Pirates on the loose in Ba Area
Houseboat and yacht residents in the San Francisco Bay have sounded off about incidents of piracy skyrocketing by marauders pillaging and plundering from their watercrafts — and even stealing entire boats as Bay Area faces a crime crisis.
“The open shoreline of the [Oakland-Alameda] Estuary is littered with sunken wrecks and derelict, end-of-life vessels, and crime has risen to truly intolerable levels,” former harbormaster Brock de Lappe said during a San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission enforcement meeting, according to a Monday Fox News Digital report.
“Multiple vessels have been stolen and ransacked. Victims have had to resort to personally confronting the criminals to recover their property without the benefit of police support. Is this appropriate activity for a 79-yearold senior?”
One resident told the outlet she kayaked over to assist a man who was calling for help Tuesday night. “They’re yelling, ‘Help me, please, please. Anybody help me.’ And I go out there in my kayak with a headlamp, and there is a sailboat drifting down the estuary, and with my kayak I towed it to shore,” said the woman, who did not reveal her name because she was afraid of retaliation.
‘Panicked & terrified’
The sailor in need was a “panicked and terrified young man” who said pirates had cut his line during a confrontation.
“If there had been any wind at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to go out there and rescue this young man who had no motor and no ability to sail that boat,” she reportedly said.
The troubling piracy trend had struck the Alameda Community Sailing Center, where four of their safety boats, which are worth between $25,000 and $35,000 each, had been stolen or destroyed, Fox Business reported Saturday.
“We cannot run our program without these boats,” owner Kame Richards reportedly wrote in a letter to the municipal commission.
“The response we received from APD [Alameda Police Department] was that they could do nothing, and a warning not to approach the perpetrators if we located our boats,” Richards added, claiming that it took 35 hours to get a police report from the cops.
“We called them right after it happened, and they said, ‘Wait, we’ll send an officer.’ It’s dinner time, and there’s still no officer . . . . Then they said they can’t help us, and their best advice is to find the boats but don’t approach the perpetrators,” Richards’ letter stated.
“We declined to heed that advice . . . We were able to retrieve all of our boats, and another RIB [rigid inflatable boat] that was stolen from the Golden Gate Yacht Club.
“How many replacements of these boats will our insurance company pay for before they drop us? We cannot continue our programs without the RIBs and cannot continue without insurance.”
The episodes were downplayed by police in an interview with Fox News Digital last week.
“Crime is both the perception of crime and the actual presence of crime,” Nishant Joshi, Chief of Alameda PD, said. “And I say that because although, of the total incidents that are generated in the city of Alameda, less than 1 percent of those are attributed to all of our marinas.”
Joshi added police were addressing the piracy complaints with an “increase” of patrols and efforts to “educate” the sea-faring community.
Some residents believe the influx of crime in the Oakland Estuary, the channel that separates Oakland from the suburban island community of Alameda, is coming from homeless residents in Oakland. One person voiced their suspicions last month after noticing more small boats tied up around a homeless camp in the city’s Union Point Park. Oakland, a city of 433,000, is now home to more than 9,700 homeless people, a 22% increase since before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to nonprofit EveryOne Home.