Beat THAT, Luggers!

[Craic]

[a hacker removed Craic's original post and replaced it with a dodgy link to an external internet site.  This has been deleted by a moderator].

[Ian Cowie]

I hope this was a legal activity. I would not want to see BR's image being smeared.

As an owner of a Mk1 Lugger I would tend to agree. If you load up the stern lockers too much the stern drags and slows the boat. I am lucky that the Mk1 has space underneath the side benches but modern versions of the Lugger they are filled with floatation. I have to very often resort to waterproof bags in the cockpit which become a nuisance when trying to move about the boat.

I dream of a BayRaider but I still appreciate the qualities of my Lugger.

Ian Cowie

[Julian Swindell]

Has someone REALLY crossed the Channel in a BayRaider? Tell us more!

[Tony]

The absence of ample stowage is one of he most depressing facts of new Drascombes.
Compare this to BayRaiders: Two BRs were used last week to smuggle four persons across the Channel, hidden inside their side lockers. Beat THAT, Luggers!

For Gods sake dont tell the Daily Mail!

(...or was it Polish plumbers desperate to get home for a decent meal?)

[Julian Swindell]

Call me suspicious, but I would like to know:

Were the skippers of the two Bayraiders keeping a careful watch, lashed to the helm as they crossed the the cold, wintery Channel,

or

Were they upstairs in the lounge bar whilst the ferry captain looked after everything for them?

just wondered...

[Craic]

A rather different story.

The two boats were shipped by lorry from Wales to a boatshow in Germany, one boat a delivery, the other a boat to go on display.
Matt Newland had not yet arrived so I stood in to take the delivery. The boats were ratchet-strapped onto their trailers and looked fine on arrival, though there was a bit of sand in the cockpit. I phoned Matt and he put that down to a rough customs inspection, probably. I took the still strapped delivery boat into a separate storage and started to hoover out the display boat.

Funny, there was sand also inside the side compartments, and there also on the vertical forward bulkheads, hmmh.

Checked again with the yard, they assured me the boats had been absolutely spotless on departure, hmmmmhhh.

After Matt had arrived we also closer checked the second, the delivery boat that was put away unopened into separate storage.

And there was not just sand, but also a sump of urine inside the side lockers, some urine-filled condom too, and the sand on the vertical bulkheads became clearly identifiable as footprints. Took just a few seconds to comprehend what had happened - The boats had been used for trafficking people. Ratchet-strapped as they were, the persons hidden inside the side lockers could not get out without accomplices. A professional racket job.

Completely illegal, but no tarnish on Swallowboats themselves, on the contrary. Shows off how big the lockers are. People and press at the show were most impressed.

Good story, eh?

[Julian Swindell]

I withdraw all suspicions! Wow, what a story. You should tell the Daily Mail too. People being smuggled OUT of the UK. It is supposed to be happening the other way round according to them. All a bit creepy though. A bit like finding someone has been inside your house.

Hope the Boat Show went well too.

[Craic]

I withdraw all suspicions! Wow, what a story. You should tell the Daily Mail too. People being smuggled OUT of the UK. It is supposed to be happening the other way round according to them. All a bit creepy though. A bit like finding someone has been inside your house.

Hope the Boat Show went well too.

There are some curious details which in fact may indicate that the smuggling had taken place INTO the UK. For instance there was found a small french origin bottle of mineral water in one of the lockers. Unlikely these people would have taken 'Eau Naturelle' with them when leaving the UK.
Current theory is that the trailer (minus the engine)has been zigged retour after its first arrival on the continent to be shipped back on it's own into the UK with a cargo of humans, from where it would have been zagged back to the continent for its scheduled onward journey to Germany.
Current theory is also that the numberplates of the trailer were fiddled with to conceal from the automatic camera recognition the fact the same trailer had been zig-zagged to and fro and to again, probably also using different crossings each time.

The show itself went very well for the BayRaiders, while there was generally a lot of doom and gloom about at the show among the sellers of bigger yachts, due to the financial sit.

[Tony]

Hi Claus,
All that detective work sounds fascinating. Dont bother with the Daily Mail. Write the script, get the film rights and sign up Matt Damon ASAP.
Seriously - beats me how they managed it. Every I take the Four Sisters on a ferry we get searched. Had sniffer dogs this year! Perhaps I just have one of those faces.......

[Craic]

... Seriously - beats me how they managed it. Every I take the Four Sisters on a ferry we get searched. Had sniffer dogs this year! ...

Tony,
I am pretty sure one cannot train sniffer dogs to sniff for any unspecific humans, because they would end up barking mad, that smell is everywhere.
Obviously dogs can sniff for unusual specific smells like explosives or drugs or -maybe- traces of adrenaline. So I would assume people to be smuggled professionally would be sedated in order not to emit adrenaline during a search. That urine we found could be a hint to that also.

Then, your boat is a cabin boat which obviously can conceal a person inside. So professional traffickers will rather use containers that are fairly unsuspicious of that, like small open boats. In addition, new GRP boats have a strong smell which may be helpful to cover up other smells.

Then, the numbers are so huge. I think I remember there are in average 10,000 units in every 24 hours going through Dover Ferryport -alone, not counting the Tunnel-, of which 4,000 are buses, lorries and unaccompanied trailers. Lorries and trailers are usually tightly packed and so are quite well protected from inspections, it would take clearly too long to unpack and re-pack to inspect each and every one properly. The probability to be detected is fairly minute.

I heard the going rate for a smuggle is GBP 5,000.00 apiece. Even if you professionally smuggle just around 100 persons per day, the total turnover per single week would be around 3.5 million, meaning there should be plenty money available for bribery in the right places. Just a thought of course, but it has happened before.
 
So Matt Damon, you think? For which role BTW? : Lorry driver, stowaway, detective, mastermind? Fascinating!

Kind regards.