Unplugging….headed to Chagos!

Well…it has been 2 months in the making to get our mooring permit to enter Britain Indian Ocean Territories waters (BIOT for short or aka Chagos) but we finally received permission to “transit” there and stay up to 28 days….and we are so excited!!!!

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Chagos has been a place Trevor and I wanted to see for many reasons… but by far the most inticing …there are no tourist or facilities here and the only way to come here is by boat….so very few people get to visit this place. Hence, we are not “visiting as tourists” but rather we are “transiting” the Indian Ocean and there for seeking shelter and waiting for a proper weather window to continue on our passage through the Indian Ocean to another destination….Mauritius in our case.

In total, the passage from the Maldives to Chagos and then the passage to Mauritius, the amount of time we will be without “civilization” could be as long as 6 weeks! …..it is longer than our Pacific Ocean crossing which was a total of 23 days. Thus our preparation to be self-sufficient must be well thought out and well planned…believe me…we will be eating a lot of canned foods (LOL)!

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We love the idea of the isolation, though I am sure there will be other vessels so our social “graces” can still be exercised…. pristine beaches, sea-life galore, and just exploring uninhabited islands sounds just what the souls needs (personally I am looking forward to hermit crab races in the sand!). However there is some drama behind these magical wonders…

Diego Garcia

Chagos currently has a UK-US defense facility that “contributes significantly to global security” according to BIOT website. Outside of the US, the main island of Diego Garcia is the world’s largest military base.

However there is controversy as to how ethically the British obtained these lands. According to wikipedia: Chagos was home to the Chagossians, a Bourbonnais Creole-speaking people, for more than a century and a half until… November 1965, the UK purchased the entire Chagos Archipelago from the then self-governing colony of Mauritius for £3 million to create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)….. the United Kingdom evicted the Chagossian people between 1967 and 1973 to allow the United States to build a military base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos Islands. Since 1971, only the atoll of Diego Garcia is inhabited, and only by military and civilian contracted personnel…. However, on 25 February 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that placing the Archipelago under British administration in 1965 was not based upon the free expression of the inhabitants and that it thus advised that the United Kingdom should relinquish the archipelago, including the strategic United States military base, for the establishment of which approximately 1,500 inhabitants had been deported [to the island of Mauritius].

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Below is 2004 video I found on another cruisers blog while doing initial research on Chagos….(sorry I can’t remember which blog). Possibly like many others, Trevor and I had no idea of this struggle and since our viewing of this video, we were interested in learning more about it. After we heard about the ICJ ruling earlier this year….we immediately wanted to go to Mauritius as well…not sure what we will find but it would be interesting to see what the feeling is in the year the ICJ ruled in the Chagossian peoples favor. It is unlikely, in our opinion, that the UK will relinquish their “lease” with the US to operate our bases on Diego Garcia, and give back the land. Trevor points out that in this age of environmentalism, there is an argument to keep Chagos as a Marine Protected Area (MPA). It is uncertain, in any case, what will become of the Chagossian people and their lands….we will be sure listening for updates and will be asking around in Mauritius when we arrive there.

Mooring permit

Here is the process we went through to ascertain permission to moor/anchor in BIOT waters. Laws are changing all the time so this may not be current for those to follow. However, at least the below will give an idea as to what to expect form the BIOT administration and what worked for us. The below documents are what we provided to them…..

See below a link to their website.

Home

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Application

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Wreck recovery, clean up and removal requirement

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Medical evacuation requirement

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BIOT’s requirement for “100,000 med-evac” was harder to clarify with BIOT. They returned our application asking us to clarify how a “membership” provided medical evacuation and that they required “medical insurance”. Now we are confused…did they want us to have Medical Insurance and/or medical evacuation? To us, medical insurance is different than medical evacuation and is really to pay for medical expense one would incur. We did find DAN Trip Insurance at a reasonable rate to cover both Medical evacuation AND Medical expenses. However, before we pulled the trigger and purchased the Trip Insurance, I provided the below documents to “justify” why we initially gave them our DAN membership as fulling their requirements.

Their response was the DAN membership was ok and we didn’t need additional “medical insurance” to cover medical expenses. Thank goodness….

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Payment

We have not had to do an international transfer with our bank until now so we were a little concerned about the process. Because we are not in the US and don’t have a US phone number to verify ourselves…the process for OUR bank to set up an international recipient took a very long time…just over a week. We could of set up the BIOT as a recipient earlier but didn’t….it just took up more time to wait for them to receive the funds.

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The permit

We originally placed the date of arrival in BIOT water for May 4th but due to a delyaed departure from the Maldives, we asked them to ammend our permit…luckily just a few days before it was active.

Their policy on amendments are: If your date of arrival is affected by the weather or other unavoidable factors and you wish to amend the dates on your permit, you should bring this to our attention either before you arrive in the Territory or before the date listed on the permit, whichever is first. Permits cannot be amended after they have become active.

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After all that….we are allowed to visit Chagos but there are many rules that are attached with said permit. They do not mess around….we hear from past cruisers that a helicopter has flown above the “allowed anchorages” and hails cruisers on VHF ch 16 to report vessel names and crews on board. It will be interesting to see how they police us and how often….. note to self:

• Fires are permitted (but not encouraged) ashore must only be at a designated fire pit (lat/long coordinates are provided to us)
• Fishing by rod/hand line is permitted but no more than 3 days worth of fish for personal consumption is allowed
• No spear fishing
• No drones
• No scuba diving
• No fresh food ashore
• No camping on land over night
• 4 separate arrival /departure reporting to the Visiting Vessel Control Officer (VVCO)

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Other than that we are excited to move off the “grid”. We don’t know how long we will ACTUALLY stay in Chagos…as weather will dictate when we leave there to head into the southern India Ocean (the passage I am not looking forward to)…to either Rodriguez or Mauritius…..either way,we will be in touch as soon as we are back “plugged in”.