He’s a bad boy, who’s lived a “no-rules” existence with an addiction for the wild side.
But he’s also been branded a rapist and was a fugitive from justice for 11 years, constantly looking over his shoulder until the long arm of the law caught up with him.
That’s the flamboyant Hans Klaar who strode through OR Tambo Airport last week as if he was at the Golden Globe Awards ceremony.
Although described as a Swiss national, he is also listed as a South African citizen and spent a lot of his childhood and early adulthood living on his parents’ yacht, moving up and down the KwaZulu-Natal coastline.
Former friends said they had no clue Klaar was involved in a rape case and were shocked to see him on the front page of last Saturday’s newspaper. He’s described by friends as a “lekker oke” and “a legend in sailing circles” with a formidable knowledge in building boats. And while it is alleged he’s left a trail of broken hearts in many ports of call, more than one woman has said he did not understand the meaning of the word “no”.
Last week, Klaar was extradited to South Africa to start serving his prison term after being convicted of rape in 1998. He is being held in a Pietermaritzburg prison.
At his appeal hearing on 17 August 1999, his sentence of six years was reduced as three years were suspended and he was allowed to hand himself over within a 72-hour period. Klaar disappeared.
Friends of Klaar, in Durban and Zululand, all said he never mentioned the rape case, but confirmed he left the country in August 1999.
“He never said a word about a rape case, we were so shocked to see the photograph of him on the front page. Back in 1999, he told me he wanted to go up the Kunene River and he sailed to Walvis Bay in Namibia.
“I know he and three crew members were arrested by the Angolans on suspicion of terrorism as they went up the coast. They were held for a couple of days and then released, with no charges,” said a personal friend, who is a respected farmer in Zululand and did not want to be named as the case involves serious charges.
Despite being on Interpol’s red alert list, it is believed Klaar then sailed to Madgascar, where he bought artifacts and then moved to the Caribbean, before going back to Switzerland for a year.
After that he went back to the Caribbean and had talked about going through the Panama Canal. It was about this time that his wife left him and returned to Switzerland with their children.
When he was eight years old, his father, Ernst, who worked for a chemical company in Switzerland, suddenly packed in his job and left on a one-way ticket for Thailand with his wife and children.
Although he had never sailed before, he bought a junk and Klaar’s new itinerant life began as his father learnt how to sail and took on any cargo from port to port around the world.
The Klaar family is remembered in Richards Bay for finding the treasure aboard the Santiago, the Portuguese galleon that sank in 1585.
Ernst Klaar, who was said to be a hard taskmaster with his children, became obsessed with tales of treasure aboard the galleon and it was the 14-year-old Hans who spotted the ship’s cannon sticking up from the wreck in an isolated area of the Mozambique Channel.
The family, who often lived frugally, left the African coast and went back to Thailand. They lived off the artefacts retrieved from the wreck for a number of years, moving through the Comores and spending time in the Chagos Islands. The family returned to Durban when Klaar was 22 and he decided to set out on for his own adventures.
St Lucia residents remember the night he crossed the sandbar at the St Lucia estuary during a ferocious storm – it was said to be the first boat to cross the sandbar since the 1940s.
Martinique Stilwell, a writer from Cape Town who knew Klaar at that time, said both Klaar and his younger brother Alex boasted about how they loved Thai prostitutes and had a reputation for not treating women well.
“One night on the beach that summer, I learned to my detriment that Hans was not very good at listening when a woman said ‘no’,” said Stilwell in the Mail and Guardian newspaper this week.
In his late 20s, Klaar married a Durban woman, Cathryn, and the couple had three children. Life was good and the family moved to the Caribbean, where Klaar soon gained recognition for his boat-building skills, especially with the crab-claw rig for catmarans.
In a 1995 interview, Klaar was described as being “known in every port in the tropical Indian Ocean, a man who sailed without an engine or electronics and who shot wild pigs and goats with a crossbow on remote islands”.
The following year, he was charged with rape after an evening at a Durban club – which he keep secret from most who knew him.
As he was about to be jailed in 1999, he fled on his boat Rapa Nui, became a fugitive and for the next 11 years moved from port to port.
In 2005 he gave an interview in Trinidad and he sold his boat Rapa Nui, after sailing across the Pacific to New Zealand.
During 2007 he stayed on the West African coast, where he designed his dream boat – a 70ft Polynesian style catamaran and his work was extensively viewed on the web. From there he sailed to Brazil, back to Trinidad, through Panama and back to the Pacific in 2008.
In 2009 he sailed from Fiji to New Zealand, where he was caught trying to enter the country illegally.
In January 2011, he was extradited to South Africa to face his punishment and for a man whose soul feasts on the expanse of the ocean and a sense of unfettered freedom, his view from a window with prison bars will be very small indeed. - Independent Newspapers