Suez to Oman, not for the romantic or faint-hearted

11:46 PM Tue 22 Dec 2009 GMT

'Lisheen Lady’s Bruce, Abdul and Jack O’Mahoney, AK47s at the ready' Stuart Broom

In early October Stuart Broom and his crew of three on the 92-foot Lisheen Lady left Cyprus heading for Thailand on a 5,500 nautical mile trek through the pirate infested waters of the Gulf of Aden.

While Broom is well experienced in delivering yachts around the Pacific and Australia, none of that experience prepared him for a once in a lifetime delivery voyage as in his role as captain, he was forced to make critical decisions.

After spending two years in the Mediterranean, Lisheen Lady's owners, Jack and Cindy O'Mahony, decided it was time to continue the yacht's round the world voyage heading south towards Asia and then ultimately to Australia and the O'Mahony's home port of Pittwater. However, firstly Jack, his captain, Broom and crew had to negotiate the African coast.

Broom's experience left him with a desire to share his experience with the many sailors anxiously holding back on making the long, dangerous voyage between Asia and the Mediterranean. "There are people still wanting to travel from Asia to the Mediterranean, but everyone is sitting on their hands going 'do I wing it and go up the coast of India and come across to Salalah and then what do I do' ?"

Prior to leaving the Mediterranean Broom, like most captains, did his homework. "I had agents connected to agents two or three months ahead of leaving the Med. I had all the paperwork, crew lists, etc, all in place rather than arriving in a place and going 'I'm here. What do you need me to do ?' If you do that everyone knows who you are and where you have come from. I prefer to arrive, go stamp, stamp, stamp, fill up with fuel and then head off the next day to the next place. Because it is so volatile there, there is nowhere you really want to stay and hang around in the bay for a couple of days, no matter how nice it is. I worked on the principle of always being two ports ahead of myself and having options."

Broom admits that this type of plan does not always work. He originally formulated a passage plan that would take the Lisheen Lady from Port Gharib in Egypt 1,600 nautical miles to Salalah in Oman. "Halfway down we were hit with 35 knot head winds and really short, sharp seas. We chomped through fuel like crazy. Even with a capacity of 8,800 litres, which would give us about 2,000 nautical miles at 8 knots, we weren't going to get to Salalah, and we weren't going to get up the Corridor. I didn't feel happy about it, so we looked for an exit spot and Aden was it."

The Corridor is the International Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC) which is on the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia. It consists of eastbound and westbound lanes, five nautical miles wide. Vessels of below 18 knots, but greater than 10 knots travel on a prescribed schedule. Broom explained; "the vessels that travel at 10 knots would start at the western side of the corridor at 1am UTC heading off up the corridor, bearing around 072 degrees. The coalition ships know you are there and registered. Every six hours you give them a position. The same thing applies at the other end for 10 knot boats. Then so many hours later the 12 knot boats depart and then the 14 knot boats and so on. So what this means is that they have worked out that the boats all end up in this middle section. Daybreak is the prime time for attacks so by then the vessels will all be in the key area and they have the most number of coalition force ships around them."

Danger lurks all around the Guld of Aden, even this vessel is a potential pirate - Stuart Broom

The International Chamber of Commerce reported in October 2009; "global piracy figures have already surpassed the total number of attacks recorded in 2008 according to the latest quarterly piracy report released by ICC's International Maritime Bureau...Somali pirates have extended their reach, threatening not only the Gulf of Aden and east coast of Somalia, but also the southern region of the Red Sea, the Bab el Mandab Straits and the East Coast of Oman. This area still ranks as the number one piracy hotspot, with a total of 168 incidents reported in the first three quarters of 2009 accounting for more than half of the overall number of reported attacks. A total of 32 vessels were hijacked by Somali pirates in the first nine months of 2009, with 533 crew members taken hostage. A further 85 vessels were fired upon and as of 30 September 2009, four vessels, with over 80 crew held hostage, were still under negotiation."

Initially Broom believed transiting to Thailand via the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden would not be a problem as long as they registered with the UKMTO, MSCHOA or MARLO which are the primary coalition forces coordinating the IRTC. Broom contacted them and provided the crew and boat details.

With no response and only the international news to rely upon which indicated that the area seemed quiet at the time, they assumed it would be okay. "So we just winged it down to Aden giving them our positions as were going down the Red Sea.

"From about half way down the Red Sea, as a captain/skipper, it was pretty stressful and we had the owner on board. Each day you were constantly on the alert. If any boat came anywhere near you, you had the binoculars out and if you were running on one engine then you would have two engines started at full speed just to make sure they weren't ambling towards you. You would make a positive change to see if it was just coincidental that they were crossing you. If you sped up and they turned you knew they were possibly going to approach you."

Suddenly Broom received an email he really didn't want to read. "It said we don't suggest that you transit the IRTC because the slowest speed they recommend is 10 knots. We can do 10 knots, but not if we are punching into 15 knots of wind. So we fell off the bottom of the list for travelling with the convoys. We then said, what do we do ? Go back to the Mediterranean ?" By this stage Lisheen Lady was already in Aden.

The last thing the crew on Lisheen Lady wanted to do was end up in a cave somewhere in Somalia. But, they were determined to proceed on their voyage. The only choice then was to secure professional protection.

Buying protection

Choosing not to carry weapons board Broom explained; "If you have a weapon you have to be prepared to come out and use it. If you have a weapon and they have a weapon, they will shoot you. You are better off to come out with your hands up. It is better therefore not having guns and getting people who know how to use them."

Broom talked to his agent in Aden who at the time was helping him get the yacht refuelled. He explained to Broom that he could hire a Coast Guard boat and crew for protection, but since Yemen didn't have any money for fuel the boats couldn't even leave the dock.

"Then we said there must be Coast Guard guys available. The Coast Guard there is like the Australian navy. So the agent set up this meeting with the top guys in Aden and negotiated a price for getting four or five armed Coast Guard guys on board. The negotiations then went to the head office in Sana'a. It took us two, three days to negotiate. It went from USD 4,000 to USD 9,000, then back to USD 4,500."

This was to be the most dangerous part of the journey as Somali pirates continue to attack everything from small vessels through to large ships. The Somalia coast reaches from southern end of the Red Sea at Djibouti, then forms a coastal border along the southern side of the Gulf of Eden before continuing south down the east African coast to Kenya. The area considered most dangerous covers an estimated 1.1 million square miles.

Guns at the ready

Packed with a full load of fuel, four Yemen Coast Guard in uniform, each with armed with an AK47 and 500 rounds of ammunition, a Russian 7mm gun on a tripod, but no grenade launcher, the Lisheen Lady was ready for action.

The 92-foot, Willam Garden designed, Lishbeen Lady - Stuart Broom

"They travelled with us the 600 nautical miles to Nishtun which is about 50 miles from the Oman border where they got off the boat. There they dropped off their weapons at the coast guard outpost before we shouted them the cost of the taxi ride back to Aden. "It made us a lot more relaxed about the whole thing having them on board."

Even hugging the Yemen coast line there were dangers. The Yemen Coast Guard recommended Broom keep Lisheen Lady no more than five miles offshore so that their staff on board could keep in mobile phone communication with their coastal bases. But the first night out Lisheen Lady ran over a fishing net entangling the propellers. "It slowed us down by about a knot. The next morning I had to go over the side with the dive gear on and spend half an hour cutting the net off the starboard shaft. We were sitting still, bobbing around. It was a little stressful." They then moved another five miles further off the coast.

Halfway up the coast is the town of Mukalla where a lot of Somalians have moved to in the last few years. Considered a real hot spot, Broom tried to ensure they went past there at night. "We made sure we timed it so that we were travelling at the speed where we could go past in darkness. We went down to basic running lights as we were pretty obvious in the daylight.'

Once at Nishtun and with the Yemen Coast Guard having left the Lisheen Lady, Broom and his crew headed off again hoping and praying the last 100 miles of the Yemen coat would not bring pirate trouble. Broom admits they were lucky, safely reaching Salalah on the coast of Oman.

Advice to the wary

Broom says he would do the transit again, but perhaps not on the Lisheen Lady. "There is not much I would change and I would certainly have it planned well in advance. A lot of the security people available you have to fly them in and the biggest problem is the weapons. You can't fly with weapons. In Malta you can buy weapons. So they (other big vessels) clear out of Malta, they load their boat up with weapons. They come down and pick up their commandos who know how to use the weapons. They have to fly them in for example from England and then they do their trip to wherever they have to go to and then those people fly out. The weapons stay with the boat. On the trip back they sell their weapons back to the guy in Malta.

A relaxed Lishbeen Lady captain, Stuart Broom safely moored in Phuket - Tracey Johnstone &copy

If I did it again and because I now know the agent in Yemen, I would go to the northern most point in Yemen, get people there with their weapons and have them travel with you all the way down through the bottom of the Red Sea all the way up the Yemen coast and drop them on the border so you have people all the way."

For Broom the most important part of any such voyage is preparation, having your equipment running properly and everything fully serviced so you are not relying on having to stop places.

But for smaller yachts there are less options. To travel the IRTC a vessel must have a capability of 10 knots or more boat speed. So then that leaves the option of hiring out the services of the Yemen Coast Guard or transporting your yacht by ship. "Smaller sized boats are a bit of an issue because they want to put a minimum of four people on boats. A vessel that is not capable of carrying four coast guard guys with weapons, in addition to its existing crew, for period of three to five days, depending on the size and type of boat, well, you just don't do it."

"If you were a bit adventurous, you could probably quite easily sail down the coast and go into Yemen ports and do the usual travelling thing, But, all you need to do is be nailed by one pirate gang and they just take you off the boat. You don't know where they are going to take you and next minute you are in Somali territory."

No matter what happened Broom recommends never leaving the bottom of the Red Sea and going straight, for example, the Maldives. "You would absolutely be asking for trouble."

"Right at the moment it is primarily between about 4 south and 4 north on the east African coast. That is where the pirates are centred. In this time of the year with the north-east monsoons you are 500 miles off the coast and it is like being just off the beach. There is no wind. Just a bit of a south-easterly swell and that is it. These guys can hang around out there catching fish and waiting for a boat to come past. "

For more information on the IRTC, visit www.cusnc.navy.mil/marlo/index.htm . For the details on the Yemen agent, contact tracey(at)sail-world.com

by Tracey Johnstone