Sailing boat confirmed held at Somali pirate stronghold

by Ecoterra/Sail-World Cruising on 29 Oct 2009 The Somali Marine and Coastal Monitor Agency, Ecoterra, has reported that four days after their distress call was sent out near the Seychelles and received by the naval crisis centre, the sailing boat SY Lynn Rival, with British couple Paul Chandler, 58, and his wife Rachel Chandler, 55 on board, has reportedly already reached the Central Somali coast.

This is while the European Union Naval Military Operation (EU NAVFOR) statements still speculated about a boat with sails and skiffs in tow apparently observed by a helicopter 200nm off the Somali coast at the same time.

Later last night coast-based marine observers reported further that the yacht has been commandeered from around 30 nm south of Hobyo to a location further south and off Ceel Huur - i. e. north of Harardheere at the Indian Ocean coast of Somalia. Harardheere is notorious as a piracy stronghold.

In the meantime, the mysterious spokesman for Somali pirates, known only as 'Hassan', based in Harardheere, warned Britain not to try to rescue the couple.

'If warships surround us, we shall point our guns at the British tourists. They are old and we will take care of them -- that is if we are not attacked,' he said.

Ecoterra further reported that the President of Galmudug regional state Mohamed Ahmed Alin as well as several respected elders from the area promised to do all in their power to achieve a fast and unconditional release.

All Somali officials and regional analysts, however, are reported to be wondering wonder why the situation was not immediately reported by the responsible centre receiving the distress signal to other search and rescue centres and to the Somali government at the time when the distress call was sent last Friday.

Somali Prime Minister Sharmake was only informed by other sources briefly before he met with the British Foreign Secretary in London on Tuesday, who confirmed the incident to him, but had no details. Also the Somali PM promised immediate response to solve the case as soon as possible and achieve an unharmed release.

Somalia's anti-piracy envoy Ismail Haji Noor noted that he receives more and better information from the ground or the media than from EU NAVFOR's Atalanta headquarters in the UK. 'While the Somali government reports any occurrence to the command centre of Atalanta, the information flow and co-operation from the side of the naval forces is very sparsely forthcoming - if at all,' he remarked.

Back in Britain, several relatives of the Chandlers confirmed that the couple's only assets in life were contained on their boat, which was already in the hands of the pirates. Ransom demands, which are now awaited, had no chance whatsoever of being satisfied by the Chandlers themselves.

Background:

The British couple were travelling from the Seychelles towards East Africa in their 38ft yacht Lynn Rival when they went missing. Hailing from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, they 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.

Leah Mickleborough, the couple's niece, told the Daily Mail that the couple were 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.

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.