Ambushed on a visit to good friends

I was telling about a horrible shock that happened while visiting friends, one of the biggest surprises of my life, and one that most of us wouldn't imagine could happen in a modern democracy like Britain, not outside television, anyway.

Of course, coping with extraordinary events is part of a mariner's life at sea. But an ambush?

To be living a normal life, visiting friends, and then to be ambushed, and to be imprisoned, and not to know freedom again for years and years?

It was an astounding drama that began with that visit to really good friends, people who had helped get Spirit of Pentax ready for my singlehanded circumnavigation many years earlier.

Overly dramatic?

Commenting on yesterday's blog, Jan from Glasgow questions whether I am being over-dramatic using the term ambush for a raid by Customs. The then customs department, I should say.

 use the term ambush because that’s precisely what it was. I had just stepped inside the home of great friends - me, my fiancée, and my young daughter.

Hardly had the front door closed than the uproar of a stampede followed. Cars pulled into the driveway, my car was wedged in fore and aft, and a whole gang of men began racing round the house, encircling it.

hey decided, perhaps during some Friday night pub session, that the drugs must have come from Sunday yachtsmen who collected the cargos in the Caribbean and sailed them up to Britain.

One at the front door came in demanding to be told which was me. And I was arrested immediately for smuggling.

Unpleasant shocks

Many unpleasant shocks have happened to me at sea. But here on land, close to the city of Portsmouth, an ambush?

A Brit public servant arresting me? And for the unlikeliest of charges, of smuggling drugs? When, where? How?

They’d explain at headquarters. I was bundled into a car and raced off to London … Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventuring book, Sailing to Purgatory, at http://sailingtopurgatory.com/index.php/feeds/420-ambushed-on-a-visit-to-good-friends