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Adventures on the High Seas

Their 6-year voyage around the world was a dream come true until they were attacked by pirates.

By Donovan Webster

They attacked out of the sun. As the two yachts approached, sailing westward through the Gulf of Aden between Somalia and Yemen, Carol Martini—on the 47-foot sloop Gandalf—scanned the horizon, still oblivious to the danger 500 yards off her bow. 

Then, flickering in the distance, she glimpsed something: two low shapes, silhouetted inside the sun's reflected brilliance on the water. Picking up the radio handset, she hailed the nearby sloop Mahdi and its captain, Rod Nowlin. "Uh, Rod," she said. "I think I see something."

Martini called belowdecks, waking her partner, Jay Barry. He was topside in an instant. "I'll take the wheel," he said. "You roll up the jib. Let's get running."

Seconds later, the boats in the distance fired their engines, sending plumes of thick black exhaust into the air. Then things began exploding around Barry as rounds from AK-47s ripped apart the decking. "Gunfire," says Barry, "sounds quite different when you're standing in front of a gun instead of behind it."

The unthinkable was happening. Despite weeks of planning to avoid precisely this fate, Gandalf and Mahdi were under siege by modern-day pirates.

Carol Martini is slight and sunblond, a Harvard-trained MD and former instructor at Harvard's School of Medicine. As she sits in the cockpit of Gandalf—sipping a mug of tea in the Mediterranean harbor at Finike, Turkey—she seems less an East Coast elitist than somebody's friendly, cool-headed sister.

In the burly Jay Barry, 53, she's found her ideal counterpart. Disarmingly funny, Barry, who's more at home in a pub than a country club, financed this expedition by selling his north of Boston auto-restoration business. 

Sailing around the globe had been a mutual goal since their second date. As a boy, Barry stared at a map of the world on his bedroom wall, and had always had an itch to travel far and wide. As for Martini, she fell in love with the guy and, subsequently, his dreams of adventure. 

It took Barry a year to find the right vessel. But when he brought Martini to the boatyard to see it, she thought it was a joke. "The thing looked like a flying Dumpster," she says.The sloop, built in 1960, was a charred wreck. Despite its five-millimeter-thick plate-steel hull and 61-foot mast of Sitka spruce, a fire in the boatyard had singed the paint off the vessel’s port side. Its original canvas sails and rigging were still aboard—and moldy. Garbage overflowed its decks. 

Over the next year, working nights and weekends, the two rebuilt the sloop, discovering a fantastic design. "Beyond the hull's steel," says Barry, "the thing is reinforced with angle iron riveted to the hull every two inches. It's incredibly solid—though with all those rivets, it’s really a boat made of a thousand holes."

In 1992, they launched their recreated vessel, Gandalf. It was named for J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings wizard who recognizes all forms of humanity. In November 1999, they set off from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to fulfill their dream—a trip around the world. Their extended vacation would take them to the most beautiful parts of the earth, as well as the most treacherous: stretches of ocean known to harbor pirates.

By March 2000, Carol Martini and Jay Barry had sailed down the U.S. Atlantic coast, cruised the Caribbean and entered the Panama Canal. By November, they'd visited the Galápagos, the Marquesas, Fiji and much of Polynesia, before fetching up in Bundaberg, Australia, for their first winter. "We did 14,500 miles under sail in a year—that's not recommended. It was hard," Barry says. 

"Yeah," Martini adds, "but we were having a wonderful time."

Gandalf continued north, through Indonesia, stopping to see the Komodo dragons before going on to Bali. They explored Sumatra and Kalimantan; then they pressed on for Singapore. So far, their trip had surpassed Barry’s childhood dreams.

After weeks of screwing tight their courage, they left Singapore and sailed into the Strait of Malacca, an area known for pirates brazen enough to attack freighters. "So there we were, all prepared for the infamous Malacca Strait pirates, and nothin' happened except a bad storm," says Martini. As they sailed on, they hoped the worst was behind them.

By late December 2004, Gandalf was moored in Nai Harn Bay, Thailand. By then, Martini and Barry had befriended another pair of round-the-world sailors, Rod and Becky Nowlin, of Whidbey Island, Washington. The Nowlins were sailing their 45-foot yacht, Mahdi—a word that means "savior" or "peaceful one" in Arabic. Rod Nowlin, 62, is a solid, athletic man. Retired from the U.S. Navy, he enjoys slow-paced exotic travel and a love of good cigars. His wife, Becky, aside from being a legendary cook, is said to be a hoot. 

Because of the piracy threat in the Red Sea, both crews planned to leave Thailand together. "I wanted someone who could get through the area quickly. I didn't want to carry anyone," Barry explains.

The two captains were well aware that any seagoing vessel, from a yacht to an ocean liner, is a potential target. Using sophisticated technology like radar and radio scanners, as well as lethally modern weapons, pirates thrive in areas with limited naval presence and numerous places to hide. One favorite spot is the narrow neck of the Gulf of Aden, where the Indian Ocean separates the government-less nation of Somalia and the impoverished country of Yemen. It's a zone known to sailors as Pirate Alley. And on January 20, 2005, it was where Gandalf and Mahdi set sail for, pausing a few days in Salalah, Oman. 

"Salalah is where we got stuck with an idiot," Barry says.

By this time, Gandalf and Mahdi had helped another sailor—a Californian and his wife in a smaller, less-hardy vessel—repair their boat at a number of anchorages since departing Thailand. "This guy had no business being on the water," says Barry. And in Salalah, the smaller boat turned up again, insinuating itself into the other boats' plans.

Barry and Rod Nowlin both knew that this third vessel, a 37-foot sloop, couldn't keep pace with their larger boats. They hooked up with another craft, a well-captained 37-foot Catalina, and on March 7, 2005, all four left on the treacherous, 600-mile trek through the Gulf of Aden. Their plan was to run all day, making good time; then, under cover of darkness—with radios and lights turned off—they would transit Pirate Alley, ending at the harbor in Aden, Yemen.

Sources Cited:

Donovan Webster. Web. 

http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/adventures-on-the-high-seas/article131824.html