Stranded on the Mekong

A Similar Craft to Mine

Late afternoon there was a crunching screech and a sudden lurching halt to our forward momentum. The fully laden 40m long steel cargo vessel had grounded on a sandbank. We were becoming even more stuck because the fast-flowing Mekong was embedding us further into the alluvial gravel.

The skipper revved the engine and thrust the gears into forward and then rapidly into reverse to get us re-floated but to no avail. We had driven the bow deep into the shingle.

Our captain had boasted in pidgin English the previous evening that he knew every sandbank on the river. Well, here was one he certainly would get to know intimately.

All evening, he continued to rev the engines and throw the gears to release us. They brought a spectacularly bright searchlight into service to help illuminate proceedings, but at around nine the crew called it a day.

At 7 am the engines started up for another round of futile effort. Around 8.30 a passing boat, smaller than ours, with a Lao family ranging from Grandma to toddlers on board, was persuaded to stop and help.

With this vessel’s assistance, four crew members got a line ashore, scrambling comically up a sheer 4m high sandbank and hammered in a spike with a sledgehammer.

Pretty soon, they decided the stake would not hold, and they needed to cross the extensive river beach to find somewhere to get a better purchase.

This would never work as they had attached a heavy-duty hawser to the initial rope and there was no way the four of them could drag this weight across the sand.

I went back to my cabin for a while and on my return noticed that there were only two men on the sand, seemingly just lying there asleep. The other two had disappeared.

By the time I had returned to the bow from the messroom, I was astonished to see thirty-eight villagers (I counted them) ranging from young kids to fit young men, older chaps, grannies and a couple of saffron-clad monks marching across the sand.

The onshore crew organised the crowd to fall in line and pull the steel hawser a hundred metres or more to the edge of the sand and loop it around a hefty-looking palm tree.

Back on board, the crew fired up the windlass, powered by an auxiliary engine on the bow, and attempted to haul us off. Miraculously, this finally worked after a while and we were floating again. The trials and tribulations of negotiating the Mekong in the dry season!