Maputo to Pomene by sea…there and back

Maputo to Pomene by sea…there and back

Yeboooo, we managed to get in a cool job from a secret organisation, late last year, to take a huge landing craft Maputo to Pomene…there and back.

The secrecy of the mission still is of international importance, so all we can do is show and narrate the trip to you, with this short movie.

The Sardine Charters and Chandling have been pulling off clandestine missions like this aplenty over the last few decades, in Mozambique and around Southern Africa. We put together highly trained and disciplined crews to take all sorts of crazy missions, involving long duration at sea, and being flung into hard-core survival threatening conditions, as we were on our return trip.

Click here to read all about that tragic evening…40 lives lost in Maputo, many of them drowned at sea. We did what we could to help, but with an exhausted crew and pitch darkness to work in, it wasn’t much.

But as you can see from the video, most of it is just plain sailing at full speed alongside huge 4 to 5 metre swells, often times breaking on our outside, we had to weave our way through sandbanks and huge waves. The twin turbo, duo prop Volvo Pentas gave us 660 hp to throw the 16.5m semi-displacement aluminium hull around. It’s as maneuvrable as a ski-boat and the acceleration is immense, to the point of being dangerous. The landing craft can take 90 people with their equipment.

For more information on The Sardine Charters and Chandling operations and availability, pls contact Sean on umzimkulu@gmail.com or call +27 79 326 9671, or click here.