High Seas Hijinx near Gaza

credit: Gettyimages

I'm trying to think back on where our Mediterranean voyage went horribly wrong. Was it the heavy sea and wind that pitched our sailboat up and down like a rubber duck in a jacuzzi? The fact that the Israeli navy was probably jamming the communications of the peace boats we were trying to rendezvous with on the high seas? Or was it that our sly skipper Shmuel was in cahoots with the Israeli authorities and was cheerily trying to sabotage our mission?

The plan seemed perfectly do-able: a small group of journalists would charter a boat and set a course northeast from the port of Ashdod so that we would meet up with two vessels loaded with peace activists who were trying to break Israel's sea blockade on Gaza. We would witness what happened when the two ships tried to break into Israel's military exclusion zone around Gaza.

Enter Captain Shmuel who looks like a sun-crisped heavyweight wrestler, a slab of a man at the helm of his sleek 38 foot sloop. His rates were piratical. Shmuel was jovial and knew his way around every aspect of sailing except when it came to charting our course. Then he would sit rubbing his big head vigorously, as if friction would make his brain cells work faster. He would pencil in lines on his map and then leave them half erased. The whole thing looked like a mathematical equation gone messily awry. The truth is Shmuel was a great guy but his forte was taking tourists up and down the coast drinking beer and occasionally catching a fish.

His crew: eight Israeli and foreign journalists. Shmuel didn't really pack any food because he assured us that we'd be catching plenty of tuna as we careened up and down the roller-coaster waves to our destination. We didn't catch any tuna –in fact, our fishing line got tangled in the propeller-- but that was OK because one of us was violently seasick and spent most of the voyage with his head stuck over the side, retching. I don't know about the other crew, but that killed my appetite for raw tuna.

The coordinates of the two peace ships were kept a secret, which was silly because the Israel navy had been tracking them since they left Cyprus on Friday morning. Finally, they got in touch with us, gave us their location and asked Shmuel for our coordinates. But the captain on the activist ship “Free Gaza” called back and told Shmuel, “If your coordinates are right, that would put you directly offshore from Beirut.” Oops. Shmuel snorted and started rubbing his head furiously again, getting those brain molecules all stirred up. The rendezvous would be in an hour, he said. Or was it five hours? Shmuel wasn't really sure.

We'd hired the sloop for 24 hours, but Shmuel was getting sulky. (It turned out that he'd gone ahead and chartered the boat anyway to a party for a sunset cruise.) Besides, the sea sick journalist was groaning in misery, and we were starting to feel a bit sorry for him.

Meanwhile, the Israeli navy decided that it was bad PR to risk a high seas confrontation with a boat filled with peace activists that included an 81 year-old American nun and ex-British PM Tony Blair's sister-in-law. So the Israelis let the vessels through to Gaza's harbor, where the activists were greeted by joyous Palestinians.

But that was later. We were still searching frantically for the 'Free Gaza' ships. Meanwhile, all communication with the two vessels went dead. Activists on board later told us that the Israelis were probably jamming the signal. The storm had thrown us and them off course, so we scanned the heaving horizon. Nothing. I used to read Greek mythology and think: how could Odysseus and all those sailors get so badly blown off course, when the Mediterranean is such a dinky little pond? As a Californian, my idea of a large body of water is the Pacific Ocean. But if you're on a tiny boat, looking for two other tiny boats, the Mediterranean can seem awful big. Later we calculated that we'd missed the two boats by about 30 miles. It might as well have been 500 miles. I'm surprised Odysseus ever made it home –or that we did.

By Tim McGirk/Somewhere in the Mediterranean