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A simple trick to help minimising the impact of a robbery



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What is the issue?
Robberies are rare aboard vessels but they can happen. If you are held up, a lot more than your property could be at risk.

Why address this?
Having a plan in difficult or dangerous situations, always helps.

How to address this?
Having a sacrificial cash box that is easily found, or handed over in a crisis, but contains very little of real value, can be a useful tradeable. If it appears to have an oversized value, you could use it to defuse a tense moment and buy a bit of time.

A standard lock and key cash box can look the part
Photo: CC0

Small lock and key cashboxes can be picked up from most office suppliers for very little. Carefully print the ship's name on it and label it cashbox with a '£' or '$' symbol to make it look like the ship's stow. Place jn it a few solid rolls of US single dollar bills, that look more valuable than they are, and store all your excess currencies here that you have collected on your travels, which have little value but look substantive. Likewise, use this as a repository for any out of date credit cards.

The hope is, that if the boat is broken into, the thieves will come upon this and then quickly depart with what appears to be the vessel's primary score. It should be much later that they discover that the foreign denominations are of little value and the credit cards are out of date. Likewise, if you stumble upon a thief or are caught in a hold-up situation it gives you something substantive that you can visibly hand over quickly and without issue, so it could provide the perfect excuse to diffuse a tense situation and provide a tool to allow you to extricate yourself.

This a play, but only 'one play' that may not work in a hold-up situation. Please do not rely on this single play to save you in a situation of a physical threat Experience, as it is not good enough on its own.

With thanks to:
Michael Harpur, Yacht Obsession.
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