The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  Leaving the kids on the boat, Herbert and I went to an Internet café to send messages to worried family and friends. On the way, we spoke to another yacht owner, a Serbian with his own stridently anti-American views, who told us he had been making lots of friends among the angry Palestinians. He told Herbert he had met a taxi driver who boasted that he had known that the embassy in Sana’a was going to be bombed a day before it happened. There were many people in Yemen who had known what was going on; those suicide bombers had certainly not acted alone. It’s unlikely, in fact, they could have carried out their plan without the connivance of harbour employees, the same ones we chatted with every time we came ashore. Indeed, Herbert was taken aside by the port captain, who talked to him at length about the explosion, trying hard to convince him that there had been no terrorism, that the explosion was an internal malfunction, maybe even sabotage from inside the Cole. There had certainly been no suicide attack, he said. Even though pieces of that exploded inflatable dinghy were still visible on the beach, he told Herbert that no such dinghies existed in Aden.

  As he drove us to the Internet café, Salem told us that glass in his house, and many others, had been broken from the concussion of the blast. Yemenis were very afraid, he told us, because even during the civil war six years ago, they had never heard a blast like that one. The government was telling the people the explosion had come from a malfunction inside the ship. But he had heard otherwise on CNN.

  “Life is going to get very difficult here again,” he told us with regret. “It was just recovering from the war, and now this. This is crazy.”

  That night, I sat on the deck of Northern Magic, looking into the night. A full moon had a risen over the jagged mountain peaks. Strings of lights, put up in honour of the Yemeni Independence Day long weekend, glittered festively on tall buildings and along the major boulevards. From loudspeakers, long drawn-out chants from the muezzin, calling the faithful to prayer, competed discordantly with each other from various tall slender minarets. The streets were full of men wearing tasselled skirts and Arab headdresses, laughing and clasping hands with each other. Some wore wickedly curved daggers thrust through wide belts. It was Friday, the close of a holy day. One would never know that disaster had struck just a few hundred metres away.

  Across the calm water of the harbour, the scene was anything but festive. Here, the stricken American warship lay, listing to one side, its floodlights drawing attention to the gaping blackened hole in its side. It looked like a mortal wound.

  We had liked Yemen, with its smiling, roguish-looking men and its silent, black-robed women. We hadn’t felt the least bit threatened during our six days here. In fact, we had felt quite welcome. Even the filth, the garbage-strewn streets, the flocks of beggars, and the piles of concrete rubble – whether from demolition or the remnants of civil war, we were never quite certain – hadn’t obscured the curious charm of this undeniably exotic place.

  But tonight, with that benevolent full moon rising and those falsely festive lights winking, the knowledge that kidnappings and further terrorist action against Westerners like us had been promised, made Aden no longer seem the friendly place it had been one day before.

  We departed three days after the explosion. For those three days, as Herbert and I went about our final chores in town, we didn’t let the kids off the boat. We felt conspicuous everywhere we went, even though, in truth, we had always stood out on the streets like bright red poppies in a sea of buttercups.

  We stopped by the Movenpick Hotel, which had by now been taken over by flocks of reporters and U.S. investigators. Yemeni soldiers were posted outside, armed with machine guns, questioning anyone who wanted to enter. Inside the compound, U.S. marines carried automatic rifles and also watched everyone coming in. We saw huge crates of bottled water, destined for the Cole, whose crew was afraid to drink any water supplied by local people. It felt as if we were in a war zone.

  None of the reporters was allowed within the harbour area. They were forced to take their pictures of the Cole from the upper floors of buildings in town. It seemed strange that we were still coming and going inside a zone forbidden to everybody else. Herbert was interviewed for CBS TV, which had spotted our friendly looking Canadian flag flying in the middle of what now seemed like a hostile place.

  And yet, there remained a soft spot in our hearts for Yemen, messy, chaotic, overrun with beggars, and yet also in many ways friendly, warm, and full of unexpected delights. Yemen was like rummaging through a dusty old second-hand store – you got your hands a little soiled, sifting through the junk, but you never knew what treasures you might find. At any moment, you might end up with Aladdin’s magic lamp. Or with a good man like Salem.

  22

  Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire

  Fuelled and watered up, we prepared to head into the Red Sea. First we had to pass through a narrow channel called the Bab el Mandeb, or the Gate of Sorrows – an apt name, considering the difficulties with strong headwinds and vicious seas that awaited every northbound mariner travelling beyond it.

  Our immediate concern, however, was not the wind or the waves, or even terrorists – it was, once again, pirates. The very morning of our departure, I had downloaded all our Inmarsat weather forecasts. Among them was a piracy report. To my horror, there had been no fewer than five new incidents of piracy around the Bab el Mandeb and the southern Red Sea – all in the previous few days, and all exactly on our path.

  Suddenly, it felt as if we might be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  It grew dark as we made our way through the harbour, past Cole and the gaping hole that leered blackly in its hull, past container ships, oil tankers, and battleships. The mournful sound of the muezzin echoed from the cliffs as we left. Once clear of the busy shipping lanes, we again turned off our navigation lights and were hidden by the night, as dark and concealing as the robes worn by the sad Somali beggarwomen who had refused to be photographed.

  The wind was unexpectedly good, or perhaps it was a favourable current, because we somehow ended up at the Bab el Mandeb the next afternoon six hours earlier than planned. Our strategy, now ruined, had been to slip through the high-risk area in darkness. Now we would have to do it at high noon.

  I was actually asleep as we approached the Gate of Sorrows, but the urgency of Herbert’s call from the cockpit roused me instantly. “Get up!” he barked, and I leapt out of bed, instantly awake.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “We’re right at Bab el Mandeb,” he answered curtly, “and there’s a speedboat heading for us.” We were, in fact, precisely at the point where armed pirates in a speedboat had attacked a ship three days before.

  Dead ahead, still a mile or two away, I could see the small boat, leaving a plume of spray behind it. It had altered course to put itself on an interception path.

  We swung into action – the kids shut down Happy Lappy, the laptop computer, and moved it into Michael’s cabin along with our precious video and still cameras. As I kept watch in the cockpit, Herbert quickly stashed them away in our secret hiding place. Michael turned on the big computer and began entering our position in a distress message, leaving it on the screen ready to send by satellite at the touch of a button. I held the VHF radio in my hand in the cockpit. Luckily, there was a large ship coming down the strait; if we got into trouble, our first call would be to it.

  The rapidly approaching boat contained six men. It was a small, fast speedboat, just like the kind mentioned in the reports. There was no point in altering course; the lane was narrow, with Yemen bordering us on one side and Djibouti on the other, both shores clearly visible. The speedboat was making at least twenty knots. There was no way we could evade it, and nowhere for us to hide.

  We watched silently as the boat approached, feeling strangely calm and alert. There was absolutely no question it was trying to intercept us. With the two older boys popping their heads through the hatch and Herbert and me in the cockpit, all we could d
o was wait.

  We had heard about another yacht with children on board that had been attacked by pirates the year before. Apparently, the pirates, upon entering the boat, had looked dismayed to find children inside. If this report was true, we figured there was no harm in displaying the fact that we were a family. Maybe the presence of our young boys would dissuade them from boarding us.

  As the small boat came closer, we could see the faces of the men within. Two of them were young, maybe eighteen years old. The older ones looked like typical scruffy Yemenis with their dark moustaches and their skirts and flapping turbans, the kind that might indeed have blown up railroads with Lawrence of Arabia. Or prey on vulnerable sailboats.

  The boat slowed and came alongside. The men didn’t look hostile; in fact they looked curious, so we waved. Two of them waved back. Then they circled us. There was no sign of any weapons, but it didn’t look as if they were fishermen, either; the small boat was entirely full of men, no nets.

  As they circled behind us, they stopped unexpectedly. There was something caught in their propeller, and two men began working to disentangle it. We couldn’t help but grin; they had run afoul of the fishing line we were towing. It took them a minute or two to clear their prop. Once free, they started their powerful outboard engine again, and turned around, back toward us! Our hearts, having calmed down a bit during this almost comical interlude, jumped right back into our throats.

  As they approached for the second time, one of the men rummaged around in the bottom of the boat and came up with something. Was it an automatic weapon? No, it was a plump fish. What a relief! It wasn’t pillaging or looting that had brought them out to intercept us; it was entrepreneurism.

  We shook our heads to say no, we didn’t want a fish. The men seemed certain we would want to buy the nice tuna they displayed, but we kept on shaking our heads, no, no, no. We just wanted to get rid of them as quickly as we could. Finally, they left, speeding off in the direction of the desolate and treeless Yemen shore.

  Were these pirates who had decided we weren’t worth bothering with? Did showing the kids’ faces really dissuade them? Or was this just a boatload of men making a detour to take a quick look at a foreign yacht and maybe make a few dollars selling a fish? We will never know, although the last possibility seems unlikely, as these were clearly not fishermen. We continued deeper into the throat of the Bab el Mandeb, nervously laughing, adrenalin pumping. Inside the cabin, flickering patiently on the computer screen, our distress message was still waiting, unneeded and unsent.

  A couple of hours passed. Happy Lappy was retrieved from its pirate-proof hiding place and the kids were playing computer games on it once more. Herbert and I were both in the cockpit, our eyes peeled, still on edge. We were almost through the narrow strait, looking forward to the Red Sea opening up so we could lose ourselves in it. Here, visible from both shores, trapped in a bottleneck, we felt incredibly conspicuous, a floating advertisement that shouted, “Lone yacht! Rich foreigners on board! Come, check us out!” How we wished we had other boats with which to travel.

  We still had to pass through one last area of high risk. “Persons in small fast boats have been trying to board several ships off Bab el Mandeb in the southern tip of Red Sea,” the piracy advisory had warned. “Masters have reported that small boats wait at the northern end of traffic lane where ships slow down to make a turn.”

  We were at that very spot now. And, lo and behold, there in the distance was the exact thing we had most been dreading — not one, but two small speedboats, at the northern end of the traffic lane. And they were coming for us.

  It was an instant replay of the earlier scene: Lappy quickly turned off and stowed away, radio in cockpit. We resurrected our previous distress e-mail, modifying it to show our new position. As before, we left the message on the screen ready to send.

  The two boats approached from ahead, one well in front of the other. The first was packed full of men, seven of them. It cut across our bow and slowed down as it came alongside. Two of the men stood up and looked us over. Again, we could see these were not fishermen.

  “Cigarettes! Cigarettes!” they yelled, pantomiming smoking. “You have cigarettes?”

  “No smoking, no cigarettes!” Herbert yelled back, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders. Some of the other pirate attacks we’d heard about also began with a request for cigarettes, giving the pirates a chance to check the boat out. Again, the innocent and friendly faces of our boys popped out of the hatch.

  The boat stayed beside us while the men scrutinized us for a few minutes more. Then, without further ado, they sped off. The second boat continued by without even stopping. Once again, we’d had a scare, but again it was nothing. It’s extremely rare to be approached by another boat while underway, but to be intercepted twice within a few hours, and right at the number one spot on the pirate hit list, was enough to lay us panting on the floor. All we could assume was that these were pirates, and that perhaps, because they saw we were a family, they decided not to bother us.

  When the two boats had safely receded into the distance, the kids asked for Lappy back. We parents, however, still weak in the knees, thought it better to leave Lappy where it was, just in case anyone else in a small, fast boat wanted to solicit something from us. Who was it going to be next: a vacuum-cleaner salesman, perhaps? The Avon Lady?

  After we made it through the notorious Gate of Sorrows and into the southern Red Sea, we faced a number of choices about our route. The first choice was whether to sail east or west around the Hanish Islands. We couldn’t approach the islands too closely; they were under dispute between Yemen and Eritrea, and many yachts blundering into that zone had found themselves being shot at. We had enough on our minds dealing with pirates, real or imaginary, to want to tackle trigger-happy soldiers as well.

  The previous spring, renewed fighting had broken out in the ongoing war between Eritrea and Ethiopia over the Eritrean port of Assab, just to our west. Although open hostilities were over, Assab was still reputed to be a rather lawless place. We had been warned by numerous people to stay well clear. So we decided to take the slightly longer route around the islands to the east, closer to the Yemeni coast.

  Even still, we had two more troubling spots to negotiate.

  Our route took us across the first of these later that night, after successfully passing the Hanish Islands. Now we had to cross the shipping lanes and make for the Eritrean coast. It was my shift, on a dark and moonless night. It felt good to be swallowed up in the blackness of the night, to know that we would be safely invisible until morning. Weather-wise, we were having a nice passage. Apart from being keyed up and nervous, things were going well.

  I was particularly watchful, because not only were we in the shipping lanes, we also happened to be within a few miles of the site of yet another recent pirate attack. I could see a few ships’ lights, and was tracking them on radar. Then, unexpectedly, two small blips appeared on the radar screen. They were very near, less than two miles away. Obviously, since they hadn’t shown up earlier, these green specks represented two small boats.

  I jumped into the cockpit and peered into the darkness. Nothing. At this distance, lit boats should have been easily visible. What possible reason could two small boats have to be loitering around the shipping lanes, unlit, in the middle of the night? There was only one reason I could think of, and the Avon Lady wasn’t it.

  I altered course sixty degrees, taking us away from those menacing green blips. Then I roused Herbert from bed. Once again, he rummaged around performing what were now sadly familiar and well-rehearsed actions, concealing valuables in their hiding places. I turned on Biggie and once more typed a distress message. There was something surreal about the whole exercise, repeated now for the third time — but that made this threat no less worrisome. In fact, of all the potential pirates we faced on the voyage, those two green blips were likely the most dangerous of all.

  Together, we stood vigil — Herbert outside,
straining his eyes to peer into the blackness, and me inside, eyes glued to the radar image, our nerves keyed to the maximum. As far as we could tell, the two unknown vessels were unaware of our presence. We would be just as invisible to their eyes as they were to ours. We snuck behind their stern with half a mile to spare.

  In the morning, the kids wondered why Happy Lappy wasn’t in its usual spot. “Another pirate attack, Mom?” Michael inquired in the blasé manner of one who has endured many such crises, a hint of sarcasm evident in that single raised eyebrow.

  There was just one more “x” left on our chart for us to cross, denoting the place where the last of the recent spate of pirate encounters had occurred. It had been at midnight, five days before. “A ship detected two high speed unlit boats approaching on radar,” the report had said. “When the ship fired three rockets, the boats retreated.”

  It was half past midnight, once again my shift (naturally, all close encounters of the nighttime kind took place on my shift). Unavoidably, we were travelling right over that last “x” marked on our chart, and I was more fretful than usual because of it. I was hating the Red Sea.

  My eyes were focused on two ships in the vicinity that didn’t seem to be moving, which concerned me. Then two more sets of lights suddenly popped up, which really confused me, because they didn’t seem to be matched by the appropriate blips on radar. I couldn’t figure out whether I was seeing a really huge, distant ship, or two small boats very close up.

  I woke up Herbert and altered course to take us away from the new lights. Soon, we ascertained that they belonged to two boats less than two miles away. Unfortunately, it turned out that they were heading the same direction, which meant that unless we made a big course correction, we had to try and outrace them, slipping in front of them before they crossed our path. A hundred times, Herbert had told me, “Never try to cross a ship on its bow; always go behind it,” but here we were, breaking his cardinal rule.