“It’s like half the ships that we’re looking for are out of the game now. Fantastic!” Adam Meyerson answers.
“Yeah! Half of them down,” Hammarstedt replies.
On social media, Sea Shepherd now calls the Thunder a “floating prison”.1 They hire Dr Glenn Simmons, a researcher and specialist in human trafficking, to describe what he thinks is taking place on the Thunder. For several years Simmons has been researching the working conditions of Asian fishermen and he maintains that the alleged suicide attempt on the Thunder was a desperate act on the part of a man being held on the ship against his will.
“We have reasonable cause to believe that the crew are indeed being held captive and against their will. The worst thing you can do is leave the scene as crew would lose hope,” Simmons writes in his statement to Sea Shepherd, which Hammarstedt forwards to Interpol.
That is the story Sea Shepherd wants – and which they quickly distribute to the media.
The news of the duel at sea also reaches the bridge of the Thunder. From her exclusive apartment in the luxurious Viña del Mar in Chile, the Thunder’s captain’s wife sends him regular updates on the chase by telefax. Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo therefore knows everything about his opponent Peter Hammarstedt and Sea Shepherd. He also knows that Hammarstedt has not succeeded in establishing the identities of the officers on the Thunder and has ordered them to wear ski masks to hide their faces when they are moving around on deck.
In an attempt to refute the accusations that he is sailing a slave ship, Cataldo now orders the entire crew on deck. As the Bob Barker’s dinghies approach the side of the Thunder, everyone on board is told to pull on their ski masks and bring with them pieces of metal pipe to bang against the railing. In this way Cataldo will demonstrate that everyone on the Thunder is united against Sea Shepherd.
“It’s strange that the Indonesian crew are now hiding their identities,” Hammarstedt says as he sees the procession of balaclava-clad fishermen on the deck of the Thunder.
Through the binoculars, Hammarstedt can see the crew members hammering on the railing with the iron pipes as the dinghies pass by. It resembles a bizarre theatrical performance.
In the evening the Thunder’s captain changes the ship’s course, this time to the northeast. To the other officers on the Thunder, Cataldo seems tired and depressed. The story of the suicide attempt on the Thunder was a bluff – a morbid attempt to induce Peter Hammarstedt to give up the chase.
Those who know that the Thunder has just lost its Nigerian flag also find Cataldo’s next move to be strange. All the fishing buoys are to be removed from the quarterdeck. The Thunder is to be prepared to put in at port.
At Port Harcourt in Nigeria.
33
THE SNAKE IN PARADISE
PHUKET, MARCH 2015
On the evening of 4 March, the fishing vessel the Kunlun is transformed into the freighter the Taishan. The operation is done in the twinkling of an eye: using some well-worn cardboard stencils, one of the crew members paints the new name on the wheelhouse and the rust-corroded bow. Then Captain Alberto Zavaleta Salas sails his wanted ship in towards the port of the tourist paradise of Phuket. In the cold storage room there are 181 tons of first class toothfish worth almost 4 million dollars.
They have outmanoeuvred the Navy, been chased by Sea Shepherd and were boarded by the Australian authorities. Now all that remains is to offer the authorities of Thailand a credible story to enable them to get the illegal cargo through customs.
At the port in Phuket, the duty paid on the cargo is for the far less expensive species the seabass. The fishing captain José Regueiro Sevilla explains that it was transshipped from another fishing vessel and that it will now be dispatched by ship to Vietnam. After the port bureaucrats have provided their stamps of approval, six freezer containers are transported by lorry to the deep-sea harbour in Songkhla, 500 kilometres southeast of Phuket.
Then Alberto Zavaleta Salas drops the rusty hulk’s anchor off the coast of the luxury holiday destination Sri Panwa – a well-guarded playground for jet-setters and celebrities from the entertainment industry. There the ship remains, bobbing like a rotten branch in an infinity pool.
While the Taishan pitches in the clear, turquoise water off the coast of Phuket, one of the officers of the Marine Police in Phuket is made aware of the Interpol notices for the Kunlun. The authorities in Australia and New Zealand have not given up on the idea of ending the Kunlun’s pillaging missions once and for all.1 They ask the special investigators of the Thai customs service to inspect the Taishan and the cargo the crew brought ashore. When they break into the containers, the fish they find is not the type that was cleared through customs. It is the Kunlun’s “white gold”.
When a few hours later the maritime police board the ship to put it under arrest, they are met by an appalling sight: the vessel is filthy and the sanitary conditions atrocious. They also notice another detail. There is no fishing gear on board.
On the journey north, somewhere halfway between the Antarctic mainland and the southern tip of South Africa, the crew packed kilometres of gillnets into plastic bags and dumped them over board. In secret, Alberto Zavaleta Salas made a note of the coordinates: 52 06 04 S 40 48 70 E.
The atmosphere on the Kunlun is just as oppressive as the tropical night outside. The cargo has been confiscated, nobody is allowed to leave the ship, even the fishing captain has been charged with document forgery. Zavaleta Salas is at risk of being held responsible for having illegally changed the vessel’s name and flag – from Equatorial Guinea to Indonesia. The police have also discovered that he is not qualified to sail vessels weighing in excess of 300 tons. The Kunlun is more than twice
