The smugglers’ main tactic to avoid detection was to “play dead”: engines cut, lights off, silently drifting past customs patrols in the darkness… They had to remain unnoticed to avoid detection as soon as they perceived the slightest glimmer of light from a boat or the faintest engine sound. The ten-horsepower engine used on the kwassa-kwassa was much quieter than the twin hundred-horsepower engines of the customs patrol boat. Stil, despite the difference in volume, Samy could pick up the faint sound of the engine long before the smugglers suspected the customs were near, even before the appearance of the small dot representign the kwassa-kwassa on the radar screen.
You had to be sitting next to Samy on the speedboat, tearing through the lagoon in the dead of night , to see it happen, his sudden raised hand, pointing the direction to follow, having just detected a hidden boat. Minutes later, Samy would announce that the boat had stopped, the engine noise had vanished. Then it was the customs officers’ turn to vanish into the night. If the boat had stopped, it meant the smugglers had either heard the patrol or seen its lights. The only thing to do was disappear : kill the lights, cut the engine, stay silent, and wait for the smugglers to move again. The smugglers were wary, and sometimes the wait dragged on for ages. When the boat finally restarted, it often turned in a different direction, but Samy was never wrong. This cat-and-mouse game of stop-and-go rarely lasted long, no small boat could outrun the fastest patrol boat of the island. Once Samy had detected a kwassa-kwassa, escape was no longer an option, it was only a matter of time.
Another tactic used by smugglers was to steer toward shallow waters at low tide. The advantage of flat-bottomed boats was their capacity to pass nearly anywhere. The smugglers knew most other boats couldn’t follow them because of their draft. But they hadn’t counted on Samy and Allan , who could push full throttle and stop just in time, thanks to their highly developped senses, especially their ability to pintpoint the location of shallow reefs.
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