Konrad's Final Run

I met John Morris in Gibraltar. He’d flown there intending to buy my friend Konrad’s seventy-foot steel fishing boat which he’d found advertised in a magazine.

Well, almost everyone with a boat in Gibraltar at that time was involved in some sort of mischief and Konrad was no exception. He’d spoken to John on the phone and the latter had agreed to purchase the vessel if all was as advertised (which, knowing Konrad, was highly unlikely).

Anyway, my Dutch friend figured that since his boat was probably about to go chugging off into the sunset, he would make a last run to Tangier in order to sell a couple of pallets of cameras that had ‘fallen off’ a freighter and found their way into his hold.

The final run was not a roaring success however. I heard the full story much later after Konrad had been released from a Spanish jail. Apparently he’d had a disagreement with his Moroccan ‘agent’ over the price of the goods, and their parting was far from amicable. The ‘agent’ put a call through to someone in Spain.

As Konrad approached the Spanish coast (where he had arranged to meet another ‘agent’), a patrol boat loomed up and ordered him to heave-to. He then made a rather foolish decision. Being close to Gibraltar, he attempted to make a run for it.

But his vessel was way under-powered. The maximum speed he could hope to eke out of her was around seven knots—the patrol boat was capable of around thirty-five. Konrad was forced to hit the floor when a burst of machine-gun fire shattered his wheelhouse windows.

Kalinka in Gibraltar

The Spanish seized the vessel and Konrad was thrown into the clink.

John—a Kiwi living in Haiti—somehow discovered that I was a friend of Konrad’s and sought me out. I was at the dock aboard my old tub ‘Kalinka’. I advised him that from what I’d heard, he’d better start looking for another vessel.

He then asked me if I was capable of navigating a boat across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. My eyes lit up with pictures of clear waters, white sand, palm trees and bikini-clad damsels. Having recently had a bit of a run-in with the Gibraltar authorities, I’d been planning to leave for the Caribbean anyway.

“No problem,” I lied. This was before electronic navigation devices, but I felt I could learn how to use a sextant along the way. So I left the ‘Kalinka’ in the care of a friend while John and I headed for Holland in search of another fishing boat. We flew to London, then on to Paris where we were to catch a train to Amsterdam.

Our search for a boat almost fizzled out there and then: Just as the train was about to depart the station, a startled look came over John’s face. “Where’s the money?” he blurted. The money was in an overnight bag—thirty-five thousand US dollars in cash.

“I thought you had it!” I said, frantically looking around. The bag was nowhere to be seen.

Shrimping off Holland

Against the wall in Brest, France

We darted off the train literally as the doors were closing, caught a taxi back to the airport where, by some miracle, we located the bus that had taken us to the train station. Again, by some miracle, we found the bag of money under a seat!

A couple of weeks later John was the owner of the sixty-five foot shrimper De Toekomst.

After he’d bought the boat, he informed the previous owner, Gerard, of our plan to sail her to the Caribbean. With no prompting from us Gerard had his crew strip the engine down completely and replace any worn parts—all at his own expense.

They did a fine job as the engine—a thumping old Deutz diesel with a maximum RPM of 800—didn’t miss a beat all the way across the Atlantic.

Edited by Davina Chapman