Seized: A Sea Captain's Adventures Battling Scoundrels and Pirates While Recovering Stolen Ships in the World's Most Troubled Waters by Max Hardberger

Author:Max Hardberger [Hardberger, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Travel, Special Interest, Adventure
ISBN: 9780307590077
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2010-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

The next morning I went to see Willem Bik at Belgisch Scheepssloperij. He’d delivered the Deletion Certificate to the ship a week earlier, and I hadn’t seen him since. As I drove into the yard, another Russian trawler was docking behind the building, the pale-faced crew working in short sleeves on the deck. The dockworkers were using a forklift with the ship’s bowline tied to it to pull the ship to the quay; I gathered that the ship’s bow windlass wasn’t working. The name Professor Kurilov was written in faded English letters on the bow.

Willem was his same brusque self. “So, Captain,” he said, “everything okay?”

“No,” I said. “I got a visit from Port State Control yesterday.”

His eyebrows shot up. “From Antwerp? What on earth for?”

“I fired that old Portuguese captain, and I think he called them. Anyway, the ship’s been detained.”

“Holy Mother. Come into my office.” We went in and I sat in front of his desk.

“I have an idea,” I said, “but I need your help.”

He threw up his thin, hairless hands. “You inspected the ship before you bought it. You knew exactly what you were getting.”

“I’m not complaining about the vessel. She’s a good little ship, especially for the price. But let me ask you this—how does Port State Control prevent ships from leaving? Do they tell the pilots not to take them out?”

He shook his head and picked up the box of cigarettes on his desk. “Not the pilots. The bridgetender at Zeebrugge.” He lit a cigarette with a match and took a deep puff. “The bridgetender has a list of ships under detention. He won’t open the bridge for them.”

I had been to Zeebrugge to buy ship’s supplies. I’d seen the bridge he was talking about. I pointed through the window. “What about that Russian ship? Is it detained?”

He grimaced through a cloud of smoke. “Of course not. Why would it be detained? I told you, Port State Control never comes here. If your captain hadn’t reported your ship, they would never have known about you.”

“So the Professor Kurilov could leave if she wanted to.”

“That ship has come to the end of its days. There’s no market for Russian trawlers. That’s why we get so many to cut up.”

“But the port authorities don’t know that, do they? What would they do if my agent went to the harbormaster and asked for an outbound clearance for the Professor Kurilov?”

A slow smile split his face. It was the first time I’d seen him smile; it looked painful, and it didn’t last long. “They would give it. They are just, what do you call them, bureaucrats? They are mostly concerned with the barge traffic in the port. We don’t have foreign cargo operations in Brugge, so they don’t pay attention to ships that clear for foreign ports.”

“If I painted Professor Kurilov on the bow and stern, the pilot wouldn’t find that strange?”

He shrugged. “The pilot will come from Zeebrugge. There are no pilots here. If he brought her in, he would know that it’s not the same ship.

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