The only reason they got away with the stunt is because the New Zealand police respected their level of commitment to the fine art of getting hammered outdoors, and let them carry on. However, their poxy island was only in an estuary, so it didn’t count. The term reared its head again last week when booze enthusiasts in New Zealand tried to get around a New Year’s Eve public alcohol ban by building themselves an island out of sand and declaring themselves to be in international waters. You might be wondering, at this point, why we’re talking about international waters at all. That limit has increased to 12 miles in most countries, and more in some - US waters extend 24 nautical miles off the coast, because of course they do. Territorial waters used to be defined as everything up to three nautical miles off the coast of a country (that was seen as being the furthest a cannon could fire, which was the kind of ridiculous way they used to make rules in the olden days), and everything beyond that counts as international waters. Internal waters are the rivers, lakes, canals and waterways of a country. Well, legally, the sea is split into internal waters, territorial waters and international waters. That said, the police aren’t going to show up to a crime scene in the middle of the Atlantic and draw a chalk outline on the surface of the ocean, so how does it all work?

Is… is that really the case? Is everyone a mile and a half of kayaking away from being a full-on pirate? Can you really just shout “international waters!” when you’re caught doing a Naughty Crime and make all the consequences go away? Because as much as pop culture has drilled it into us that this is A Thing, is sounds a lot like bullshit, doesn’t it?

The culturally shared half-memory of being drunk on a ferry as a teenager and losing six pounds in a fruit machine between Portsmouth and Le Havre has somehow calcified into a society-wide certainty that out there, on the open sea, anarchy reigns and anything goes. There’s an idea lodged firmly in the back of everyone’s head that, if we are in international waters, we can do whatever we want.

Uncharted waters new horizons best ship