Then he put the Thunder in motion.
Slowly, it glided across the Banzare Bank and Lampon’s gaze remained glued to the sonar until he found a new deep hollow where there could be toothfish at the edges. His subsequent attempts struck gold. The cold storage room was filled with 30 tons of first-class fish. On the black market, the fish was worth half a million dollars. Nonetheless, it was still far from enough.
As they were in the process of putting out another net, Lampon noticed a dot on the radar moving quickly towards them. Was it the Perlon?
“It looks like we’ve got company,” he said. He left the bridge, hurried down the stairs from the wheelhouse and knocked on the sleeping captain’s door.
At first they thought it was a patrol ship. Then one of the workers on the production line of the Thunder’s fish factory recognized the ship, its rectangular blue, black and grey camouflage paint and the predatory shark-jaws on the hull. He had been watching the Sea Shepherd series Whale Wars on Animal Planet, and on the bridge he explained about Sea Shepherd’s perseverance and fierce confrontations with the Japanese whalers. When the captain shut himself into the navigation room to consult with the ship owner over the phone, Lampon gave the order for the crew to get to work. The factory was to be washed down, fish heads, entrails and waste were to be thrown overboard. Any fish on board was to be put into cold storage immediately.
“Pica! Cut the nets,” Lampon ordered.
The Portuguese boatswain found a knife and started sawing at the thick ropes. In a rush and on turbulent seas it was a perilous job. Should a foot or arm become tangled up in the ropes, the next stop would be in the 2,000-metre depths.
A flock of shrieking gadfly petrels soon gathered above the Thunder.
One of the lowest ranking officers in the ship’s hierarchy thought they should give in and follow Peter Hammarstedt’s order to sail with the Bob Barker to Australia. Among the Indonesians a confused atmosphere reigned. They knew they were fishing illegally and for a long time believed they were being chased by a battleship.
In the navigation room, four of the Spanish-speaking officers convened in front of a half-metre tall red and gold Madonna figure hanging on the wall behind the map table. None of them were counting on much help from the other side. They knew the ship chasing them was much faster than their own, so they would try and enlist the assistance of the elements to give their pursuers the slip. Following a brief consultation, Lampon took the wheel and set their course for a belt of floating drift ice. But the sight of the first floes of pack ice before the bow gave them pause. Should they venture through the ice? Shipmaster Cataldo opposed the manoeuvre. With a “do whatever the hell you want with the ship,” he escaped into the messroom.
As he was eating his evening meal, he felt the collisions with the ice shudder through the vessel. Still, the Bob Barker didn’t get stuck as they had hoped. After two hours in the ice the ship owner called and ordered them to set their course for open waters. Then their pursuer would give up.
A storm front coming in from the north could be seen on the radar. It could be their salvation. A ship of the Thunder’s size and stability could manage the storm better than the smaller Bob Barker. When they finally reached the storm, they could see their pursuer struggling out of the swells as if gasping for breath, before descending once more into the troughs between the waves. The white shark jaw, however, popped up again. The Thunder’s helmsman said he wanted to continue regardless of what happened to the Bob Barker in the storm.
But the Bob Barker attached itself to the Thunder’s stern and held its own.
17
THE WORLD RECORD
THE INDIAN OCEAN, JANUARY 2015
“We have broken the world record for chasing a poacher!”
In the lounge of the Bob Barker applause breaks out when Peter Hammarstedt gathers the crew for the morning meeting on 8 January. When there was no news to report, Hammarstedt turned the mission into a story unrelated to the daily routines, a story in which he can personally control the dramaturgy and create a feeling of moving forward also when things are at a standstill. In the past few days the Thunder has been lying virtually dead in the water.
The lounge is the ship’s clubhouse and museum, not unlike a common room in a student dormitory. A flat screen television hangs above a shelf containing a clutter of worn out DVDs, and a battered acoustic guitar rests in a corner. Along the bulkheads hang portraits of all the activists who have served on board, beside a bamboo cane thrown by a Japanese whaler. The shabby, shapeless couches invite sinking into and the shelves overhead are full of reading materials. The book many of the crew want to read is the documentary about the search for the fishing vessel the Viarsa 1, the story of the last world record.1
In 2003 a patrol vessel from Australia chased the ship out of Australian waters in the southern part of the Indian Ocean and all the way to the southern tip of Africa. The chase, which went on for 21 days, has since been referred to as the world’s longest pursuit at sea. Hammarstedt has studied the history of the Viarsa 1 in detail,2 and he has no intention of repeating the mistakes of that episode. The Viarsa 1 was taken carrying 97 tons of toothfish. The vessel was observed within Australian waters, but
