It was a little fishing boat, packed with boxes which they started lugging aboard.
Suddenly my suspicions came flooding back - what was in those boxes? Could it be guns? Explosives?
Jeez, was that what this was all about? Had Luna Rossa been selected as the most souped up gun-running blockade breaking speed boat on the planet? Not that it wasn’t pretty good at that. The netting between the two hulls could be used to rope down a lot of those boxes, and there was nothing on water that could catch us.
And they’d be ducking away at the sight of even the slightest whiff of another boat on the horizon.
Oh my god! Had Buff’s deep sea intuition guessed the true story straight away - these truly were the pirates of the Med, genuine gun toting bandits! I had to get away and on land as quickly as possible.
My face must have given me away - or the way I backed away to the furthest corner of the leeward hull - but Rachel came over.
“Relax, Buff” she said. “Do you really still not trust us? You are funny.”
Me? Well I do tell a good joke.
“Come and see for yourself.”
I followed her, wondering how she looked so cool and pretty after a day at sea on a monstrous yacht in the baking heat of day.
“Look” she said, as Doha strapped down some more boxes. “Medicines, bandages, baby food, nothing nasty.”
“And this” said Doha. It was just another box to me.
“We’d ordered a whole range of surgical components for the catheterization theatre at European Gaza Hospital. It was out of action for several months... and that was before the Israeli's starting bombing and destroying the hospitals... before they began to run out of medicines...”
Jeez, women. All of a sudden she was crying, and Rachel sniffing too, comforting Doha.
There was a silence, broken by sniffs and the slap of waves against the hulls, and I wanted to be somewhere else.
“No more; never again” said Doha, making cutting motions with her hand. She stood up and marched to the little fishing boat, or at least as well as one could over netting.
“Her sister - Ali’s other sister - died when the machine broke” said Rachel, softly. “I was visiting Gaza with a Code Pink delegation. It broke my heart; it opened my eyes. So we take these medicines to break the blockade, to remind the world that this is wrong. These are war crimes.”
I don’t get politics but I didn’t want to see Rachel cry again. So when the fishing boat left I stayed on-board and we headed off again, flying faster than the wind, to do a good deed.
To be continued....
(or you can read the earlier version of part 11 here)
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