MAN SURVIVES PIRATES’ RAID
A NORTH Queensland man has told of his terrifying encounter with Indonesian pirates.
Cannonvale man Tadeusz Nowicki has revealed how pirates violently robbed him in waters off the coast of Sumatra.
It was supposed to be a simple trip to sail his yacht home to Australia, but in the middle of the night 10 men armed with guns jumped aboard his vessel. They stole everything: GPS, phone, cash, generators, laptops, emergency food, dinghy, even his steering wheel.
“Before midnight, a fishing boat with 10 men arrived at my boat,” Mr Nowicki, 70, said.
“For 20 minutes, maybe more, I tried to not allow them to enter my boat. They had ropes that they tied in knots and tried to throw around my head and legs.
“Two people were very, very violent; they looked like they were professional murderers. They warned me, ‘If you will not do what we want, we will kill you’. Then I was more quiet and resigned; I was thinking I would like to survive this situation.”
Over the course of five hours, under the cover of darkness, the pirates would temporarily leave on their boat to unload before returning back to steal more from the yacht.
“At the end when they left the boat, one man came to me and said ‘Sorry’,” Nowicki said.
After the robbery, Nowicki was scared the pirates would return and felt he needed to leave the area and sail into the open sea, towards Java.
“I escaped into the fog and then went around into the open sea because I fear that they will come back,” he said.
For two days at sea, he survived by drinking rainwater he caught and eating coconut oil and raw eggs he had stored on his boat.
“I was afraid to stop and come to any other vessel,” he said. “I found a river and a village, when I enter I see in big letters in Indonesian police station and put the anchor down.” Nowicki was rescued about 24 hours later after International Maritime Organisation picked up an activated emergency beacon and notified the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, which notified water police.
Mr Nowicki said he felt huge relief landing on the tarmac in Melbourne, before going to two weeks of hotel quarantine and returning to his home.
Weeks on, he said the experience had had a profound impact on his life.
“The most stressful factors in my life are diminished,” he said.