It's Neutral Territory. Should be Safe

I met Maxie in the port of Vilamoura, Portugal. He was sitting in the cockpit of a fifty-foot wooden ketch, a beer in one hand and a pair of binoculars clamped to his eyes in the other. The glasses were directed aloft to where a young man in a bosun’s chair was applying a coat of varnish to the mast.

As I walked past on the dock, the man with the beer piped up in a broad Australian accent, “Ya missed a bit to yer left.”

I paused and glanced up to observe the young man’s reaction. I can’t be sure, but I believe he rolled his eyes. I dropped mine back to the cockpit. “Don’t go exertin’ yerself,” I said, reviving my own Aussie twang.

The man lowered his binoculars and turned to me. “Maybe you could come aboard and lend a hand,” he replied, opening a cooler and pulling out a frosted beer.

That’s how I came to meet Maxie. I helped him out for several hours that afternoon and we repaid each other in kind on a number of occasions during my stay at Vilamoura. I left the marina before Maxie. I was headed off to somewhere I can’t recall.

A couple of years later I ran into him at the anchorage of Spanse Water in Curacao, down in the Caribbean, where we did a bit of catch-up.

One of Maxie’s adventures involved the evacuation of a wealthy family from Lebanon during one of the spikes in the civil war. He had apparently run into some character in Malta who’d offered him a sizable sum to get these people out of the war-torn country. Obviously, due to the amount of money offered, the venture was not without peril.

The pick-up point was a run-down wharf somewhere near Tripoli. Maxie had been assured by his contact that it was a neutral place and relatively safe.

As Maxie told it, he tied up at the wharf on time, waited an hour for his passengers to show up, then headed out to sea. He was about a mile offshore when a shell hit the wharf and blew it to smithereens.

Maxie and I might well have been the proverbial two ships passing in the dark, for as it turned out, I happened to be in those very same waters around the same time.

A couple of Dutchmen, an American and yours truly had sailed there from Holland in a sixty-five foot, twin screw ex-Dutch Navy vessel to pick up a quantity of the famed Lebanese tobacco. My friend Rob had flown to Tripoli a month ahead of us in order to get things organized.

At a particular time on a particular evening I was to rendezvous with Rob twenty-five miles due east of Tripoli. If for some reason things didn’t work out the first evening, we would try again, two times more if necessary.

Well, as Murphy would have it, all three nights were washouts. But like diligent boy scouts, we were prepared with a back-up plan. We re-grouped in Heraklion, Crete, and it was there that Rob regaled us with the details of his little adventure.

On the first night, he and a motley crew of locals had set out with the cargo from a small port somewhere south of Tripoli. They were in an open vessel of around thirty-five feet—an old ship’s lifeboat Rob figured.

In the bow, perched on a small triangle of decking was a belt machine gun manned by two men. Behind them, a snaggle-toothed older man brandished a loaded rocket launcher, while at the stern the captain sat by the tiller on a wooden box, flanked by two more men with AK47 rifles. The product was piled high amidships.

According to Rob, the operation was rather haphazard. No one had bothered to secure the machine gun to the deck so the two men in charge of it spent most of their time trying to prevent it from falling overboard as the boat rolled. The captain bantered and laughed with his two companions, occasionally glancing at a compass held between his legs while steering what appeared to be a completely erratic course.

When Rob and his seafaring friends failed to find us on this first night they headed home a bit before daybreak. There was apparently some confusion as to their intentions as they steamed back into port: Their own men opened fire on them from the shore. Fortunately no one was hit before their identity was established.

The next evening, off they went again. I don’t recall the details of how this particular debacle came about, but the morning found them way off course—some fifteen or so miles west of Syria with one of that country’s gunboats in sight.

To Rob’s horror, the captain decided to attack the gunboat and altered course to intercept. The crew were in the process of preparing weapons when a second enemy vessel appeared. Fortunately for all concerned, discretion overcame valour and they scuttled back to Lebanese waters.

The third evening was uneventful but they again failed to reach the rendezvous. On this occasion though, Rob managed to determine one of the reasons why they appeared to be wandering all over the ocean. The box upon which the captain perched was filled with hand grenades. The metal in these weapons obviously rendered the magnetic compass between his legs useless.

Rob flew back to Lebanon and a couple of days later we managed to connect. But it was luck rather than good management. I arrived at the rendezvous a couple of hours early. To kill time, I headed south for an hour then did a one-eighty to retrace my steps.

It was after I’d turned around and was steaming north that I spotted them. They were headed south—away from the meeting place. Where they were off to, I have no idea and I doubt their captain did either!

The swine told me he was doing a charter in the Greek Islands! Davina