as these things go, enough to stress beyond its limit a latch in the galley whose role in life is to secure the oven door. The familiar law of human misfortune, that events when they begin to go awry will continue to do so, was now fully in command. At that very moment there lurked behind the now ill-secured oven door a dish of lasagna which had only recently arrived at the temperature at which cheese begins to bubble. Any man of worldly experience standing back and observing this unfortunate sequence of events would conclude that nothing salutary was likely to come of it. And nothing did.

As anybody who appreciates a good spectacle will tell you, there is nothing that quite compares with the sight of a dish of bubbling hot lasagna launched across a yacht’s galley at the speed of a major league fastball. If there were a Hall of Fame for Grand Spectacles, oven launched hot lasagna would be in it.

As the dish collided with a distant wall, the sound of the crash resonated through the vessel in the manner of a cherry bomb set off in a trash can thus alerting the crew to the prospect of sandwiches for dinner. Splattered about the galley floor in a formless and confused fashion, the lasagna wreckage viewed by a person with an artistic turn of mind might be said to have a modernist aspect of the sort that you would not be surprised to encounter rendered in oil on canvas hanging in the Guggenheim.

CHICK ALERT. BOY STUFF FOLLOWS.

When the energy of a wave is absorbed by a vessel causing it to roll, hydro-mechanical forces and buoyancy counteract the roll and urge it back to upright. As the roll angle increases, these counteractions also increase, somewhat as a rubber band reacts to stretching. But at a certain degree of roll, a point is reached at which the counteractions cease increasing and begin to decrease rapidly. That point, called the maximum righting moment, is for Indigo thirty-four degrees. Should the roll angle continue to increase, the counteractions will erode completely at a point ominously called the angle of vanishing stability. As any person with even the most superficial acquaintance of maritime matters knows, on the very long list of things on earth that you would wish to see vanishing—your creditors, your wife’s divorce lawyer, Brussels sprouts, income taxes—the stability of the vessel on which you are currently a passenger is not to be found. That angle, when passed, will result in the vessel continuing to roll until it turns upside down spoiling the day for all onboard. END OF CHICK ALERT.

Low Flying Jet
An unidentified fighter jet screaming low and menacingly over a yacht wallowing along in the Arabian Sea rarely gladdens the heart of those on board, with the one exception that the water through which you are traveling is just outside Iran’s and the jet turns out to be one of yours. In this event, owner and crew are moved to wave with an enthusiasm usually reserved for the headline performer on a brass pole. So low did it fly on its second pass that I could see a tail hook hanging from its undercarriage suggesting strongly that the plane was from an aircraft carrier and thus probably friendly.

British Destroyer
Just as we entered the Gulf of Oman, a prelude to transiting the Straits of Hormuz, a British Royal Navy destroyer passed us going in the opposite direction. Captain Watson, who having served twenty years in that distinguished organization knew its ways, got on the radio and in his best Brit-speak inquired about pirate activity in the area. He was assured by the officer on watch that while there have been a considerable number of pirate attacks in the nearby Gulf of Aden, a fact we and the rest of the world knew only too well, there have been none in the Gulf of Oman, the Straits of Hormuz or the Persian Gulf. The officer said, however, that we would see from sundown and on into the night many small outboard powered boats running back and forth across the Straits. These are smugglers operating with the tacit approval of the Omani government delivering contraband into Iran in defiance of the West’s embargo.

He also gave us the phone number in Dubai of the naval coalition patrolling the Gulf of Aden to combat piracy there. We should call them to arrange a sailing date and routing through a so-called secure corridor in the pirate infested waters. Twenty ships from various blue water navies of the world currently patrol the Gulf though unfortunately not under a unified command. The officer went on to say that should we come under pirate attack we should call the coalition office or any nearby coalition warship and they would scramble the nearest “assets”, meaning helicopters or fighters, to chase off the bad guys. I would have preferred that instead of chase off he had said sink, but we’ll take whatever help we can get.

We passed through the Straits of Hormuz without result and, as the British officer had said we would, saw lots of small boats travelling at high speed between Oman and Iran delivering smuggled goods, for a handsome profit no doubt.

USS Boxer
Next day as we were cruising along in the Persian Gulf making for Dubai a US Navy amphibious assault ship, the USS Boxer, came blowing by us doing about 30 knots to our nine. As it did so, I instructed the Captain to raise the large Confederate flag we keep at the ready. No sooner had he got it up the mast than the Boxer gave us three impressive blasts on its horn and its crew began waving cheerfully. It’s reassuring to know you have friends in the area.

The Boxer is designated the flagship of Combined Task Force 151, the international coalition patrolling the Gulf of Aden against pirate attacks. For an unflattering look at the most recent of the Boxer’s exploits, this one involving a pirate attack on a German commercial ship, see Wikipedia at USS Boxer, LHD-4. I doubt you will be pleased.

Piracy
Low flying fighters, British destroyers, US amphibious assault ships and all appearing on the scene within just a few days of each other. If men were dominoes, even the double blanks among us would by now have the sense that something in this part of the world was amiss. And amiss it surely is. Quite apart from the matter of Iraq, there is Iran and Yemen, and all that oil, but of more immediate and personal interest to me is piracy.

Pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden, in particular a 400 nm corridor that could be accurately termed a pirate gauntlet, have increased dramatically in just the first quarter of 2009. The increase has occurred despite the celebrated and long overdue arrival of the world’s navies, well actually just twenty ships, and not all of these on station at the same time, patrolling an area twice the size of Texas. Crawling with cops the Gulf of Aden is not.

There are too few of these ships, they operate without a unified command and seemingly with rules of engagement crafted by Woody Allen. Thus not surprisingly the pirates are having a fine old time of it.

The International Maritime Board in its most recent piracy report reveals that in the Gulf of Aden during the first quarter of the respective years there were 7 attacks in 2006, 3 in 2007, and 5 in 2008. In the first quarter of 2009, there were an astonishing 41 armed attacks! Of these, 5 were successful hijacks in which 102 crew were taken hostage. Sixteen vessels were fired upon and 20 fought off attempted boarding. (If you’d like a copy of the report, contact Linda in my office at lstadtmiller@bellsouth.net.) Now bear in mind that this was during a period when the Coalition forces were fully in place.

These alarming statistics are said by the IMB and the Coalition to prove the success of the Coalition forces in greatly reducing the number of successful attacks. Thanks in large measure to the Coalition Task Force chasing away attackers and to improved countermeasures by ship’s masters, the number of successful attacks has diminished. Or so it is claimed.

My conclusions are quite different. It is the dramatic increase in attacks that requires explanation and in my judgment that sudden and compelling increase is the result of conveying to the pirates the inescapable message that attacks will be met with what can only be described as effete gestures. Shooing away flies from your dinner plate is not a deterrent to their return. So the enterprising pirate will launch as many attacks as possible knowing that these cost very little and that some will be successful with attendant large gains. How do you buy stock in Somali piracy?

The enormous increase in the number of attacks, it follows, has occurred not despite the Coalition Forces but because of the rules of engagement under which they are compelled to operate. They have been revealed to the pirates as an illusion of power, a floating UN Security Council resolution. Barney Fife would be an improvement.

In the Wikipedia article concerning the role of the USS Boxer in dealing with an attack on a German commercial vessel (cited above), it is clear that the responsibility for the Coalition’s pusillanimity lies in the White House. Rules of engagement of the Woody Allen variety have been imposed on Coalition forces greatly restricting a robust deterrence. From the web you can learn that the US Navy among others is not at all pleased with these restrictions.

Employment Opportunities
A man who finds himself currently unemployed or toiling away in a job that lacks the financial rewards to which he believes he is entitled or perhaps a recent graduate of a university unable to find suitable employment, should consider a career in piracy. There is much to recommend it, especially if his attitude toward law and order is one that could be described as carefree and he has a natural gift for armed robbery.

You work outdoors in a warm and sunny part of the world, the work day is short and vacations are plentiful. There is no air travel required and no long committee meetings or grumpy bosses to contend with. Running around half the day in a fine fast boat is not the most taxing of occupations you’ll have to agree.

The cost of entering the field calls for minimal expenditures, mostly for that fast boat and a few rifles and some ammo and a few junior pirates to help out. True your fellow pirates may lack something in the way of refined social amenities and their IQ’s may not amount to a residential speed limit, but there is that big payoff for a good day’s work, a tax-free payoff I should add. How good is that? Should all go as planned, you end up owning a really big ship and all the stuff that’s in it and as a bonus there are all those crew who can be ransomed off or sold into slavery. And then you can do it a few more times until it’s time to retire in fine style to Miami Beach. It’s almost better than investment banking used to be.

Should you, against all the odds, find yourself apprehended there is a fair chance you’ll be set free for some reason you won’t comprehend but don’t really need to. Worse case you get sent to Kenya or Yemen for trial, which means lawyers and judges who are easily bought off and so it’ll cost you a few bucks. As careers go, you could do worse.

PHIL’S RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

As a public service to the current administration, I herewith submit Phil’s recommendations for rules of engagement in the Gulf of Aden.

TO: Commander, Coalition Task Force 151, Gulf of Aden.

You are hereby directed to rid the Gulf of Aden of all pirates and in doing so shall adhere to the following rules of engagement.

1. Find pirates. Any group of men in a small fast boat carrying automatic weapons or rocket propelled grenades will be conclusively presumed to be pirates. The same applies to any suspected pirate “mother ships”. When discovered, you will fire warning shots alerting them to their impending demise. Should they fail to stop and submit to search, you are to sink them forthwith using whatever means are at hand. Should they be sufficiently prudent to stop and submit, you will take into custody every person on board for remand to Guantanamo prison, where they will be charged with piracy and tried before a special military tribunal. If found guilty they will be hanged in keeping with a long tradition of punishing pirates, if innocent released.

2. You are to determine the ports used by pirates for staging operations, porting vessels and obtaining provisions and, without regard to the country on whose soils these ports are found, you will destroy any vessels or stores that you determine are used in piracy, taking reasonable precautions to avoid injury to innocent civilians.

3. Continue finding pirates and disposing of them as above until there are no more to be found.

4. If hostages are held by pirates and threatened with harm, you are to make every reasonable effort to protect the innocent from harm but you will not allow threats to deter you from freeing them and capturing or killing pirates even if it should mean that innocent civilians may be injured or killed.

You are fully in charge of activities in your theater of operation and are a trained professional in these matters while I am not. Do your duty as you see fit consistent with these rules of engagement. No person in this administration will question your professional judgment or interfere in the execution of these rules. Good hunting.

Sincerely,
The President of the United States