SMUGGLERS AND THIEVES
ASSURE HIGH SEA ADVENTURE
Fred Dyson – Dyson's Starboard View – Messing About in Boats
The most notorious modern pirates operate in the South China Sea and in Indonesian waters. Even the totalitarian Red Chinese Air Force and Navy could not stamp out this vicious plague that had been the scourge of the area for two hundred years. Thousands of refuges from Southeast Asia have been raped, beaten, and killed by these human sharks.
In the southern and western portions of the Caribbean, the dope smugglers have a nasty and discriminatory practice of capturing unwary yachts. They kill the crew, dump the bodies over the side and then use the boat for drug smuggling. When the yacht begins to arouse the attention of the authorities, the smugglers burn it. The scenario has been known to ruin an otherwise delightful vacation.
Pirates are not limited to capturing ships by force. Some modern sea-going thieves are using vessels as platforms for stealing.
When I was in high school there was an enterprising classmate who was a prosperous part-time log pirate. Whenever there was a storm in Puget Sound, he would be out in his skiff scouting for logs that got loose from log booms. If they were up on the beach, he would pull them off at high water. If they were floating, he hooked on and towed them to some quiet cove where he would saw the branded end off the log.
He then towed them to a nearsighted and discreet sawmill owner and went home a few hundred dollars richer. He felt that he was doing the public a service by removing obstructions to navigation. The timber industry saw his work differently and had the cops looking for him. I hope he drifted into a similar line of work and is now in politics.
In Southeast Alaska, some local folks with a fast skiff will catch up with a barge load of north-bound van boxes. They climb aboard, tie their boat, and loot the cargo of booze, TVs, or whatever they find. Often the tug crew never knows until they get in Whittier or Anchorage and find they are short on the manifest.
Pot pirates pull other peoples' crab pots and rob them. In the summer of 1990, I was lying on the hook on a dark, foggy night when I saw a blip show up on my new Furno Rastersoan radar. As I watched and slipped my coffee, the blip slowed and swung in near a bluff where I had seen a crab buoy.
A couple of days later I saw a crabber in the area and found out that they had lost a string of pots. I told them what I had seen on my screen and answered their questions about exact times. I understand that the recovery of the missing pots involved a ramming, brandishing of weapons, the transfer of the stolen pots, and the skipper of the pot pirate vessel making an emergency trip to the dentist in Kodiak.
Until the 1950s, fish traps were used in many Alaskan locations. One rainy night in Southeast Alaska, a high school kid was working as a trap guard and was asleep in the trap shack. Suddenly, the shack lit up and the startled kid rolled out of his bunk and went out on to the walkway. A seiner was alongside the trap with floodlights focused on the trap shack and the shivering kid in his underwear. A deep voice came over the bullhorn, "Go back inside, kid, and you won't get hurt. We're going to take your fish."
Pretty scary situation for a high school kid to face alone, but this was no ordinary kid. It was Dick Ericson who had reputedly won the Washington State tennis championship playing in his bare feet and would row in the number two seat in the University of Washington rowing shell that beat everyone in the world, including seventeen Russian teams in Moscow in 1959.
Dick went back in the shed, put on his pants, and grabbed his rifle and a box of shells. He ducked out the door and slipped over the side of the walkway around the trap. His first shot got the search light and the next two knocked out the floods. The seiner crew cut their tie-up lines and got under way. By the time they got out of range, they had lost all of their lights and most of their windows. As I understand it, Dick had no more calls from trap pirates that summer. After college, Dick coached the University of Washington crew for over a decade. As I heard it, he never had much trouble with smart-mouthed oarsmen.
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