I had been alone on deck when I first saw the wreck. Ellen had been sleeping in the stern-cabin’s king-sized bed, and Thessy had been snoring in one of the clients’ forward cabins. It was only when we were dead-heading that we were allowed to make free with the air-conditioned luxuries of the boat’s staterooms. The brochure promised our charterers the ‘authentic sea-salt taste of tropical seafaring’, though sailing on Wavebreaker was about as authentic as Pussy-Cute’s miaow.

The whine of the sail-furling motors brought an alarmed Thessy running on deck. He stood blinking in the new daylight, then stared in astonishment at the waterlogged white hull which rolled sluggishly under our lee. We were now close enough to read the name on her transom and could see that the derelict was called Hirondelle, and hailed from Ostend. The small waves slopped and splashed across the neat blue lettering. It seemed a terrible waste to have run from that grim North Sea port safely across the Atlantic to what must have seemed like the sunlit paradise of the Bahamas’ sheltered shallow waters, only to meet this savage fate.

And something savage had happened to Hirondelle: She was a mastless mess, trailing a tangle of sodden rigging. Her coachroof and deck were riddled with holes; so many holes that groups of them had joined together to make dark, jagged and splintered craters. My first thought was that someone had run berserk with an industrial drill, but then I saw a glint of brass in her scuppers and I recognised an empty cartridge case and knew I was looking at bullet holes. Hirondelle had been machine-gunned. Someone had poured fire at her, but she had stayed afloat because she was one of the few production boats that were built to be unsinkable. Foam had been sandwiched between her fibreglass layers and crammed into every unused space inside her hull and that foam was now holding her afloat, fighting against the dead weight of her ballast and engine and winches and galley stove.