We don’t know more than this, might you? This from the dailymaverick.com…
Diane Coetzer had always called Anthony Murray, the Leopard 44’s skipper, her brother-in-law, although technically it wasn’t true. But she had been the life partner of Jeremy Savage, Murray’s younger brother, for almost a quarter-century—had in fact raised four children with him—so the technicalities were beside the point. The important thing was, Murray deeply valued his relationship with the family, and they in turn loved nothing better than his stories of whales and trade winds and dodgy ports. A journalist and writer, Coetzer had begun compiling these stories into a book on Murray’s career. “He said it would be a bestseller,” Coetzer explained. “And then he could retire.”
In February 2016, the book had been on hold for a year. Coetzer’s journalism experience was being put to more urgent use, and she had been faithfully chasing down the story, trying to figure out how a yachtsman as skilled as Murray could simply disappear.
“From the time I first made contact with [TUI Marine] on February 5th last year,” she said, “there was an obvious resistance to giving me and Jeremy basic information about the vessel. It became very clear that they were not going to report the boat missing, so we had to do it ourselves.”
Coetzer’s contact was a woman named Nicky Murison-Burt, who worked in the operations department of TUI’s Cape Town office, which her email signature identified by its locally registered name of Mariner Yachts. The staffer in charge of appointing delivery skippers in South Africa, she was the person to whom the families of Murray, Robertson and Payne initially turned.
At 11.07 AM on 5 February 2015, the following SMS was sent from Coetzer’s iPhone to a contact listed as “Nicky – Tui Marine”: “Hi Nicky – I just tried to call you – my name is Diane Coetzer – I am Anthony Murray’s sister in law. I am just trying to see if he is delivering a yacht for you in Thailand – could you let me know with some urgency – many thanks – Diane”.
Coetzer, having grown concerned about Murray, and realising she didn’t know for whom he was sailing, had set about locating the company via Internet searches and phone calls. Mavericks Yachts in Cape Town had given her the contact for Robertson and Caine, who had then put her on to Murison-Burt, who called back within half-an-hour of receiving the SMS. According to Coetzer, she confirmed that Murray was sailing for Mariner Yachts, and that she hadn’t heard from the vessel since 18 January. “She reassured me,” said Coezter, “that it was a broken satellite phone. She claimed something like, ‘Broken satellite phones are not unusual, they can get wet.’ She told me that the emergency signal hadn’t been activated, and that this was a good sign. She also said, and I’ll never forget this, ‘They ran into a bit of bad weather’.”
Read on.
