Phyllis

Phyllis was one of the four American hostages shot dead in the early hours of the 23rd February on board the pirated US yacht Quest that had been attacked by Somali pirates at dusk.on the 18th Feb in the middle of the Indian Ocean while sailing alone from Mumbai to Salalah, Oman. The other hostages were Bob, who had circumnavigated with Phyllis in their 36ft yacht on the previous Blue Water Rally, and the yacht’s owner/skipper and his wife, Scott and Jean. At the time the fatal shootings happened, Quest was surrounded by four US warships including a carrier and a battle cruiser and negotiations had been going on to free the four hostages for some days but in the end, a panic shooting between the pirates led to the warships closing in for action, panicking the pirates still further into shooting their captives. I can’t begin to imagine how awful those few days must have been.
I didn’t really know the owner and his wife as they had only joined the rally in Thailand at Christmas and we have been mostly at sea since then in different ports at different times. (The owner was a very determined character by all accounts and had decided to sail direct and alone from Mumbai to Salalah against all the advice). I knew Bob (who was very quiet) slightly better as he had been on various boats with the Rally fleet for some months and we met in Fiji. Phyllis however had been with the Rally since the beginning in Gibraltar, October 2009.
I first met her in Panama last year and she made quite an impression. She was very outgoing and chatty from the start with a strong American accent and a way of talking from the side of her mouth with her teeth clenched tight. She looked and sounded like one of those gutsy little female characters you see in old American movies who are propped up against the bar or looking after the menfolk on the ranch and always running the whole goddam show. She also reminded me a little of Liza Minnelli I think.
After circumnavigating with Bob in 2007-09, she wanted to do the whole thing again, this time sailing as crew on other yachts. She had sailed on several in the Rally for a few weeks or months before she joined Quest and I remember thinking that she and Bob would have felt very much at home with their own countrymen for the final legs of the trip across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea into the Med. We were always turning to her for her experiences from “the last time around”. She told me that the toughest part of the trip for her last time was the Pirate Alley aka the Gulf of Aden or GOA. Second time around, GOA had become less dangerous and Pirate Alley is now Pirate Pond aka the Indian Ocean. Unbelievable.
She was certainly a tough cookie. In October, she had hired a scooter in Kupang, Indonesia along with other crews and set off to explore the island. She came a cropper on the terrible roads and really scraped herself along one side when she hit the ground…..the scars were still very visible just a few weeks ago in Cochin which is when we last spoke. We hadn’t expected her to turn up in Cochin either as she had developed an extremely nasty corneal ulcer while in Sri Lanka which could have cost her an eye. The advice then had been for her to go back to the States immediately for proper treatment but she typically chose to grin and bear it and carry on with the Rally.
I think in a way that Phyllis belonged to the Rally and maybe embodied the spirit of the Rally too. She will be missed very much by everyone.
I just can’t believe that she’s gone.