Foreword

By a strange coincidence I am writing these lines in almost exactly the spot where one of the most terrible attacks on a cruising yacht occurred a few years ago. Aventura III is anchored off Barbuda Island, in the Eastern Caribbean, where robbers who boarded the yacht Compucentre ransacked the yacht and murdered its captain. The attackers were eventually arrested and imprisoned. The incident caused a heated debate within the sailing community. Although robberies from yachts had occurred occasionally in this part of the world, this was the first case in recent memory where an attack had resulted in loss of life. Indeed, the main thrust of the debate was whether the attack should be regarded as an act of piracy, or just a case of armed robbery. This is the very theme that Klaus Hympendahl is proposing to address in the following pages. His thorough research analyses some of the most significant incidents of recent years and paints a none too rosy picture of the current cruising scene.
Until not so very long ago, the main cause of concern for most sailors setting off on a long voyage was the weather, and primarily for this reason most transatlantic or round the world voyages confined themselves to the tropics and avoided the tropical storm seasons. There were a few trouble spots where piracy attacks had been known to occur (the Sulu Sea, the area off Colombia, as well as the notorious island of Socotra) and these were carefully avoided. No one, as far as I recall, ever considered not to go cruising because of concerns for their personal safety. However, a radical change has occurred in recent years, and in a survey conducted among a large sample of cruising sailors in the latter part of 2001 I found that the threat to their personal safety is now perceived as the main risk in offshore cruising. While there is no doubt that the overall situation has deteriorated in recent years, one should make a genuine attempt to see matters in perspective. However frightening and upsetting the 75 cases mentioned in this book may sound, I hazard to guess that every year there are at least as many violent attacks and even murders of visitors in some well known landbased tourist destinations, and yet very few, if any, seriously consider not going on holiday to Los Angeles, South Africa, Egypt or Moscow. This is why I regard the most valuable part of this book not so much the actual description of the individual cases but the conclusions drawn, and lessons learnt, by those who had been attacked. There is a lot of commonsense advice here and , I am happy to say, many of the incidents could have been avoided with some foresight and a larger dose of caution. Indeed, this is the main merit of this excellent book as it shows how most dangerous situations can be avoided, and that by taking some simple precautions, cruising can be just as safe, if not actually safer, then living on land.

Jimmy Cornell
Aventura III, Barbuda, 2 January 2002