Scar-faced 'Captain Jack Sparrow' sorry for yacht theft

Police in two states were yesterday continuing their search for the man who stole an ocean-going yacht from Melbourne, sailed it single-handed without navigation aids through mountainous seas to Tasmania, then wrote a letter to the owner apologising for the theft.

The scar-faced fugitive, accompanied by a german shepherd, made the crossing just ahead of the most powerful storm to strike southeast Australia on record, hammering Victoria and smashing several boats in the bay where the yacht was abandoned.

He was tailed by a private plane chartered by the yacht's owner, Melbourne wine merchant Philip Murphy, and a police helicopter, before vanishing in huge seas.

Police were chasing leads they hoped could lead to an arrest last night, but were prepared for further disappointment.

"We hope we'll have some results this afternoon if all goes well," acting Detective-Inspector Darren Hopkins, of Devonport, Tasmania, said.

"The lines of inquiry we have could yield fruit or it may be just a dead end."

The saga of the theft of the A$350,000 ($383,000), 13.5m Premier Cru - by a man who cringes at comparisons with pirate captain Jack Sparrow (played by Johnny Depp) in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean - began two weekends ago when the yacht disappeared from its mooring at Blairgowrie, on Mornington Peninsula, near Melbourne.

Outraged, Murphy hired a plane and flew along the Victorian coastline until he spotted the Premier Cru near King Island in Bass Strait late on Monday, but as darkness approached lost sight of the yacht.

Last Wednesday the Premier Cru was seen moored near Hawley Beach, a small boat harbour on Tasmania's northwestern coast, near Devonport.

The Premier Cru was unharmed, apart from minor damage near the engine hatch - presumably to allow the engine to be hot-wired - and a mess left by the german shepherd, for which the thief apologised.

"I kept [the dog] in the cockpit until it started gusting to 60 knots (111km/h) and it was getting scared and it hadn't been for three days," he said in a handwritten letter slipped under the door of the Launceston Examiner.

The thief rowed the yacht's inflatable dinghy to shore, left the dog in the care of a local shop assistant, and returned later with a white early-model Toyota Corolla, into which he loaded the canine and dinghy and disappeared.

Police have no idea where he got the car. None was hired locally, car yards made no such sale, and no vehicle matching the description was reported stolen.

"He may have bought something privately: walked down the street and saw a for-sale sign and bought it that way," Hopkins said.

The night after the Premier Cru anchored at Hawley Beach a storm swept through the area, destroying several boats, battering the huge roll-on, roll-off ferry Spirit of Tasmania, and hammering Melbourne.

The Premier Cru had a second stroke of luck by being towed by the insurers to safe harbour at Devonport before the storm struck.

Sailors and police are amazed that the thief made it at all.

The Premier Cru usually requires a crew of four, and in his letter to the Examiner the thief said he had no intention of sailing to Tasmania and had made the crossing by the seat of his pants.

"With no fuel and no radio, charts or navigation to get back [to Melbourne] it was the only place I knew I could sail in to anchor," he wrote.

Said Hopkins: "He was very lucky. It may well have been a search and rescue mission if it had been the following night."

But the thief had a conscience, apologising to Murphy in his letter.

"I don't expect you to forgive me but unless you have been through it you can't possibly understand," he wrote. "Maybe one day we can sit down and have a beer and I will tell you, and I am not Cpt Jack Sparrow."

He added: "Of a lot of bad idea this was the best and I belive [sic] it saved my life."

Police said they had no idea what this meant, but appealed for the thief to turn himself in.