“You’ve got the bridge, Adam,” Hammarstedt says to Meyerson.
“Wasn’t expecting this this morning,” the Bob Barker’s second-in-command mumbles.
Hammarstedt must make a few difficult decisions and he has to make them quickly. Shall he fill up the Bob Barker with the crew from the Thunder? There are almost twice as many of them and they have thrown chains and a smoke shell at his crew. How dangerous can they be?
And if he takes the shipwrecked seamen on board, where will he put them? In the bow? With a helicopter deck astern, there is limited space on the Bob Barker. Hammarstedt instructs two of his crew to take notes. Everything that happens now is to be documented. Then he gives the order for the Bob Barker’s dinghy Gemini to be sent out to the life rafts and asks Gimeno to call up the Thunder again and ask what has caused the ship to sink.
“How much time does he think he has?” he says to Gimeno.
What if the mayday situation is a prank? What if the captain is trying to dump the Indonesian crew so the officers can make a final desperate attempt to escape with the Thunder? He won’t let the shipwrecked seaman on board the Bob Barker now. Hammarstedt wants to wait until the Sam Simon is in position in a few hours. He doesn’t like what’s happening; he doesn’t trust the officers on the Thunder.
“The Sam Simon is going to be here in about two or three hours. I don’t want to rush to get these guys on here. The weather is good, it’s nice and calm. I don’t want them to leave these guys behind on us and then they take off. So, we put a boat in the water and we keep that with them and we see if they need anything. Then we wait until there is another boat on the scene,” he says.
Scarcely ten minutes have passed since the mayday signal and Hammarstedt is already convinced that the drama unfolding before him is being staged.
“They have probably scuttled the ship,” he says to Meyerson.
“Yeah.”
“Everything that happens on the radio must be noted. Everything. Every word.”
Now it seems as if the Thunder is lying lower in the water, but the ship is not listing.
The Thunder’s life rafts fill up as one by one the crew members climb slowly down the ladder. The engineer Luis Alfonso Morales Mardones loses his foothold and falls into the water and must be hauled up into the raft by his arms. Some of them perch on the sides while others seek shelter under the tarp. Deck Officer Manuel Ricardo Barcia Sanles suddenly stands up, climbs back up the rope ladder, runs through the corridors and into the officers’ cabins and retrieves suitcases. Everything has been packed. Once back on deck he throws them over the gunwale and down into the life rafts, and then he fetches some bottles of water before descending into the raft again. The first two life rafts are cut loose from the Thunder and slowly drift away from the ship.
Captain Cataldo has still not left the bridge. Chief engineer Agustín Dosil Rey is also there. Dosil Rey speaks English, but he stays away from the radio, choosing to let Cataldo handle the communication.
Over the radio Cataldo tells the interpreter that the Thunder is on the verge of losing its electricity and that water is flooding into the engine room. He explains that there are 40 men on board and asks that Sea Shepherd launch its dinghy immediately so they can save his crew.
“The ship will sink in 15 minutes,” he says over the radio.
Hammarstedt does not believe that the Thunder is headed for the bottom of the ocean so quickly and asks Meyerson to follow all movements on the radar.
Hammarstedt’s dream was to follow the Thunder into a port where the local police and Interpol would be standing by with handcuffs and available jail cells. Now he must in all likelihood save the crew, while the evidence of the illegal fishing activity disappears into the almost 4,000-metre depths. But a mayday signal has been sent, and has very likely been picked up by many. As a captain he must handle the emergency situation correctly.
A trawler does not suddenly begin to take in water when the weather is good and the wind quiet. But what kind of captain sinks his own ship? How desperate are they? And what can he do to secure any remaining evidence that must still be on board the Thunder, such as fish, computers, logs, telephones, nautical charts and fishing gear?
He must try and outwit Cataldo, get him into a life raft as quickly as possible. Then he will have better control over the situation.
“Tell him that there is another ship coming,” he says to Gimeno.
“OK, OK,” Cataldo answers over the radio and explains that he saw another ship on the radar early that morning. So did the watchstander team on the Bob Barker. At 3:35 AM the container ship the Thasos sailed onto the radar, but then continued on, disappearing into the night. The brief rendezvous with the Greek cargo ship gives Hammarstedt an opening. Perhaps it will be easier to lure the Thunder’s captain down into the life raft if he believes he will be rescued by somebody other than Sea Shepherd?
“I wonder if they finally ran out of fuel? This is so crazy. What a thing to wake up to,” Meyerson says.
“I bet the fishing log disappears with the ship,” Hammarstedt says.
From the Bob Barker’s dinghy the Gemini, Lex Rigby reports that the crew of the Thunder is fine in the life rafts.
“They have water, they have food, they are waving. Everyone is OK,” she reports over the radio.
Rigby, who grew up in the Midlands of England and became fascinated by the ocean from watching David Attenborough’s nature
