Catching Thunder

by Eskil Engdal

  “We have come across a fishing vessel. There is fishing gear in the water. We do need to get a bit closer to get a 100 per cent confirmation, but it does seem like the vessel we have found is the Thunder. On the second day of our search. We got one of them!” he says eagerly.

  “This shit is for real,” one of the crew shouts amidst the excited uproar, rounds of applause and cheers in the lounge.

  On the bridge, Adam Meyerson watches the stern of the Thunder as it moves closer and closer. He has set their course to cut off the ship, which is now sailing south-eastward – away from the net floats.

  “Nine minutes away. We’re reeling them right in. It is a nice feeling to be on the faster ship,” he chuckles.

  “Let’s get the flags up. Uncover the boats!” Hammarstedt says, who has just returned to the bridge.

  Soon all the deck hands are wearing survival suits. They pull the tarps off the two dinghies that are installed on the foredeck; a number of the crew hang over the rail to catch a glimpse of the ship that is trying to escape between the icebergs. The Dutch flag is waving above the Bob Barker along with Sea Shepherd’s own flag – bearing the skull of a pirate, but the standard crossbones have been replaced by a shepherd’s crook and a trident.

  “We definitely interrupted them when they were fishing. They saw us, and immediately they started running,” Hammarstedt says.

  “They know they are up to no good. Criminals run,” Meyerson replies.

  Soon they can see the name of the vessel; it is attached to the sternpost on a wooden board that can be removed with a simple hand movement. The Thunder, Lagos.

  “That’s too much … They actually have their name on them? It is like finding John Dillinger with a name plate on him,” Meyerson laughs.

  Hammarstedt lifts the manual control for the VHF-radio and announces:

  “Thunder, Thunder, Thunder. This is the Bob Barker. PC9519. Calling you on Channel 16.”

  “This is Thunder on Channel 16.”

  “Good afternoon, Thunder. This is the Bob Barker. You are fishing illegally in a CCAMLR region without a permit to fish.”

  “Sorry, sorry. No English. Just Spanish.”

  “That’s very lucky because hablo español también,” Hammarstedt says and asks the captain of the Thunder to wait while he summons the Spanish-speaking photographer Alejandra Gimeno to the bridge.

  “You are fishing illegally. Do you have a fishing permit?”

  “We have a permit, we have a permit. The ship has a Nigerian flag, and we are sailing in international waters. Over,” the Thunder replies.

  “You are fishing in CCAMLR region 58.4.2, and we have an Interpol wanted notice for you.”

  “We are en route and not fishing. By the way, what kind of ship is that? I see that you have a pirate flag. What’s that?” the shipmaster of the Thunder asks.

  “Tell him that we are international conservation police and that they’re under arrest,” Hammarstedt says to Gimeno.

  “No, no, no. Negativo. You have no authority to arrest this ship. We will keep sailing. Over,” is the reply from the Thunder.

  “We have the authority. We have reported your position to Interpol and the Australian police.”

  “OK, OK, you may report our position, but you cannot board this ship. Neither can you arrest it. We are sailing in international waters and we will continue.”

  “We are going to follow you, and you are under arrest. Change your course to Fremantle, Australia. If we see you fishing, we will physically stop you,” Hammarstedt threatens.

  He can feel the adrenaline racing through his body, and trots down onto deck to take the photograph he has been dreaming about, by the railing with the Interpol wanted notice in his hand and the Thunder in the background.

  Once back on the bridge, he gives the order to maintain a distance of a half nautical mile from the Thunder. He does not want to come too close, but simultaneously be close enough to be able to respond quickly should the ship change its course.

  “The hard part is over now,” Adam Meyerson says.

  Before he goes down into the great cabin, Hammarstedt opens the ship’s log, leans over it and writes:

  “Hot pursuit begins.”1

  6

  OPERATION SPILLWAY

  LYON, FRANCE, DECEMBER 2014

  From the office on the bank of the Rhône River, Alistair McDonnell can see the morning mist suspended like gossamer above the flowing water. For almost all of December, a heavy blanket of clouds has hung over Lyon, and the city is now in the process of moving into a silent, chilly Christmas slumber. McDonnell, the leader of Project Scale, Interpol’s new division against fisheries crime, is just a few days away from a much longed for Christmas holiday at home in Hastings.1

  At Interpol’s headquarters, the last year can be summed up as a success. The police organization played a part in breaking up a ring that was smuggling uranium from Moldova, and they rounded up the backers of a syndicate smuggling ivory from Tanzania. In Central America, close to 30 tons of narcotics have been confiscated.

  For Operation Spillway there is not much to celebrate for the time being. The secret operation’s foremost target is the pirate ships the Thunder and the Viking. For eight months, Alistair McDonnell has been pondering over how he can stop them.

  Then, around lunch time on 17 December, Interpol’s Command and Coordination Centre receives a call from the Southern Ocean.2 Over the poor satellite connection they are able to pick up more or less that the caller introduces himself as Peter Hammarstedt. He explains that he is the shipmaster on the Bob Barker and that he has just found the vessel wanted by Interpol, the Thunder.

  When the news reaches McDonnell’s office, he punches his fist into the air. This is the opportunity the British investigator has been waiting for. He quickly transforms portions of the office landscape into a “Situation Room” and marks the Thunder’s position on the electronic maps. He subsequently cancels the Christmas holiday. Operation Spillway is the result of persistent, long-term lobbying activity on the part of bureaucrats and environmentalists. Fisheries crime had long been brushed aside as a joke and held outside police priority areas, even though it had the characteristics of organized crime. Ship documents and fishing protocols were forged; inspectors and port authorities bribed. The ship crews subsisted on slave contracts and the profits were laundered into impenetrable corporate structures. It was a swindle that generated more than USD 20 billion a year.

  In 2012, Norway and the USA took the initiative to appoint a committee designated to combat the illegal conditions at sea – “illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing”.3 The same autumn, Interpol carried out its first covert operation against the poaching of fish. Each of the fisheries officers in the respective Interpol member nations held random pieces of a confusing puzzle. They registered shipping arrivals and catch declarations, pirate ships were observed from the air, in one harbour there was a crew list, in another a fine had been issued. Combined they perhaps had enough information that it could be converted into evidence in criminal cases against the ships’ officers and backers.

  A group of vessels appeared that was a clear target for Interpol: the fleet of trawlers and longline fishing vessels that were plundering the toothfish stock of the Antarctic. It was probably the most profitable and long-term illegal fisheries offensive in history. It took place in a delimited geographic area, it targeted a single species and it had been documented by hundreds of reports, books, newspaper articles and legal documents. Each ship could earn up to 5 million dollars annually. They posed a threat to the fish stocks and destroyed the economic means of sustenance for ordinary fishermen.4

  In contrast to cocaine smugglers, who actively hid their illegal wares, the pirate trawlers were easy to follow, they were like “elephants in the snow”, Alistair McDonnell thought.5 Now they could test whether Interpol’s databases and com
munication systems would be effective in the fight against the fishing pirates.

  Although the Thunder and the Viking have left countless clues behind them on land, the vessels are difficult to stop. The crimes are committed in international waters, the profits hidden in tax havens, and it is virtually impossible to induce those who know the operation from the inside to talk. The police’s most important “intelligence agents” are usually neighbours who sound the alarm, but at sea most consider themselves to be members of a professional brotherhood and they don’t snitch on one another. The pirate ships also operate in an area equivalent to 70 per cent of the earth’s surface.

  In Operation Spillway McDonnell and his colleagues have carved out a strategy they hope will work. The ships are to be harassed and inspected at every single port of call. Charges are to be brought up and prosecution pursued for every tiny law infraction. He has named the strategy “Death by a thousand cuts”.

  Now Sea Shepherd has its eyes and cameras glued to the Thunder around the clock, but Interpol’s notices on Paul Watson make any dialogue difficult. Sea Shepherd is also notorious for its unpredictability and lack of patience with the authorities. When McDonnell receives an email from Sea Shepherd’s Asia Director about finding the Thunder, he nonetheless spots an opportunity.

  “Thank you for the information, we will monitor the position updates and material you release identifying the vessel,” McDonnell answers curtly.

  He hopes Sea Shepherd will take the hint: Keep us updated at all times. Even if we don’t respond, we are paying attention.

  7

  THE ICE

  THE SOUTHERN OCEAN, DECEMBER 2014

  Everything is in motion.

  The albatrosses, suspended effortlessly on the air current with their three-metre-long wings, now cross upward against the wind. Then they set out in a broad-reaching, leeward arc, plummet towards the surface of the ocean and turn back into the wind to ascend once more.

  In the south, out of the Prydz Bay, an eternal, invisibly flowing stream transports ice from inner Antarctica to the coast.1 The winds rush out from the hinterland. Shaped by dense, cold air from the Antarctic continent, they sweep down the uncompromising polar plateau and inward across the coast.

  The wind is blowing from the southwest at four knots; the ocean is flowing silently and calmly around the two ships and the waves swelling to heights of barely more than a metre. The Thunder is headed west. Does the pirate already know who his pursuer is? Is that why the mate on the Thunder is sailing in the opposite direction of the Bob Barker’s home port in Tasmania? Perhaps he wants to test how far Hammarstedt is willing to pursue them?

  Suddenly, the Thunder changes course, heading in the direction of a belt of pack ice. The mate reduces the speed to two knots, heads northwest and around a square ice sheet. The two ships sail along the northern edge of the drift ice for a long while. When they enter a wide gulf with ice on all sides, the Thunder stops. It is as if for a moment the ship becomes aware of the danger that lies ahead.

  “There’s a lot of pack ice. Let’s see what these guys do. They may turn, they might go in,” first mate Adam Meyerson says. “It is a waste of their time and ours. They may be testing us. We are faster than they are, so they cannot outrun us. Trying to wear down our jaw. I’m sure they are desperate. They have no other options,” he says.

  “They are just going to see what we will do, I think. Let’s get in right on their stern,” Peter Hammarstedt says.

  During the brief lull, the Bob Barker’s photographer runs up on deck to take photographs of the draft marks, which indicate how high the Thunder is sitting in the water. This can give them an idea of the amount of supplies and fuel on board.

  Then the Thunder doggedly directs its bow towards the pack ice, at first carefully and tentatively, as if the shipmaster wants to test how contact with the ice will affect the ship. Suddenly, it speeds up and the propeller churns open an ice-free channel which allows the Bob Barker to follow without having to do any icebreaking of its own. Hammarstedt cannot follow more than 700–800 metres behind the Thunder, or the channel that has been cleared ahead of them will close up.

  “Who knows what the game is?” asks Simon Ager, the Sea Shepherd’s Canadian photographer.

  “They may be testing if we will go into the ice. They may try to see if they can go through the ice faster than us,” Meyerson says, holding one hand beneath his chin and observing the manoeuvre taking place in front of him with an incredulous gaze.

  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 si
lently 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 storage room and an interior outfitted for a crew of 47. The ship also had air conditioning, which would ensure cool temperatures even in tropical waters.