March 10 & 11
Port Blair departure.

If we haven't said enough positive things about Ravi - let us state it again: a wonderful human being, humble, completely honest, unbelievably helpful and just so easy to work with. Rascal needed 400 litres of fuel, Dreamcatcher 250. We gave the money to Ravi to purchase the fuel and deliver to the docks the next morning. He did so and arrived with 44 gallon drums and jugs on the back of an auto-rickshaw, and we all helped Rascal to get into the inner harbour, tie up and start taking on fuel. About 15 minutes later, 3 uniformed Customs officers arrived and made a big nasty scene about us breaking the law and illegally exporting fuel. Dreamcatcher's name was on the receipt so Henry was given a particularly hard time. They seemed to be on an absolute witch hunt and were unbelievably rude and belligerent. By now a crowd had drawn to see we foreigners being berated. They cut off the fuel supply to Rascal, impounded the remaining fuel and told us to report to the Customs office for punishment. We waited, fretting, for ages and then Gavin, Henry and GT spent 2 hours discussing this terrible crime of "illegal export" that we had committed, amidst ongoing threats of arrest, jail and impounding of vessels. It was unnerving and we were in a lose-lose situation. There is apparently a "process" for taking on more than about 5 litres (hand carry) of fuel, which is ridiculous as Ravi had pointed out, every boat leaving the Andamans had to re-fuel to get anywhere, the closest land being 400 miles away in any direction. We went to-ing and fro-ing with the customs officials, were made to write statements of confession and apology and put in very compromised positions. Next, they came after Ravi, accusing him of being an illegal supplier, also with a threat of jail. The bottom line is that they were highly corrupt jerks who were on a witch-hunt and if they couldn't convict us, they wanted Ravi. They also tried to accuse us of currency fraud, claiming we had paid for the fuel in US dollars (it is illegal to bring in foreign currency or Rupees purchased overseas to the Andamans).... which we hadn't and were able to produce all the local ATM chits for the rupees we had used to purchase the fuel. Our final play to the officials was to invoke our respective embassies: Australia, Singapore, Britain and the USA. That slowed them down. We had a highly stressful, awful day. Customs finally cleared the fuel for release at sunset, after extracting a "fine" from Ravi (read, bribe) and we retired, stressed out, to a final Andaman dinner at the Emerald hotel and an agreement to do the re-fuelling in the morning via the laborious jerry-can approach as we did not wish to bring the boats alongside the dock again, in case Customs were tempted to impound them. We later found out that a fellow called Vijay, who purports to provide a similar service to Ravi, had called Customs and reported the fuelling. Vijay does not speak good English and thus uses an agent to help clear in yachts, much to their surprise when they get a big bill on departure. Vijay is a "snake in the grass" and to be avoided. All other officials : Immigration, Port Captain and Coast Guard were fine - it was Customs who were highly corrupt and we will be taking the matter further.

It took several hours to re-fuel the following day, sharing jerry-cans between the two boats and Smystery helping with their dinghy. We all got away early afternoon, on a fine breeze, bound for the Similan Island group in Thailand.
Before we left we did a whip-round and paid for Ravi's fine.
Pic shows re-fuelling Rascal from jerry cans, at the inner Port Blair harbour