Bombs away
Posted on | September 10, 2010 | No Comments
How would your company respond if you were to send a stores indent for some explosive harpoons? Or perhaps a few underwater explosive charges that will make no lasting impression upon the stout plates of your ship, but make literal mincemeat (or perhaps a stew) of a frogman attempting to clamp a torpedo containing narcotics to the bilge keels of your ship?
There seem few other alternatives, if the discovery of such a device will lead to the prosecution of senior officers of the hapless ship, and indeed its confiscation, as has happened in the friendly port of Maracaibo quite recently. What other defence is feasible, if the ship and its personnel are always to bear the blame for the useless security of the ports where these devices are attached by the well-resourced drug smugglers?
You can man a ship with hundreds of vigilant security staff, but there is no real defence, other than a sort of James Bond scenario on underwater combat troops that will prevent a team of drug-dumping frogmen from their evil task, in the dark waters under a big ship alongside, or at anchor.
Some brave Italian underwater experts showed us the way in Gibraltar and Alexandria, in World War II. It is a pity their heroic lessons have been taken on board by the criminal smuggling gangs of South America.
In the absence of violent deterrents, or tame sharks, it seems that it is quite unreasonable to expect decent seafarers to take ships into ports where protection against such outrages are ineffective, or ports where the utter unreasonableness of the judicial process is weighted against the officers on visiting ships.
The Year of the Seafarer is becoming memorable, it seems, for all the wrong reasons and seafarers, and shipping people, should be raising a great deal of rage.
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