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dabulamanzi

Once the race started the newspaper would print daily the latitude and longitude of each yacht and I would plot the positions on the chart. I could not wait for the paper to be delivered and would lie on the verandah floor, which would always be warm from the afternoon sun, and plot the positions of each boat. It was very exciting and a wonderful memory. I knew that one day I would do the race and indeed I did, a couple of times.

In 1979, when was 20, I joined a famous South African boat named Dabulamanzi, as sailmaker. We were racing that year to Uruguay because most of the world, including Brazil, had sanctions against South African and would not let us into the country. We took off from Cape Town as a strong southeaster blew a white tablecloth over Table Mountain. It was thrilling beyond words.

We set the huge green and white spinnaker being extra careful to make sure that the halyard was clipped to the head of the sail. Four years earlier the crew on the same boat attached the halyard to the clew and there is a famous shot of the fleet leaving Table Bay and there was Dabulamanzi with the spinnaker set sideways. We got it right and the spinnaker stayed up for 28 straight days until we got to Punte del Este in Uruguay. I had promised my high school sweetheart that after the race I would head back to South African and that we would get married but somewhere between Cape Town and South America I tasted the sweetness of the open road and never went back, well not for a while by which time she was married to someone else.

This years race has attracted 22 entries from ten different countries with more than half of the entries being from South Africa. The line honors favorite is the 80-foot trimaran Lovewater skippered by Craig Sutherland from Cape Town with Brian Thompson, one the world’s best offshore sailors, also on board. They will be given a bit of a run for their money by Giovanni Soldini with his 70-foot trimaran Maserati. Both boats will be chasing a new race record with the current record being 10 days, 5 hours and 45 minutes set by Rambler in 2009.

This is the second smallest fleet for the Rio race with the 2011 race attracting only 17 entries. Back in its heyday the race would routinely attract a huge fleet with the biggest fleet of 129 yachts taking part in 1976. For many years the Rio race was a way for South Africans to escape the country. They would use the race to springboard out of there to start a life in another country as apartheid and a corrupt government had a stranglehold on its citizens. It was never my intention to leave but I chased the breeze and I am still at it.

There are two starts with the smaller boats going out this Saturday and the bigger boats on January 11. I will track the fleet just for the fun of it but somehow I don’t think that Yellow Brick Tracking will provide the same warmth as the verandah floor or the same thrill of connecting the different color dots as the boats slowly make their was across the South Atlantic. – Brian Hancock.

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What Happened To The Zulu Commander at Rorke's Drift?

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Sailing Magazine

THE CAPE TO RIO RACE

by Brian (Mugs) Hancock

The Cape to Rio race starts today. It’s one of the world’s iconic sailing events first raced back in 1971. Perhaps it’s more iconic to me than other sailors because I grew up with the race.

When I was a kid in South Africa the Rio Race was a big deal. Before the race started the local newspaper would have a supplement that featured all the competitors and also had, and this was my favourite part, a large pull-out map of the course from Cape Town all the way to Rio de Janeiro. Once the race started the newspaper would print daily the latitude and longitude of each yacht and I would plot the positions on the chart. I could not wait for the paper to be delivered and would lie on the verandah floor, which would always be warm from the afternoon sun, and plot the positions of each boat. It was very exciting and a wonderful memory. I knew that one day I would do the race and indeed I did, a couple of times.

In 1979, when was 20, I joined a famous South African boat named Dabulamanzi, as sailmaker. We were racing that year to Uruguay because most of the world, including Brazil, had sanctions against South African and would not let us into the country. We took off from Cape Town as a strong southeaster blew a white tablecloth over Table Mountain. It was thrilling beyond words. We set the huge green and white spinnaker being extra careful to make sure that the halyard was clipped to the head of the sail. Four years earlier the crew on the same boat attached the halyard to the clew and there is a famous shot of the fleet leaving Table Bay and there was Dabulamanzi with the spinnaker set sideways. We got it right and the spinnaker stayed up for 28 straight days until we got to Punte del Este in Uruguay.

I had promised my high school sweetheart that after the race I would head back to South African and that we would get married, but somewhere between Cape Town and South America I tasted the sweetness of the open road and never went back, well not for a while by which time she was married to someone else.

This is the second smallest fleet for the Rio race with the 2011 race attracting only 17 entries. Back in its heyday the race would routinely attract a huge fleet with the biggest fleet of 129 yachts taking part in 1976. For many years the Rio race was a way for South Africans to escape the country. They would use the race to springboard out of there to start a life in another country as apartheid and a corrupt government had a stranglehold on its citizens. It was never my intention to leave, but I chased the breeze and I am still at it. There are two starts with the smaller boats going out this Saturday (today) and the bigger boats on January 11. I will track the fleet just for the fun of it but somehow I don’t think that Yellow Brick Tracking will provide the same warmth as the verandah floor or the same thrill of connecting the different colour dots as the boats slowly make their was across the South Atlantic.

Follow Brian Hancock HERE

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KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board Maritime Centre of Excellence

Supply and Installation of two (2) 250HP engines on Dabulamanzi boat.

2022 wed 16 feb (feb 16) 9:00 am mon 21 (feb 21) 11:00 am Supply and Installation of two (2) 250HP engines on Dabulamanzi boat. ZNT21/22KZNSB05 - Briefing Session :09 February 2022

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DABULAMANZI

Pleasure craft.

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The current position of DABULAMANZI is in English Channel with coordinates 50.32181° / -4.63828° as reported on 2024-07-17 15:49 by AIS to our vessel tracker app. The vessel's current speed is 4.3 Knots

The vessel DABULAMANZI (MMSI: 235001901) is a Pleasure Craft It's sailing under the flag of [GB] United Kingdom .

In this page you can find informations about the vessels current position, last detected port calls, and current voyage information. If the vessels is not in coverage by AIS you will find the latest position.

The current position of DABULAMANZI is detected by our AIS receivers and we are not responsible for the reliability of the data. The last position was recorded while the vessel was in Coverage by the Ais receivers of our vessel tracking app.

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Camper & Nicholson 55. Another classic yacht from 1970 with timeless lines.

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The current position of DABULAMANZI is at North East Atlantic Ocean reported 3 days ago by AIS. The vessel is sailing at a speed of 11.8 knots. The vessel DABULAMANZI (MMSI 235001901) is a Pleasure craft and currently sailing under the flag of United Kingdom (UK) .

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DABULAMANZI current position and history of port calls are received by AIS. Technical specifications, tonnages and management details are derived from VesselFinder database. The data is for informational purposes only and VesselFinder is not responsible for the accuracy and reliability of DABULAMANZI data.

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per person (pounds 3,129 between 20 July and 15 August), you can go on a two- week Caribbean dream holiday. The first week is spent in the Coconut Creek hotel in Barbados, followed by a week aboard the elegant 55ft Dabulamanzi yacht. Holidays don't get much more extravagant. Contact Crystal Worldwide on 0181 241 5161.

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Hot on the trail of 56 superyachts owned by Russian oligarchs and subject to seizure

• Published: Mar. 06, 2022, 2:04 p.m.

French authorities have seized the yacht Amore Vero linked to Igor Sechin, a Putin ally who runs Russian oil giant Rosneft, as part of EU sanctions over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The boat arrived in La Ciotat on Jan. 3 for repairs and was slated to stay until April 1 and was seized to prevent an attempted departure. (AP Photo/Bishr Eltoni) AP

• The Associated Press

The massive superyacht Dilbar stretches one-and-a-half football fields in length, about as long as a World War I dreadnought. It boasts two helipads, berths for more than 130 people and a 25-meter swimming pool long enough to accommodate another whole superyacht.

Dilbar was launched in 2016 at a reported cost of more than $648 million. Five years on, its purported owner, the Kremlin-aligned Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, was already dissatisfied and sent the vessel to a German shipyard last fall for a retrofit reportedly costing another couple hundred million dollars.

That’s where she lay in drydock on Thursday when the United States and European Union announced economic sanctions against Usmanov — a metals magnate and early investor in Facebook — over his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine.

“We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets,” President Joe Biden said during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, addressing the oligarchs. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”

But actually seizing the behemoth boats could prove challenging. Russian billionaires have had decades to shield their money and assets in the West from governments that might try to tax or seize them.

Several media outlets reported Wednesday that German authorities had impounded Dilbar. But a spokeswoman for Hamburg state’s economy ministry told The Associated Press no such action had yet been taken because it had been unable to establish ownership of the yacht, which is named for Usmanov’s mother.

Dilbar is flagged in the Cayman Islands and registered to a holding company in Malta, two secretive banking havens where the global ultra-rich often park their wealth.

Still, in the industry that caters to the exclusive club of billionaires and centimillionaires that can afford to buy, crew and maintain superyachts, it is often an open secret who owns what.

Working with the U.K.-based yacht valuation firm VesselsValue, the AP compiled a list of 56 superyachts — generally defined as luxury vessels exceeding 79 feet in length — believed to be owned by a few dozen Kremlin-aligned oligarchs, seaborne assets with a combined market value estimated at more than $5.4 billion.

The AP then used two online services — VesselFinder and MarineTraffic — to plot the last known locations of the yachts as relayed by their onboard tracking beacons.

While many are still anchored at or near sun-splashed playgrounds in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, more than a dozen were underway to or had already arrived in remote ports in small nations such as the Maldives and Montenegro, potentially beyond the reach of Western sanctions. Three are moored in Dubai, where many wealthy Russians have vacation homes.

Another three had gone dark, their transponders last pinging just outside the Bosporus in Turkey — gateway to the Black Sea and the southern Russian ports of Sochi and Novorossiysk.

Graceful, a German-built Russian-flagged superyacht believed to belong to Putin, left a repair yard in Hamburg on Feb. 7, two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. It is now moored in the Russian Baltic port of Kaliningrad, beyond the reach of Western sanctions imposed against him this past week.

Some Russian oligarchs appear to have not gotten the memo to move their superyachts, despite weeks of public warnings of Putin’s planned invasion.

French authorities seized the superyacht Amore Vero on Thursday in the Mediterranean resort town of La Ciotat. The boat is believed to belong to Igor Sechin, a Putin ally who runs Russian oil giant Rosneft, which has been on the U.S. sanctions list since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

The French Finance Ministry said in a statement that customs authorities boarded the 289-foot Amore Vero and discovered its crew was preparing for an urgent departure, even though planned repair work wasn’t finished. The $120 million boat is registered to a company that lists Sechin as its primary shareholder.

On Saturday, Italian financial police in the port of San Remo seized the 132-foot superyacht Lena, which is flagged in the British Virgin Islands. Authorities said the boat belongs to Gennady Timchenko, an oligarch close to Putin and among those sanctioned by the European Union. With an estimated net worth of $16.2 billion, Timchenko is the founder of the Volga Group, which specializes in investments in energy, transport and infrastructure assets.

The 213-foot Lady M was also seized by the Italians while moored in the Riviera port town of Imperia. In a tweet announcing the seizure on Friday, a spokesman for Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said the comparatively modest $27 million vessel was the property of sanctioned steel baron Alexei Mordashov, listed as Russia’s wealthiest man with a fortune of about $30 billion.

But Mordashov’s upsized yacht, the 464-foot Nord, was safely at anchor on Friday in the Seychelles, a tropical island chain in the Indian Ocean not under the jurisdiction of U.S. or EU sanctions. Among the world’s biggest superyachts, Nord has a market value of $500 million.

Since Friday, Italy has seized $156 million in luxury yachts and villas in some of its most picturesque destinations, including Sardinia, the Ligurian coast and Lake Como.

Most of the Russians on the annual Forbes list of billionaires have not yet been sanctioned by the United States and its allies, and their superyachts are still cruising the world’s oceans.

The evolution of oligarch yachts goes back to the tumultuous decade after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, as state oil and metals industries were sold off at rock-bottom prices, often to politically connected Russian businessmen and bankers who had provided loans to the new Russian state in exchange for the shares.

Russia’s nouveau riche began buying luxury yachts similar in size and expense to those owned by Silicon Valley billionaires, heads of state and royalty. It’s a key marker of status in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and size matters.

“No self-respecting Russian oligarch would be without a superyacht,” said William Browder, a U.S.-born and now London-based financier who worked in Moscow for years before becoming one of the Putin regime’s most vocal foreign critics. “It’s part of the rite of passage to being an oligarch. It’s just a prerequisite.”

As their fortunes ballooned, there was something of an arms race among the oligarchs, with the richest among them accumulating personal fleets of ever more lavish boats.

For example, Russian metals and petroleum magnate Roman Abramovich is believed to have bought or built at least seven of the world’s largest yachts, some of which he has since sold off to other oligarchs.

In 2010, Abramovich launched the Bermuda-flagged Eclipse, which at 533 feet was at the time the world’s longest superyacht. Features include a wood-burning firepit and swimming pool that transforms into a dance floor. Eclipse also boasts its own helicopter hangar and an undersea bay that reportedly holds a mini-sub.

Dennis Cauiser, a superyacht analyst with VesselsFinder, said oligarch boats often include secret security measures worthy of a Bond villain, including underwater escape hatches, bulletproof windows and armored panic rooms.

“Eclipse is equipped with all sorts of special features, including missile launchers and self-defense systems on board,” Cauiser said. “It has a secret submarine evacuation area and things like that.”

Eclipse was soon eclipsed by Azzam, purportedly owned by the emir of Abu Dhabi, which claimed the title of longest yacht when it was launched in 2013. Three years after that, Usmanov launched Dilbar, which replaced another slightly smaller yacht by the same name. The new Dilbar is the world’s largest yacht by volume.

Abramovich, whose fortune is estimated at $12.4 billion, fired back last year by launching Solaris. While not as long as Eclipse or as big as Dilbar, the $600 million Bermuda-flagged boat is possibly even more luxurious. Eight stories tall, Solaris features a sleek palisade of broad teak-covered decks suitable for hosting a horde of well-heeled partygoers.

But no boat is top dog for long. At least 20 superyachts are reported to be under construction in various Northern European shipyards, including a $500 million superyacht being built for the American billionaire Jeff Bezos.

“It’s about ego,” Cauiser said. “They all want to have the best, the longest, the most valuable, the newest, the most luxurious.”

But, he added, the escalating U.S. and EU sanctions on Putin-aligned oligarchs and Russian banks have sent a chill through the industry, with boatbuilders and staff worried they won’t be paid. It can cost upwards of $50 million a year to crew, fuel and maintain a superyacht.

The crash of the ruble and the tanking of Moscow stock market have depleted the fortunes of Russia’s elite, with several people dropping off the list of Forbes billionaires last week. Cauiser said he expects some oligarch superyachts will soon quietly be listed by brokers at fire-sale prices.

The 237-foot Stella Maris, which was seen by an AP journalist docked this past week in Nice, France, was believed to be owned by Rashid Sardarov, a Russian billionaire oil and gas magnate. After publication of an earlier version of this story, AP was contacted Sunday by yacht broker Joan Plana Palao, who said his company represents a U.S. citizen from California who purchased the Stella Maris last month. He declined to disclose the name of the buyer or the person from whom the boat had been purchased.

On Thursday, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a new round of sanctions that included a press release touting Usmanov’s close ties to Putin and photos of Dilbar and the oligarch’s private jet, a custom-built 209-foot Airbus A340-300 passenger liner. Treasury said Usmanov’s aircraft is believed to have cost up to $500 million and is named Bourkhan, after his father.

Usmanov, whose fortune has recently shrunk to about $17 billion, criticized the sanctions.

“I believe that such a decision is unfair and the reasons employed to justify the sanctions are a set of false and defamatory allegations damaging my honor, dignity and business reputation,” he said in a statement issued through the website of the International Fencing Federation, of which he has served as president since 2008.

Abramovich has not yet been sanctioned. Members of the British Parliament have criticized Prime Minister Boris Johnson for not going after Abramovich’s U.K.-based assets, which include the professional soccer club Chelsea. Under mounting pressure, the oligarch announced this past week he would sell the $2.5 billion team and give the net proceeds “for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, location transponders showed Solaris moored in Barcelona, Spain, on Saturday. Eclipse set sail from St. Maarten late Thursday and is underway in the Caribbean Sea, destination undisclosed.

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National Warrior Heritage South Africa

Dabulamanzi kaMpande (1839–1886) – Zulu

Dabulamanzi was a Zulu commander in the Anglo-Zulu War.

He is most noted for commanding the Zulus at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, after earlier taking part in the the Battle of Isandlwana, where he led the Undi Corps.

He was the son of King Mpande and the half-nephew of the famous and legendary King Shaka. In the Battle of Gingindlovu, when Lord Chelmsford arrived with a relief force, it was Dabulamanzi leading the right wing of the Zulu army (Somapo being his co-commander).

King Cetshwayo was restored to power in 1883 after returning from England, only to be challenged by Zibhebhu kaMaphitha. Dabulamanzi fought on behalf of his half-brother Cetshwayo to maintain the unity of the Zulu kingdom, leading the fight against arch-rival enemy Zibhebhu from 1883-1884.

Following Cetshwayo’s death, Dabulamanzi supported the succession of the late king’s son, Dinuzulu. To counter the threat from Zibhebu, an alliance with the Boers was formed. This would lead to Zibhebu eventually succumbing.

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