We are back aboard good old Que Sera Sera, which has been berthed here in Agios Nickalos, Crete for the better part of a month while we were off touring some of the wonders of Europe.
The day after we arrived back aboard a 15 year old wooden sailboat pulls into the dock just to our stern. The Boat looks a little rough and a lot weather-beaten. I meet the Captain, a man of fifty something who is from Poland. He states that a friend of his also from Poland has asked him to bring the boat from Sudan where it has been at a mooring for several weeks, to Croatia where it will get some badly needed repairs.
There are four men including the Captain aboard, two of which leave the boat the next morning to fly back to Poland.
I happen to make some small talk with one of the crew, and he tells me of their miserable windward slog up the Red Sea and the Gulf of Suez. He related that they did stop to do some Scuba diving several times in the crystal clear waters around some of the islands that they had stopped at. This is pretty much the standard procedure when heading north, for when the north winds blow, you stop and wait.
This all sounds pretty innocent to me, and when the Captain and the remaining crewman want to go out for a big dinner in town he asks me to turn on the manual bilge pump in about an hour. “Sure” I of course tell him, “show me the switch”. He does stating that now after the windward slog there is a big leak, as old wooden boats usually get, and they only have a manual switch to operate the bilge pump.
So an hour or so later I climb aboard and flip the switch, the bilge pump runs for six or eight minutes when I hear the pump suck air I shut the switch off and get back off the boat, no problem.
No! the problem comes down the dock at about 2 PM the next day in the form of two official looking men in white uniforms. There are three others as well who look like officials, but they are in plainclothes, and one man is leading a dog. I tell my mate here comes trouble and we both duck below decks. Lucky for us when they all get to the stern of Que Sera they turn toward the Polish Boat behind us.
Sure enough they proceed aboard the Polish boat and start a very thorough search for drugs with the dog sniffing away all over the boat. The dog is back on deck in five or so minutes which would seem to say it found nothing, but the two plain-cloths men are still keep searching below. Almost an hour later and several dark recesses of the boat having been opened up, out come the two of the searchers with four or five oblong objects wrapped in plastic bags.
Ha! They have found the drugs! No! As they unwrapped the plastic bags they discovered old ceramic vases, maybe rare sunken treasures then. Ha! Ha! Got ya they smile, and ask the crew member where did these vases come from. “I bought them,” he says. “Where” asks the agent of doom, and “do you have a receipt”? “No” says the very somber crewman. Ha! Ha! Ha! Says the Customs agent just what we suspected from this lowly old craft from Poland.
I must report that I am really not hearing all of this conversation, for I am trying to look innocent and innocuous by sanding the bright work on the stern of the boat. So perhaps a word or two slipped past my ear as the sandpaper scraped to and fro. Plus perhaps I have added a word or two as well, but most of this report is mostly factual.
A short time latter one of the white uniformed officials’ hurries off the dock to the Marina office. Five minutes later two more important looking men show up at the dock one coming in by a small launch. By now there are four men standing on the dock behind Que Sera, two other men are standing on the foredeck of the subject boat, with maybe three men still tearing apart the interior of the now dissembled boat, oh and still the dog is sitting at the ready on deck.
The new arrivals must have been Masters of the Antiquities Division of Archeology Parathion Group, Crete, Greece, for they are really studying the clay pots brought up from the deep of the damp and foul smelling bilge. I know it was a foul smelling bilge for the guys that came out after the search were very damp and foul smelling indeed. The ambient temperature above decks was close to 87 degrees in the shade. Come to think of it even the two men in white official uniforms standing on the dock were a little smelly by now as well.
After about three hours of this search, the whole search team, the Antiquities team, the deck team or what ever they were, and the white uniform team finally get off the boat. Oh, and last off the boat and in no real hurry was the dog. They all head off the dock in a pretty jovial mood. Unfortunately behind them followed the not too jovial Polish Captain and his crewman.
In that my bright work sanding had now taken me right to the very stern of my vessel I was able to question the Captain what’s up? As he left his boat, he said “Some one has put out a word against us for something. They are using the pottery to further question us so who knows, but I think that there was a problem with the previous delivery Captain”.
Let me now describe the two of the five clay pots that were unwrapped on the dock just six feet from my camouflaged position under the bimini, behind the stern anchor, below the outboard engine, in a vast cloud of sanding dust on Que Sera.
OK! Here goes, They were round on the bottom with a long narrow neck topped by a small flared opening, the round part was maybe five or six inches in diameter. The neck was about one and a half inches in diameter and the opening at the top about two inches in diameter, and they were about 12 inches tall. They were light gray in color without any noticeable markings, colors or carvings on them. They looked like they had been buried under ground or under water for a long time, and I, who used to make pottery, would not have given a dime for them both. But maybe the other three were magnificent vessels worth millions perhaps, possibly, probably not.
Time passes and it is now twenty-eight hours after the group of officials walked off the dock with the Polish Captain and his nice guy, Mark the crew in tow, and they are still gone.
Some facts to consider. This is the first port in Greece that they had stopped in. So the rare Artifacts were not purchased or stolen in Greece. It is possible that they stopped offshore and bought them from a Greek fisherman who brought then up from the deep in his fishing nets, sure!
They could have been stashed aboard the boat when they got on the boat in Sudan, but I did hear the crewman say that he bought them, and answer the officer that he did not have the receipt, so that’s not likely either.
So he bought it in a foreign country out side of Greece, let’s say Egypt. Why would that be illegal?
The problem now is that these men are in custody of the local officials, and they have no rights what so ever. They could be locked up until whenever, and who’s to do something about it? Me? No way for if they come aboard this boat and find all the bottles of Italian wine I have stored aboard I’m in Jail for a century. They will take Lois also for she has smuggled at least twelve, maybe eighteen, foreign china head dolls aboard as well. We’re history if they catch us.
Oh shucks! I was aboard that Polish boat, what if they find my fingerprints on the bilge pump switch? Guess I would miss the last Millennium Odyssey rally party next Monday if they find those babies.
So tomorrow I’ll be back at my bright work sanding project, and you can be sure I’ll be keeping my eyes open, my nose to the grind stone, and my ears glued to the on going Saga at Agios Nickolaos Crete Greece.
Tomorrow is here, and as a matter of fact it is six in the afternoon tomorrow, and still the skipper and his crew are not back to their boat. I have been pressed into turning on the bilge pump switch today in their absence so as not to have the old girl head for the depths.
I’m not worried about finger prints any more though, for I have been sanding the stern of my boat steady for two days now so as not to miss any new tidbits that might be forthcoming. In so doing have worn all the skin off my fingers tips, alas no more fingerprints are to be detected.
Here now at about fifty six hours, fourteen minutes, and eight seconds after their departure, down the dock walks the Captain and his Mate, looking I might add very glum. They went promptly aboard their vessel and disappeared for the night.
The next morning however a see them standing on the dock talking very man to man, so I take up my sand paper and get to work once again on the stern bright-work, which by the way is getting pretty dull by now from all this repetitious sanding.
So I asked the skipper what the heck happened. He said, “Well someone must have alerted Interpol that the boat was here for they came looking for drugs. They found none, but did find some old pots aboard and some picture negatives taken with an underwater camera of the pottery, so they suspected that we were part of an artifact smuggling ring”.
“The new Polish owner says that he found the pottery while diving in the south of the Red Sea. But he did not tell us that they were aboard the boat when we picked it up in Port Sudan. He has been talking with the police on the phone, and has worked things out with them, I think”.
“He is sending bail money, and all of the necessary documentation work necessary to get us clear passage to Croatia from Greece”. ”The trouble now is that I had to put up the money from my own personal funds to get us out of jail rather than wait for the money to get here by mail from Poland”. “Now we have no money to buy provisions, nor a new anchor, and other necessary equipment to get the boat ready to go”.
He also stated, “That as delivery captain he should have gone over the vessel completely, but that there were so may safety problems which needed attended to, plus the boat was a friend’s boat, thus I did not check it out like I should have.”
We set sail for other delightful islands of Greece the next day, and so we do not know how this story ended, but perhaps the moral of this story is that the Captain is responsible.
Most of us are the owner and captain of our yachts, and should certainly know what’s aboard. If someone, somewhere, slips something aboard our vessel unknown, we may well be in harms way. And worse yet, we may even end up in the jail of some small foreign country awaiting justice that may not be forth coming.
As Captain Horatio Hornblower oft stated, “be thou always aware”
Don A Babson: Yacht Que Sera Sera