When a few days earlier the cook was told to make a shopping list, they understood that they were approaching the end of the voyage and that they would soon sail into the closest country, the tiny island state of São Tomé and Príncipe.
During the first hours of the morning it is Cataldo who stands lookout. He comes to the bridge wearing a new, clean T-shirt he bought at the tax-free shop in Singapore. A new shift will start at eight o’clock. Seated in the messroom are the head of the fish factory, the Chilean José Rubincio Carrion Alvarado, and a couple of Indonesian crew members. They eat and drink coffee and tea. There are still plenty of provisions in the galley.
Then they hear the ship’s alarm. Captain Cataldo comes running down to the messroom and asks Carrion to wake up the engineer Luis Alfonso Morales Mardones and the rest of the crew. The Chilean Mardones had a shift in the engine room until four o’clock in the morning. After his shift he lay in his berth watching a film. Now he gets to his feet, puts on his life vest and baffled, goes up on deck. Another of the ship’s engineers, a 32-year-old Indonesian, was awakened by the alarm. He climbs down the stairs to the engine room and sees that the main engine is half submerged in water. Chief engineer Agustín Dosil Rey and first engineer Luis Miguel Pérez Fernández are down in the engine room. They ask him to come on deck immediately. What has happened?
There is no ship other than the Bob Barker in sight, not a thing between the Devil and the deep blue sea. It is 4,000 metres straight down, in the middle of a lustrous ocean surrounded by an empty horizon.
Captain Cataldo makes his way through the narrow corridors past the Indonesian crew’s cabins, knocking hard on the doors. Some of the crew are already awake, and in the chaos that ensues, the half-dressed and sleep-dazed deck crew members collide with one another. The two deck officers, the Portuguese Manuel Agonia Dias Marques and Spanish Manuel Ricardo Barcia Sanles, leap straight out of their berths and go below deck to get the entire crew out of what can quickly become a death trap. They scream that the ship is sinking and that they must put on life vests and come up onto the quarterdeck. In the course of a few agitated minutes the entire crew is on deck and the officers start loosening the life rafts.
From the bridge of the Bob Barker the Sea Shepherd officers watch as the quarterdeck of the Thunder is filled with bodies dressed in orange. Is it raingear or life vests? Can it be a drill? Hardly. In the course of 110 days, Sea Shepherd has not seen a single emergency drill on board the Thunder.
“How strange,” Hammarstedt remarks.
He sends an officer to wake up the ship’s photographer Simon Ager. What’s happening must be documented.
“There’s a dude at the top of the ladder and there’s a whole lot of people on the port side staring at the water,” the ship physician Colette Harmsen says while holding the binoculars steadily focused on the Thunder.
“Yes, they are wearing life vests.”
“How weird,” Hammarstedt says.
Then the radio crackles.
“Bob Barker. It is Thunder,” a high-pitched sharp voice says in stammering English.
It is the same voice that Hammarstedt has communicated and argued with previously. He is sure it’s the captain, but he still doesn’t know what he looks like or his name. Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo has never introduced himself by name in their radio conversations and he has stayed indoors to elude being captured by Sea Shepherd’s many cameras.
“Thunder. Bob Barker. Go ahead,” Hammarstedt answers.
Cataldo quickly gives up his attempt to speak English and requests that they communicate in Spanish.
“No hablo español. Espera un minuto,” Hammarstedt responds. He asks Meyerson to take the wheel and maintain secure distance between the ships while he summons the Spanish-born Alejandra Gimeno.
Cataldo comes on the radio again, Gimeno translates from Spanish.
“He says they’ve got a problem and that they’re sinking.”
“Ask him if it is mayday?”
“Mayday, mayday,” can be heard from the radio’s channel 16, the international distress and calling channel, before Gimeno has time to translate Hammarstedt’s question.
“Say that we have received their mayday and that we are standing by to assist in any way.”
Before Gimeno has a chance to translate Hammarstedt’s message, a peeping can be heard on the bridge of the Bob Barker, two high-frequency, piercing alarm signals.
“That’s their distress call,” Harmsen says.
Somebody on the Thunder has pressed the panic button – the so-called DSC-distress signal that will be picked up by vessels and rescue services in the area.
Cataldo calls up the Bob Barker again. He explains what is happening.
“He wants us to launch a small boat to help them to recover the crew,” Gimeno translates.
“Tell him that we are launching a small boat,” Hammarstedt says.
Then he presses the alarm on the Bob Barker. A series of five short rings is the signal for the crew to drop everything they are doing and go to their action stations.
“Just keep doing circles. We’ve got to get a boat in the water. Quick as we can,” Hammarstedt says to Meyerson.
While the crew of the Thunder begins climbing down the side of the ship and into the life rafts, Hammarstedt calls Captain Sid Chakravarty on the Sam Simon.
Chakravarty immediately sits down at his computer
