Don’t you hate it when you can’t sleep so you put on your flip-flops to walk outside the house of your ship and when you do get outside and take a look around, your ship is surrounded by Venezuelan secret police and some type of armed army-types all dressed in black?

What?   Never had that happen to you?  Why does all the weird stuff happen to me?  Well, my momma has a librarian friend who uses snausages to ease the pain in her aching feet.  That is weird!!  But that is of her own design whereas this is a weird event that happens to me.  If you have been around for awhile, you know these things happen to me all the time.

I don’t know what you would do if you saw your ship about to be boarded by hostile armed forces from a foreign country not totally friendly with the United States of America but let me tell you what I did.  While the rest of the crew were biting their nails and running around aimlessly I vaulted over the rail –  doing a triple flip in the air for no other reason than because it looked awesome – landed on the dock and immediately took out the closet guard with a ninja kick to the head.  He dropped unconscious to the ground and I grabbed his automatic weapon.  Now that I was armed, this fight was over.

I gunned down half of the thirty soldiers with one hand while updating my Facebook status with the other.  Actually, the only reason the fight took as long as it did is because the lousy 2G data services in Maracaibo slowed down my internet connection.  With half of the enemy already down I made a quick dash into the city and grabbed an order of ribs from El Gaucho.  By the time I had polished them off and got back to the port the Secret Police were just getting reorganized.

To make things fair I fought the rest of them barehanded.  I did sprain my little pinky, but other than that I came through unscathed.  Unfortunately, at just that time reinforcements showed up forcing me to dive into the water to escape a hail of gunfire (If you have been to Maracaibo, you know you only dive into that water if somebody is shooting at you.)  I was then able to swim around to the offshore side of the ship, use my Spiderman-like skills to climb aboard and head down to the galley for some ice cream.  The crew was thankful for the fact that I took charge of the situation and we all got a great night’s sleep.

The End.

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Blog music for the night is Fortunate Sun by Creedence Clearwater Revival.  I don’t know about you but this blog got CCR going in my brain.

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Ok.  That is not what happened.  It would have happened that way but I was sensitive to the fact that we were trying to keep from starting an international incident.  It is true that I went out on deck and there were Secret Police and guys dressed all in black with guns demanding that the gangway be let down and they be let aboard.  This was about 2100 (9pm.)

The Captain had been summoned to court that day and although he had returned to the ship nobody had as of yet the opportunity to talk to him about how things went.  This was our seventh day in Maracaibo and in my opinion the mood was beginning to shift from amusement and very little concern to some irritability and some consternation.  The day before, quite a few crewmembers went to shore to visit the mall and while they were out our attorneys, who I didn’t know we had till that point, came to the ship.  I have no idea what they told the Captain, but he immediately texted everybody and ordered them back to the ship.  Things were obviously taking a turn for the worse and that made us all curious as to what happened to the Captain that day in court.

I never found out because the Captain was taken to jail before I ever got to talk to him.  I take some exception to the press releases I have read that praise the Venezuelan authorities for how professionally they handled everything, how this was a routine investigation and everything was done by the book.

This isn’t true.   The Venezuelan authorities that seemed to be in charge over the last week of our detainment were great people.  They were nice and courteous to me and the crew, even when they had to search our ship time and again.  The Captain claims to have been treated well when he was detained and I will have to take him at his word.  I met the prosecutors who were handling our case and they seemed like nice people as well.

I am not talking about any of those people right now.  I don’t know what organization was in charge at the end but as I have shared you with you, there were many organizations involved in the debacle.  They were not all pleasant.  They were not all professional.  This was not a routine investigation and it was not handled properly.  Sorry to sound a little bitter about that but I think it is unjust in the extreme to tell my family that they were worried for 17 days because of a normal routine investigation in Maracaibo.  I have been involved in many routine customs inspections and none of them ended in me having a warrant issued for my arrest for arms trafficking.

Thanks for letting me vent.

I have to say my heart was beating pretty quickly when I saw all these people on the dock.  One of the vehicles was a paddy wagon and several of the “police” had handcuffs.  What were we supposed to think but we were going to jail?

Especially after the Captain spoke to the guys and then informed the crew that we were going to jail.

This is when things went crazy all over the internet including the stories about yours truly.  While I wasn’t the only one, I will readily admit that I called everybody I could think of to tell them that we were going to jail.  I caught a little flack for the story spreading like wildfire.  Feel free to judge me after somebody threatens to drag you off in handcuffs to a Venezuelan jail at midnight.

Most of this blog was the pretend story of that night.  Tomorrow, you get the real story!  Stay tuned for, “I’ll volunteer to go to jail as long as I can bring my Kindle, some toilet paper and my Pooh necklace.”

Want a poem?  Here you go!

I went outside to get some air

And there were guys with guns

My exciting time in Maracaibo

Wasn’t turning out to be much fun

I frantically called my momma

To tell her I was going to jail

She said that I was out of luck

Because no one could afford my bail

I crawled under my Sponge Bob blanket

Might even have sucked my thumb

I didn’t want to get ass raped in prison

By a homeless Venezuelan bum