There is a strange and invisible connecting line running between Ría de Arousa, the search for the Thunder and Norway – a line of connection that perhaps more than anything else was the beginning of the end for the Thunder and “The Bandit 6”.
In the 1990s, an armada of fishing vessels popped up in the Barents Sea bearing flags from nations such as Belize, the Dominican Republic, Togo and Cambodia. During the worst years they fished 150,000 tons illegally. The Norwegian authorities and the environmental activists declared war on the fleet. They began recording the ships’ movements, owners and harbours where the illegal fish were unloaded. For a period of time, every single fishing vessel that travelled from the Barents Sea with fish to harbours in Germany and the Netherlands was monitored and dozens of cases were tried in courts in Russia and Norway.
One of the ships, fisheries control agencies in Europe noticed, was the reefer ship the Sunny Jane, which accepted on board illegal fish from a group of blacklisted trawlers known as “The Rostock Five”. “The Rostock Five” were controlled from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and had their winter base in the north German harbour town from which they had received their nickname.
“The fish you receive are not to be landed in Norway, the oil you use is not to come from Norwegian vessels and our harbours are closed,” the Norwegian Minister of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs Helga Pedersen warned them.
After having been turned away from a number of harbours in Europe and Africa, the Sunny Jane finally set its course for Galicia. One summer day the ship laid anchor in the Ría de Arousa carrying 600 tons of frozen tuna fish, an abandoned Russian crew, empty fuel tanks and a freezer that was threatening to break down. The Sunny Jane had run out of safe harbours to turn to, the crew had not been paid in months, and now 13 men were sitting at the mouth of Ría de Arousa, clinging tightly to their catch, the only thing of value on board that could be traded in for plane tickets home to Russia.
The Sunny Jane became the symbol for a successful fight to shut fish poachers out of harbours in Europe. But the majority of the ships sailed on to new harbours and fish banks, often in West Africa, where there were fewer coast guard vessels, surveillance planes and inspectors.
After they had chased the pirate fleet out of the Barents Sea, the Norwegian fishery authorities and environmentalists had amassed an extensive card file of pirate crafts, shady ship owners and dubious flag states. They had also recognized something new. Fish poaching was controlled by organized crime and could only be countered through international cooperation. In Norway a special criminal investigation group was appointed which was named the Norwegian National Advisory Group against Organized IUU-fishing, in common vernacular called “the fish crime investigation squad”.
Norwegian bureaucrats travelled around the world spreading their message of how fisheries crime was just as serious, cynical and cunning as human trafficking, narcotics and arms smuggling. The backers forged ships’ documents and catch protocols, laundered money, bribed port authorities and hired crews on slave contracts.
It was this recognition that induced the Norwegian authorities to finance Interpol’s intelligence operation targeting illegal fishing.
The Norwegian environmentalist Gunnar Album was probably the person who worked the most systematically. For many years he had been charting the activities of fishing vessels, shipping companies, flag states, call signals, owners, tonnage and port calls all over the world. Every single suspicious fishing vessel was given its own profile in his card file, a unique database Album shared with the authorities of many countries and which would turn out to be a goldmine in the search for the pirates. Two of the ships in Album’s file stood out as being the most active: the Thunder and the Viking. The first two fishing vessels in history to be wanted by Interpol.
In an ironic twist of fate, the evidence against the Thunder’s officers and backers led to the small town in Galicia where the Sunny Jane ended its days.
Before it was sold for parts, the unhappy ship with the jolly name lay for three years in the harbour in Ribeira.
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BUENAS TARDES, BOB BARKER
THE MELVILLE BANK, FEBRUARY 2015
After sailing for a short while towards the Cape of Good Hope, the Thunder does a complete about-face and continues east at half throttle. The Bob Barker’s first mate Adam Meyerson hopes the pirate vessel is on its way to Malaysia, the country where the trawler has gone into hiding previously.
“We could be there at the end of February eating insects on a stick and drinking Singapore Slings.”
“Is it vegan to eat insects?” he wonders.
For the crew of the Bob Barker, one day blurs into the next. They are north of “the Roaring Forties”, where the cold winds from the west never relent, but although the weather and temperature are agreeable, the horizon is still just as never-ending. Only five of the crew decided to sign off when Captain Hammarstedt gave them the option.
The crew manning the Bob Barker’s dinghies the Gemini and the Hunter are longing to feel the adrenaline that will be triggered when they are skimming across the waves in the quick, light vessels. Jeremy Tonkin, the man who was in the crow’s nest when they found the Thunder, draws lines above his berth to keep track of the days he has been at sea, like a prison inmate. He started doing this when he was lying there wracked by seasickness. He now has 60 lines. The ship photographer Simon Ager is extremely satisfied with the cabin which was renovated before departure – under the linoleum flooring they discovered a beautiful wood floor that his cabin mate polished and restored. All the same, he is now far more concerned about there being a proper showdown with the captain of
