As manager of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, Salmon was the person coordinating Australia’s efforts to prevent illegal vessels in the Southern Ocean. Every year they shelled out millions of dollars on patrolling the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean with ships and sophisticated surveillance planes. There were two ships that he saw more often than others: the Thunder and the Viking.
Ever since the authorities of Penang gave Salmon the first crew list from the Thunder in 2010, he had tirelessly gathered information about the ship. In the harbours of Malaysia where the pirate vessels sought shelter, he started his own little intelligence operation. Salmon was formerly a federal police agent and was known to be a capable investigator. He had a friendly, reserved nature and the ability to put people at ease in his company. This also made it possible for him to extract information without disclosing too much about himself.
In Malaysia he distributed a pamphlet containing photos of the six vessels which several years later would adorn Peter Hammarstedt’s “The Bandit 6” poster. Then he asked the port inspectors he met if they had seen the ships.5
“Yes, yes, they all speak Spanish,” was the most common answer he got.
There was little Salmon could do to stop the ships, but he could arrange a minor form of hell for the ship owners. Every time a surveillance plane spotted the ships leaving Antarctica, Salmon and his team notified the authorities in Malaysia: The ships will very likely be in your parts in four or five days.6
And Salmon’s tactics produced results. In the winter of 2012, the inspectors in Penang started becoming aggressive and inspected the Thunder three times. The ship owner and his two assistants went into hiding at one of Penang’s hotels. Two weeks passed before they succeeded in bringing the fish to land.
It became more and more difficult for the Thunder to find a safe harbour. When the ship sailed into the shallow Benoa Harbour in Bali, it was boarded by agents from Indonesia and Australia. To the agents’ great surprise they found no fishing gear on board. But a quick glance at the rusty incinerator that was lashed securely to the Thunder’s quarterdeck disclosed that the nets had been burned. The ships’ documents on the bridge stated that the vessel was flagged in Nigeria, but the ship agent had a ship’s certificate from Mongolia on which the same ship was named the Wuhan No. 4. The ship was then chased out of Bali as well.
The Thunder had been observed by surveillance planes, patrol vessels and research ships and inspected by fisheries officers more than 20 times since the ship was blacklisted. The old trawler was now a repeat offender, whom the authorities in Australia, New Zealand and Norway decided to stop.
On Thursday 5 December 2013, at 8 PM, Interpol issued a Purple Notice on the Thunder to its 190 member nations. It was the second time in history that a notice on a fishing vessel was issued by Interpol.
After the Purple Notice was issued, the Thunder roamed about to such an extent that there were few on board who had any idea of where they were or where they were headed. From the bridge they seldom received information; those wanting to know something had to purchase it from one of the ship owner’s trusted officers. The currency was in beer and cigarettes.
In April 2014, the ship dropped anchor southeast of Teluk Ramunia, an old mining district on the south-eastern tip of Malaysia. These were troubled waters and a well-known smugglers route for oil, refugees and exotic animals. The name of the ship was now the Ming No. 5.
But the authorities here had also been tipped off about her. The Russian captain and chief engineer were placed under arrest, on charges of illegal anchoring. The involuntary stay cost the Thunder’s owner a lucrative expedition in the Antarctic.
10
THE STORM
THE SOUTHERN OCEAN, DECEMBER 2014
A storm is on its way in from the northeast.
The Thunder sets its course out of the 60th parallel south and into the 50th parallel south – “the Furious Fifties”.
Straight into the storm.
On the bridge of the Bob Barker, Adam Meyerson glances at the weather radar. The yellowish-orange colour codes he sees indicate winds up to 40 knots. The reddish-black field further northwest tells of a full-scale storm – winds reaching up to 60 knots and waves over 7–8 metres tall.
“It is OK if they take us to the mustard. But not the ketchup,” Meyerson says.
This is the only place on earth where the movements of the wind, current and waves are wholly unimpeded. Here the low pressure systems race around the continent in an eternal storm. South of the 50th parallel, one storm a week can build up, and the stable summer months of January and February are like mid-winter in the North Atlantic. At “the Roaring Forties”, the region between the 40th and 50th parallels, the warm air from tropical waters meets the cold air mass from the Antarctic. The collision whips up the most powerful waves on the surface of the earth, and nothing stands in their way. The velocity and force of a wave depends on its length and the distance between the crests of the waves. There is nothing to stop them here and the longer the wave is, the harder it will topple into the hull of a ship.
Matthew Fontaine Maury, the father of modern day oceanography, described the weather at the bottom of the world as “a reservoir of dynamic force for the winds – a regulator in the grand meteorological machinery of the earth”.1 The crew on the full-rigged ships called the wind belt “Dead Man’s Road” and knew that it was down here the devil began dancing between the masts.
The Eye of Sauron, Peter Hammarstedt thinks. The image depicted on the weather radar resembles the eye of the evil Sauron in
