The murder case

Pedregal was a good place to do laundry, touring inland and to provision inexpensively, but I felt that our safety was threaten due to the piracy stories we heard, one of those, the most recent and the creepiest was the murder case.

Father, son from Denmark and daughter in law from Panama, living in a sailboat for quite sometime, anchored close to the town for a little longer than 3 months, the son is shot in the back, the wife (daughter in law) hit on the head and the father killed with a shot in the leg. Who did it? It’s still a mystery. I have heard three versions, theirs and the one of the locals. Their story is that the attackers were 5 men who came to steal. They took a laptop computer and nothing else. The locals theory: The son killed the father as a result of a dispute or they were involved in some dark business and the killing was a retaliation or a warning. It seems as if the shot to the father was not meant to be a shot to kill, because it was to the leg, but he didn’t get fast enough medical attention… In any case, there was a murder and it was here.

The day we left, we were caught in a heavy down pore that forced us to anchor for the night. I was awaken by the VHF radio around 1 AM, someone whistles, he is calling someone else. 1001 thoughts went through my head; it’s a code!. Ganymede was right behind us, but too far away to feel that we were safe by number....I realized the story had left me extremely paranoid. Although I tried really hard to disregard the radio I couldn’t and I had to go outside the boat to make sure no one else was around.. surprise! There was a little fishing boat, a “panga”, maybe 100 feet away from us, just floating. I let Matt know about them and I went to bed hoping that they were just plain, good old fishermen but at the same time, I run a mental inventory of all our weapons of defense. Matt on the other hand, remained on watch. He would get up at different intervals to make sure they were keeping their distance.

The morning came and they were gone! I concluded: they were plain, old fishermen and/or we were surrounded by forceful guardian angels. Later that morning we were blessed by the approach of a local man in his boat who came with a bag full of fruits and a stock of bananas that currently hangs on the back of Endurance. His name was Bolivar Camacho, known as Camacho. He chatted with us for a while, invited us to his farm near by and gave us his version of the murder case.