Gun pulled and fired at Macaronis

Words by Jed Smith

A plain clothes police officer has stormed the Australian-owned surf charter, the Huey, in Indonesia and fired a shot over the head of a guest.

“I said to everyone, ‘go downstairs, get off the deck so you’re not intimidated by them (the local Indonesians),’” Steve Sewell, captain of the Huey, told Stab. “The guests went down to the TV room to watch some tele and ol’ Freddo (guest, Fred Annesley) was up on the deck and then bang! There was a bloody loud bang and I’ve jumped up and run out the back. The guy in the red shirt, he’s pulled a gun and let it off!”

It is the latest in a series of incidents following a decision five years ago by local villagers to implement a controversial mooring system, which prevents all but two surf charters from dropping anchor at the wave, thereby handing control of the wave to the land camp. Though, according to Sewell, this is definitely an escalation. “There’s been run-ins, but nothing to this extent,” he says.

An unnamed source from the Macaroni camp told The Australian Newspaper, that Sewell enraged the official by ‘abusing’ him. “You didn’t hear that part of the story, did you?” the source said. “He mouthed off at a police officer.”

Sewell denies this. “I offered them some money, as you do,” he told Stab. “If there’s two boats there, as long as there is a third or fourth boat there they don’t mind if you hang around there for a few hours or the rest of the day. But the head honcho (of the camp) has been back in the camp for a few weeks and they weren’t keen on us hanging around, so I said, okay, we’ll head off in an hour, and they came back with all their books and permits and I said, I don’t acknowledge your permits, I don’t think they’re legal, they’re based on a flimsy by-law, we’ll leave when we’re ready. They said, you can leave now, and I said, nah. They left and came back a third time with a policeman who wasn’t in uniform. I didn’t know who it was.”

Sewell also believes the officer in question is likely to be the same man who climbed aboard the Indies Trader III and threatened the crew with a machete two weeks ago.

“The guy is a cowboy,” says Sewell. “The reason he pulled the gun was to intimidate us and get our attention, and that worked but it’s not a good look at all.”