British yacht hijacked by Somali pirates - yacht sighted

by Nancy Knudsen on 28 Oct 2009 A British couple have been hijacked by Somali pirates. They were travelling from the Seychelles towards East Africa in their 38ft yacht Lynn Rival when they went missing. Reuters Newsagency was contacted by a pirate yesterday to say that the couple were 'in our hands now.'

Maritime Monitors relayed at 20h10 local time today that the abducted sailing yacht was observed around 30 nm south of Hobyo at the Central Somali Coast, ECOTERRA Intl. reports. Further reports from local elders indicate that the British couple held on the boat are well and that efforts are made to have them released unconditionally and immediately

Paul Chandler, 58, and his wife Rachel Chandler, 55, from Tunbridge Wells in Kent had sailed down the Red Sea, crossed the Gulf of Aden very close to the coast of Yemen successfully, visited India and then the Seychelles. They then appeared to sail straight into the hands of pirates by sailing south east towards Tanzania in Africa. A British coastguard spokesman said that they had left the Seychelles on October 22 and were first headed for Amirante Islands, a 150 nautical mile passage.

First signal of the kidnapping came when an EPIRB was activated from their yacht Lynn Rival at 2300 on Friday and since then the Royal Navy have been scouring the sea in the area.

The distressed family in England is now awaiting a ransom demand. Relatives have said they fear the worst. Leah Mickleborough, the couple's niece, told the Daily Mail that the couple were not naive. 'When you hear of things like this you possibly expect the worst might have happened but you always hope that it hasn't,' she said. 'They are not naive. They are very experienced in these things. They are not the sort of people who would put themselves deliberately in danger.'

It is a mystery why the couple were headed into such waters. Two yachts from the Seychelles have been hijacked from those waters in the last year, which would have been well-known to the Chandlers, who had been cruising in Seychelles waters for seven months.

As the couple left the Seychelles they wrote on their blog: 'We'll be at sea for 8 to 12 days, maybe 14 as we are now getting into the period of transition between the south monsoon and north monsoon, so the trade winds will be less reliable and we may get more light winds. We probably won't have satellite phone coverage until we're fairly close to the African coast, so we may be out of touch for some time.'

Two days later, at 7.41am on 23rd October, the cryptic message 'PLEASE RING SARAH' was entered, and nothing has been heard since.

The Chandlers, married 25 years and with no children, took early retirement and three years ago boarded the Lynn Rival and embarked on the trip of a lifetime. They had already owned the boat for thirty years before embarking on the voyage.

The couple's niece Leah Mickleborough, who last saw them five weeks ago when they briefly returned to the UK for her wedding, said sailing was their passion.
'This is their life really. They do sailing, they live for this.'

Mr Chandler, a former civil engineer, and his wife, an economist, have a wealth of sailing experience and made their way from Turkey in January 2006 through the Suez Canal.
They travelled past Saudi Arabia, around to Mumbai and down the west coast of India before embarking on the one thousand mile sail to the Seychelles.

Light winds in the Seychelles region in recent weeks has given rise to a spate of hijack attempts as pirates make use of the fair conditions. An Indian cargo ship was hijacked off the coast of the Seychelles last Wednesday, and its more than two dozen crew members have not been heard from since. It was also reported that several Spanish trawlers working near the Seychelles are employing former British soldiers as armed guards.

The International Maritime Bureau's (IMB) Piracy Reporting Centre (PRC) reported eight pirate attacks in the last 10 days alone. In the latest attack, on Sunday, off the coast of Somalia, six pirates armed with machine guns opened fire on a container ship before it escaped.

The PRC reported 306 incidents in the first nine months of 2009, up from 293 in the same period the year before.