For a moment, Captain Hammarstedt considers calling up the captain of the Thunder and asking if he thinks the manoeuvre into the ice is advisable, but he decides against it. He does not want to reveal his own nervousness.
Hammarstedt’s foremost concern is that the ice will oblige him to stop. Then it will close up behind the Bob Barker and can force its way in between the hull and the rudder, putting the most exposed part of the ship out of commission. That is a nightmare when you are located two weeks from the closest port and the only ship in the vicinity is fighting to get rid of you. The most dangerous of all is navigating between the ice and the Antarctic continent if the wind should suddenly change direction, sending the ice masses towards the ship while the wind laboriously packs the ice around the hull, shutting it in. Then the steel will begin to give way, the pressure from the ice threatening to tear it open. In such a case, getting into the life boats serves no purpose.
“Right now the Thunder is acting erratically. Trying to find something that sticks. We have never been up against these guys before. We are going to wear them down. I don’t think they will last that long,” Meyerson says on the bridge.
The sound of the ice scraping along the hull is like stone against a grinding wheel. The noise grates its way into the cabins, from time to time an explosion can be heard from the treacherous floes of drift ice. These are “bergy bits”: on the surface they are no more than 2–3 metres across, but nothing on the ocean surface reveals the actual depths to which they extend. When they break free from a drifting ice berg and reach the ocean, they roll over, washing off the surface snow and remain floating there with a clear surface of glassy ice that makes them difficult to read on the radar. Weighing up to 500 tons, they can easily sink a ship.
Chief Engineer Ervin Veermuelen is standing with his eyes glued to the Thunder’s stern.
“It is a huge risk for the crew, but also for the environment. If these ships break down, they rely on other ships to come to their rescue,” he points out.
A few months earlier, the pirate ship the Tiantai vanished in the Antarctic polar wasteland. When the Australian chief rescue operations centre received the mayday call, initially they tried to contact the owners. It was futile. The ship was registered in Tanzania, but there was no information about the vessel or about who could be contacted in an emergency. The only reliable information about the ship was that it was blacklisted for illegal fishing in Antarctica.
At the same moment that the Tiantai’s emergency radio beacon was triggered, an extensive search operation was underway in the south of the Indian Ocean for a Malaysia Airlines plane that had vanished without a trace with 239 passengers and crew on board.2 One of the Australian airplanes that had been sent to take part in the search for the missing airplane was redirected to search for the Tiantai. An Orion airplane from the Australian Air Force was also sent towards the site of the shipwreck.
When the aircraft arrived at the scene, the Tiantai’s emergency radio beacon was still active, the waves were rising to heights of up to 7 metres, and the air temperature was 17 degrees below zero Celsius. There was no sign of the ship, the crew or the life rafts. All they could see from the air were some scattered remains from the wreck. One hundred and eighty kilometres from the site of the accident, the pilots suddenly noticed the well-known pirate ship the Kunlun. The shipmaster on the Kunlun did not respond to any calls and the longline fishing vessel continued sailing silently on its course headed north.
The conclusion of the medical experts was disheartening. In the cold and in the turbulent ocean nobody could have survived, not even in a lifeboat. The next day the rescue operation was cancelled.3
While the news media worldwide was full of stories about the Malaysia Airlines flight’s inexplicable disappearance, not a single word was written about the Tiantai. Nobody knew what had happened to the ship or the crew, but it also seemed as if there were few who cared. When Hammarstedt travelled around fund raising for the upcoming Operation Icefish, he usually concluded with the story of the Tiantai. Chasing pirate fishermen out of the Antarctic was also about protecting and helping the faceless crew members of the battered death traps that were fishing in the Southern Ocean.
Around the Thunder and the Bob Barker the ice grows thicker and thicker. First it closes in around the Thunder, subsequently the Bob Barker. The ships are surrounded by ice and they plough slowly forward. Soon Adam Meyerson can make out a clear blue strip of open sea. The Thunder moves out of the ice first, increases its speed and sets its course north, away from the ice.
From the bridge they watch as the Thunder grows smaller and smaller against the horizon, but they know they will manage to catch up with her as soon as they have broken through the last of the ice floes.
A half hour after midnight, both of the ships are out on open water.
“Come on, guys, let’s go to Fremantle and I’ll buy you a beer. And then I take you to jail,” Adam Meyerson laughs.
8
VESTURVON
ULSTEINVIK AND HULL, 1969–2000
23 March 1969. It was a hopeful spring day in Ulsteinvik on the west coast of Norway.
At the shipment quay of the machine shop Hatlø Mekaniske Verksted was a shiny, stern trawler newbuilding equipped with the latest in filleting machines, skinning machines, a spacious cold
