Writer has probably got everything wrong. Needs help

Hi. My name’s William Shaw and I’m a professional writer – but I chose to set a novel on a super yacht that gets hijacked and have probably got a lot of my marine details wrong.

I need someone kind to volunteer to read a few sections and hopefully suggest viable alternatives if I’ve embarrassed myself. There is stuff set on the bridge that relate to navigation and safety, and the are scenes set below, when the yacht’s electrical systems are disabled by a rogue ETO.

There are a hundred ways to black out a yacht that could not be reversed by anyone onboard even if they were lucky or skilled enough to find even one of them and had the parts to fix it.

It doesn’t take a “rogue ETO” so don’t try to make it like bypassing the safeties on a nuclear weapon or it will read like a comic book tale.

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Thanks…

… and any advice gratefully received.

The best advice I can offer is for you to visit a megayacht, talk to the engineers and see for yourself how systems are powered, how power is distributed, and what kind of failures would put an end to the hijacking within minutes and leave the boat adrift.

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The problem is there would be any number of handheld devices that would not go down immediately if the boat’s generators and batteries were disabled. Hell - my cellphone has a nav app that would work just fine until it went dead.
Also see any PLBs/ELTs and handheld VHFs :wink:

They won’t be doing much navigating without rudder control unless the hijackers have enough hands to crank the emergency steering for some extended period. Not to mention enough spare handheld batteries to keep talking until the CG shows up.

The only way I could see it happening is if the entire crew was part of the plan. Also, I doubt the ETO would be of much use anyway since most of them are just IT and AV guys in real life and probably couldn’t help much with the engineering stuff.

What is the point of hijacking a yacht anyway? If it’s a big boat and the boss is onboard he probably has his security guys onboard as well and they aren’t going to take kindly to a mutiny.

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Believe me. I’ve been there. I’ve had to think of LOTs of reasons why the surviving crew and small number of passengers can’t get hold of sat phones, EPRIB stuff etc. But that’s half the fun of it.

There are no passengers on those yachts, they are “guests” and when they don’t phone home or post their latest selfies someone ashore is going to be calling out the dogs to find them and it’s hard to hide a large yacht.

write the story about the Maltese flagged vessel ( Arctic Sea, media reports now are different than at the time) that got hijacked somewhere between a Russian port and?
Israel tipped of the Russians.
Possibly had nukes on board
Possibly Russians boarded it in the English channel, and diverted it out to sea to meet another vessel where they unloaded something they didnt want to talk about then the ship sailed to Malta into news blackout, was all kept very quiet.
I was alongside in Malta at the time