By Chris Doyle
The February 2024 kidnapping and apparent murder of Ralph Hendry and Kathy Brandel aboard s/v Simplicity, a 48-foot St. Francis catamaran, was a brutal and viscerally emotional event. It reverberated through the yachting community and the Grenadian and St. Vincentian populations, leaving all of us shocked, horrified, deeply saddened, and feeling terrible for the relatives and friends of the victims.
It is completely antithetical to everything we think of as a normal situation. For those outside the region with loved ones cruising in the area, it can feel more dangerous than it does to those who are here. From afar, you hear the news and have only your imagination to fill in the gaps. At least in the islands you can look outside and see the sun shining, hear birdsong, see normal activities, and realize the sky has not yet fallen.
Our horror is healthy and good, because the last thing we want is to be inured to such events, as I fear has happened in the U.S., where mass shootings have averaged two a day over the last three years and where these have become just another news story unless it happens close to where you live.
Events as awful as this are not unknown but, thankfully, are rare. In January in 1994 in Barbuda, there was a similarly awful event, when three men went aboard a yacht, bound up the four crew members and executed them. It should be noted that Barbuda has a population of 1,200 people and has had almost no crime before or since. Apart from these incidents, there have been other murders of those on yachts, including the murder of an English captain in Vieux Fort in St. Lucia 10 years ago, and a murder in Wallilabou about 8 years ago.
In the aftermath of the Simplicity event, communication between the Grenada and St. Vincent police departments was excellent. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) information was reported online, though maybe after the event. Had the coast guard in St. Vincent & the Grenadines and Grenada been aware of and trained in using AIS, they might have been able to intercept the boat in time to prevent the tragedy.
This is a tool that the coastguards of all islands should use. The yachtsman who saw that something was wrong with Simplicity and investigated and the local population who told the St. Vincent police where to find the escapees acted promptly and well. As a result, the St. Vincent police were able to arrest them quickly.
The escape of these three men from Grenada’s Grand Anse police custody is more concerning. The three yacht hijackings that I know of in Grenada spanning over 50 years were all carried out by escaped prisoners. Plus, at around the same time as the recent tragedy, a man charged with murder escaped from police custody in Grenville, Grenada, and, as I write this, is still at large. I listened with interest to part of the police press conference on this matter and heard a lot about safe and sufficient protocols. What I would like to have heard is someone accepting responsibility for what were two major failures, and an assurance that such a thing would not happen again. I know many Grenadians share my view.
When something like this happens, it naturally puts the whole community on edge, with a tendency to make people think they are in more immediate danger than the facts warrant. Since I arrived in Grenada in 1969, cruising in the Caribbean has been generally safe. I base this on the number of yachts I see sailing up and down and the number of incidents that come to my attention. With a murder rate of four per hundred thousand, less than the U.S. and far less than many other Caribbean nations, Grenada is relatively safe.
Overall in the Caribbean there are many bareboat charter companies, and thousands of cruising boats. The number of these grows annually, with a slight reduction during the Covid pandemic, and now a rebound. Hundreds of boats move up and down and anchor every day without problems. This is the reality against which to balance this recent disaster.
So much for the headline news. Now I am going to change tacks and write about security issues that are fortunately more mundane than murder, but do affect us every day.
The difference between risk perception and actual risk is interesting and has changed over time. Fifty years ago, there was no internet, overseas phone calls were prohibitively expensive, and we relied on the bush telegraph, which worked well for events in the immediate vicinity, less well for distant events, and not at all for a minor infraction such as a fuel line being stolen from a dinghy.
Enter the Caribbean Safety and Security net (CSSN,) which started around 1996 and became a household name when it got a website around 2007. Not too long after that social media became popular and Facebook cruising sites added to the available information.
Nowadays, every cruiser in Grenada can read about unlocked flip-flops or flashlights being stolen from dinghies anywhere in the Caribbean. This information is good, in that it provides a view of infractions and problems all over the Caribbean. But knowing all the bad things that are happening, however far away and however small, without them being balanced by a view of all thousands of people who are not having problems, tends to make one see the world as more dangerous than it is. When I have analyzed the data for an anchorage that gets a few incidents, I have always been surprised how safe cruisers have been. Nonetheless, people will post on Facebook, telling everyone to avoid the whole island because it is so dangerous.
Then there is the problem of lopsided reporting. CSSN relays complaints yachts have, so the view you get is that yachties are all wonderful people subject to injury at the hands of unscrupulous locals.
There is no corresponding site detailing the bad acts of yachties, but they happen. Some have been known to contract for work and leave without paying. I know of one who tried to blackmail a contractor under the threat of bad press. Shoplifting is so common that Island Water World in St. Lucia has had to put our Doyle cruising guides under locked glass.
Local people are not responsible for all violent deaths, either. Decades ago, five people were killed on three boats in transatlantic crew disputes. Fortunately, I never have heard of a similar occurrence before or after that fateful year. Bad actors are tiny minorities, and by and large yachts and locals interact harmoniously.
Comments on social media suggest that people expect more than they should from local law enforcement, and they get outraged too easily when they are victims of a crime that they could easily have prevented. Everyone should recognize that you do not put a purse on a towel on the beach, then swim half a mile away. If it were stolen, I would not blame the victim for the theft, but if they displayed huge outrage over it, I would think they had unrealistic expectations.
Many yachts people anchor and go to sleep with their main entrance hatch wide open so anyone could walk in at night. I did that for years with no problem, which says a lot about how safe cruising our islands is. But most people living ashore have locks and fences and often dogs. It is great that we can choose to accept the risk. But if it goes wrong, I don’t think blaming the local authorities is always appropriate.
It becomes especially unrealistic if you are anchored within easy swimming distance of the shore, as happened with a series of thefts last year in Soufriere, St. Lucia. For me, it was sailing with local people and their discomfort at the doors being wide open at night that motivated me to put in a robust alarm system – one which has not yet gone off.
Anchored boats, especially alone in distant anchorages, are extremely hard for the local police to patrol. While yachts contribute a lot to the local economy, our contributions to the governments are relatively meager. To protect us, they must have patrol boats, gas, and manpower, all of which are expensive. This is not to say there are not things the local police could do to help. CCTV cameras have been placed in both Cumberland Bay and Wallilabou. This is excellent in such anchorages where a bunch of yachts are tied up stern to the shore. However, since cameras were installed, there have been incidents in both places and no evidence from those cameras, which makes me think they have not been maintained or monitored.
While sailing in the Caribbean is relatively safe, it is, like life, not risk-free. We gain protection from being at anchor and surrounded by water. At the same time, if our isolation gets invaded, it also renders us vulnerable. This can be minimized by anchoring among other boats so that we have neighbors. We have had a few unpleasant incidents recently involving boats that were anchored alone in spots on St. Lucia’s west coast and St. Vincent’s south coast. I would be cautious about anchoring overnight alone in these places.
Although it has not yet affected our safety, I am a little concerned that the Caribbean has been receiving illegal guns and ammunition from the U.S. In the islands, every gun owner needs a permit, and the police know who owns every legal gun. In the U.S. almost anyone can buy a gun and then sell it on with minimal or no paperwork.
Consequently, there is little barrier to guns being exported to South America and the Caribbean. This is not new; illegal guns have been in St. Lucia and St. Vincent for years. They now seem to have reached Grenada. In January 2024, four separate gun incidents left one dead and several wounded ashore. The world would be much safer if all guns and gun owners were registered and responsible for their weapons. The lack of gun control in the U.S. creates problems throughout the Caribbean region.
Chris Doyle is the founder of Doyle Cruising Guides.
Read our ongoing coverage of the tragic Simplicity story here
