Catching Thunder

by Eskil Engdal

  Wastewater and fish blood were pumped straight into the ocean. Allergies and skin diseases spread through the neighbourhoods closest to the factories, protests were countered with imprisonments and some of the more prominent environmentalists were even accused of belonging to terrorist organizations.

  One tragedy would follow on the heels the other. When El Niño came barrelling in across the coast of Peru, the current of warm, oligotrophic water led to the collapse of the already severely decimated anchovy stock. One after another the fishmeal factories shut down. In the end the destitution and unemployment was so extensive that assistance organizations had to distribute food to thousands of fishermen and port and factory workers in Chimbote.3 Alberto Zavaleta Salas continued sailing ships that fished close to his home city. There was fish to be found, but the largest ship owners were awarded the quotas and Zavaleta Salas would sometimes be out at sea for a week and then remain inactive on land for a month. Although he was a shipmaster, in the end it was not even possible to be hired as part of the ordinary crew.

  It is difficult to say whether what happened next was a blessing or a curse for Alberto Zavaleta Salas. After having subsisted on random odd jobs, he was hired as a captain on the Kenyan-flagged fishing vessel the Sakoba, which operated off the coast of East Africa. When he was home on shore leave in Peru, the Sakoba was boarded by Somali pirates and sailed towards Harardhere, 300 kilometres northeast of Mogdadishu – the dusty fishing village that had been given the nickname “the piracy capital of the world”.

  At a loss, out of work and with unending money disputes with his ex-wife, Zavaleta Salas once again found himself wandering around Chimbote. In the spring of 2012 he came across an advert from the Panama registered company Red Line Ventures, which needed crew for a fishing vessel. When he contacted the ship agent, he learned that the ship the Huang He 22 was going to the Antarctic. That was an opportunity he did not want to miss out on.

  The Huang He 22 would later be known as the pirate ship Kunlun wanted by Interpol – one of “The Bandit 6”, a ship observed several times in the vicinity of the Thunder.

  Alberto Zavaleta Salas is one of the few pirate captains ever who have dared to come forward with their story.

  Late in the evening on one of the last days of November in 2014, Alberto Zavaleta Salas lands at the airport in Batam. A dinghy takes him out to the Kunlun’s anchoring site, a one-and-a-half-hour journey from the coast. As he climbs up the ladder, he notices that the name of the ship is no longer the Kunlun, but instead the Taishan.

  Although on paper he is a shipmaster, he is assigned an ordinary cabin that he must share with a taciturn and melancholy chief engineer from Ribeira, Spain.

  It is Zavaleta Sala’s fifth expedition to the Antarctic, and this time he notices that there is an uneasy atmosphere on the ship. They have problems procuring enough fuel, there is a mix-up in the order for provisions and just hours before they are about to set sail to the south, one of the other Peruvian officers decides to sign off.

  “Either things have already gone to hell or they are going to hell. I would rather wait for four months on land than go along,” he says to Zavaleta Salas before disappearing in the dinghy.

  Serafin Vidal, the shipping company employee with responsibility for crew recruitment, wants people who don’t ask too many questions, who are not plagued by problems from the past and who can collaborate and keep their mouths shut. The Spanish officers on the Kunlun are paid between 6,000 and 8,000 dollars a month plus a share of the catch. As a shipmaster, Alberto Zavaleta Salas’ salary is 2,700 dollars a month. He sends 2,000 of this home to his wife and spends the rest on cigarettes and telephone costs. On a cargo ship he could have earned far more and without risk. In addition to feeling irritated about the pay, he has constant confrontations with the fishing captain José Regueiro Sevilla, the ship owner family’s most trusted man on the Kunlun.

  Alberto Zavaleta Salas fears that it is he who will be sacrificed should the ship be arrested, that it is he who will have to rot in jail in an unknown port, while the Spanish officers will go free. He therefore carries a mobile phone in the pocket of his trousers at all times. He secretly records fragments of conversations on the bridge. When he is instructed to tear up pieces of paper, he gathers them and hides them in his cabin. When he is asked to delete emails, he saves them. He secures pictures of the officers who do not want to be photographed and he films the Kunlun’s fish factory, the effective assembly line that sends millions of dollars straight into the pockets of the ship owner’s family. One day he may find use for the recordings.

  On the voyage out of the Riau Archipelago the Kunlun maintains a good distance away from Singapore, where there may be coast guard vessels. Then they set their course for the Cocos Islands – the atoll located between Australia and Sri Lanka. Zavaleta Salas knows the sailing route well; it is the same every time.

  In 28 days they will reach the ice edge by the Banzare Bank.

  On the evening of 19 December, 300 nautical miles off the Cocos Islands, they change the name from the Taishan to the Kunlun. The ship is equipped with two sets of documents; one of these is hidden behind a trap door in the cabin of one of the Indonesian crew members. On board there are also stamped and signed ship’s documents that the officers can fill out themselves if they should need a new identity quickly. They have a miniature printing press in the form of a simple set of stamps and a cardboard box full of flags from countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Mauritania and Panama.

  Sensitive information from computers on the bridge is stored on mobile hard drives that can be easily hidden or thrown into the ocean and everything in the way of receipts from the ship agent in Batam is shredded and thrown overboard. Should the information fall into the wrong hands, it could lead to disclosing the identity of the ship’s true owner.

  In the course of the past ten years, the ship has been assigned at least ten names and been flagged in at least five countries. The Kunlun is a floating and inveterately persistent offender, a pioneer in what would become the world’s most lucrative poaching of fish. The ship was fined in South Africa for illegal shark cargo; it was blacklisted and denied access by ports all over the world. Finally, the Kunlun was so open and shameless in its devastating activities that the trawler was debated in the Australian parliament.4

  The ship now also has the eyes of the Australian authorities on it. An Orion plane from Australia’s Air Force sees three ships pass the Cocos Islands on the way into the Antarctic.5 Along with the Kunlun the flight crew also sees the ship that was once painted white, the Songhua.

  The true commander on the Songhua is the aging and legendary fishing captain “El Diablo” from Ribeira in Spain, a hardy veteran of the Antarctic. He has received the nickname for his ruthless treatment of his crew. But “The Devil” also has his more light-hearted qualities. He is the only one of the fishing captains who regularly invites his crew out on the town when they put in at port. The Songhua is also the youngest of the three vessels, and for the insurance agents on land who receive detailed reports on how much fish is hauled on board, the Songhua is the hardest worker.

  The captain of the third ship, the Yongding, is the 40-something Juan Manuel Núñez Robles, a man with a fondness for whisky and the good life. He will later claim that the expedition destroyed both his life and his marriage.6

  The Perlon is already at Banzare Bank, where the fishing captain has started what will be one of his better seasons.

  The Viking, the first ship to be wanted by Interpol, is also out on a mission. Few know where the vessel is located, but on board a wild Christmas party is being planned at which cold beer, sparkling wine, barbecued meat and ice cream will be served and they will dance the jenka, a Finnish folk dance.7

  Soon Alberto Zavaleta Salas will sail into the largest ship search in the history of the Antarctic, a handful of ships caught up in a game of cat and mouse at the bottom of the world.
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  The pursuit of the Thunder has already been underway for one week.

  14

  DESOLATION ISLAND

  KERGUELEN ISLANDS, FRENCH SOUTHERN TERRITORIES, DECEMBER 2014

  During the week between Christmas and New Year the Thunder sets its course to the north and sails down the middle of the strait running through the French controlled outposts of the Crozet and Kerguelen Islands. The ocean is glassy and still, and the ships move steadily through the water.

  Peter Hammarstedt calls their course “fraudulent”, contacts Sea Shepherd’s office in France and instructs them to forward an email to the French government.

  “As a member of CCAMLR, responsible for protecting the untouched marine ecosystem of Antarctica, we implore the French government to send a naval vessel to escort the Thunder back to a port where the ship can be inspected and the pirates held accountable,” Hammarstedt writes from the bridge of the Bob Barker.1

  He also informs the French research station on the Kerguelen Islands of the ships’ position. His hope is that France will send out one of the naval vessels that the nation has stationed on the island of Réunion.

  What Hammarstedt doesn’t know is that the French authorities have already been alerted. As the ships approached the French islands, a message was immediately sent from Interpol. “You have a bad guy in your waters soon. Get ready for it.”2

  There are 500 nautical miles between the Crozet Islands and Kerguelen Islands, and the Thunder is sailing down the middle in between them. As long as the ships remain in international waters, the French naval vessels stay put.

  The Kerguelen Islands lie 3,000 kilometres from the closest populated area, silently tortured by the winds from the west. The brutal storms constantly thrashing upon the landscape do not relent even during the night. The islands’ bald mountains loom out of the sea where the polar air meets the warmer water from the Indian Ocean – the Antarctic convergence. The confrontation can whisk the waves up to heights of 15 metres and produce winds blowing with a force of more than 100 kilometres an hour.

  The French Baron Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen had led an expedition to the coast of Iceland and was accustomed to navigating ice-cold seas. Under orders from King Ludvig XV, in February 1772 his mission was to find the undiscovered continent that had to lie somewhere in the south.

  Based on the accounts of the explorer Paulmier de Gonneville, the French believed that there was an enormous southern land mass that balanced the globe. Only a decade after Columbus’ return to Europe, Gonneville sailed from France to find a route to India. When he came home, he reported that for six months he had lived in a country far to the south that was flowing with milk and honey and which France should not hesitate to colonize. (Gonneville had probably been in Brazil.)3

  Kerguelen’s commission was to find this unknown continent and establish friendly relations with its inhabitants. After 12 days of heavy sailing through hail, dense snowfall and a cold that Kerguelen described as the most bitter he had ever experienced, he glimpsed a lofty and vast tongue of land emerging out of the fog. They waited two days for the winds to calm before the expedition attempted to send a dinghy ashore, but it was seized by a current, beaten against the cliffs and thrown back to the companion vessel the Gros Ventre, the mast of which was broken in the collision.

  When they finally came ashore, there was no sign of human life or land animals between the steep mountains, only colonies of penguins.

  After 15 minutes the procession buried a bottle containing documents which, on behalf of the French crown, made a claim for the land they called “La France Australe”.

  Kerguelen claimed to have discovered a fifth continent with soil that could be compared to that of southern France. All manner of vegetables and grains could be cultivated there, along with lumbering activity and the extraction of salt. Kerguelen described the temperate climate; he told of the forests and green valleys, which could only mean that the land was inhabited and cultivated by a primitive people.

  He claimed that in the course of six years he would succeed in building a metropolis on the Antarctic continent he had discovered.

  Although rumours were in circulation about how Kerguelen’s celebrated discovery was a flight of fancy, the French government bestowed the Order Chevalier de Saint Louis upon him and decided that he was to be quickly sent back to colonize the continent in the south. It was to be the proudest French scientific expedition in history, involving three ships and a total of 700 men. This time Kerguelen would continue east and sail around the whole continent. In the overloaded and damp holds below deck, worms and rot got into the supplies and on the voyage south he lost two of the topsails. When they reached the Southern Ocean, the crew was so devastated by scurvy and the meagre rations that several of them fainted on deck from the cold.

  Kerguelen’s only pleasure was his 16-year-old mistress whom he had smuggled on board and who would probably be the first woman to sail into the Southern Ocean.

  When Kerguelen once again reached the snow-covered island that was to bear his name, on 6 September 1773, he personally refused to go ashore, but instead sent one of his officers, who noted that there were some harbours there fit for use.

  The great French expedition turned into a fiasco. Thirty-four of the crew had died, and they had not found anything but a godforsaken island which was mockingly referred to as the “Penguins Republic”. The humiliation led to the formation of a commission that concluded Kerguelen was a fraud. Initially he was condemned to 20 years in prison, a sentence that was later changed to six years.

  When Captain James Cook laid anchor by the Kerguelen Islands in 1778, he elected to name it “Desolation Island”. But despite the dismal barrenness of the islands, its seal population was abundant. Then Norwegian, American and British sealers descended upon the islands and did their best to wipe out the population.

  In 1996 the toothfish pirates sailed into the waters around the Kerguelen Islands. The ships were outfitted with advanced radar systems to ensure early warning of any patrol ships and during the night they loaded the illegal catch onto a cargo ship. When the French authorities understood the scope of the poaching operations, they sent down a battleship and invested in new surveillance systems on the Kerguelen and Crozet Islands.4

  It was in the waters around the Kerguelen Islands that the Spanish family that would become the most notorious of all the toothfish pirates, the clan of Vidal Armadores, got its first taste of the white gold.5 On the ships that plundered the marine regions near the Kerguelen Islands, a striking number of the shipmasters and officers were from the Spanish province of Galicia.

  On the bridge of the Thunder lies a map that testifies to the fact that also the old Norwegian-built trawler had fished by the French outpost on former expeditions. On the map, which is labelled “Kapp Norvegia to Iles Kerguelen”, the fishing grounds around the Kerguelen Islands are marked in yellow ink.

  15

  THE PHANTOM SHIP

  THE INDIAN OCEAN, DECEMBER 2014

  Like a phantom ship, the Thunder continues north. Nobody moves on deck, but now and then the officers on the Bob Barker see a shadow, catch a glimpse of a face glancing quickly down at them from the bridge. When the ship starts constantly changing its course or strategy, it is right after lunch. Is it because somebody has just woken up in Europe and is now sending orders to the Southern Ocean? Lloyds List, the company with the largest database of shipping traffic in the world has no information about where the Thunder has been since 2010.1

  From his hiding place on land, Sea Shepherd’s founder Paul Watson is increasingly frustrated over how the international community fails to come to the Bob Barker’s aid.

  “Interpol states that the nations have united to identify this poacher, yet none of these nations seem to be interested that Sea Shepherd has not only identified the poacher but also escorted the vessel from the CCAMLR region and has seized the net
. Instead of supporting this effort by Sea Shepherd, the Australian government is condemning Sea Shepherd’s intervention,” he writes on social media.2

  Paul Watson’s theory is that the Thunder and the five other ships being searched for in the Southern Ocean are connected to Vidal Armadores – the most powerful clan of what is called la mafia gallega – the Galician mafia. Watson also implies that there is “somebody” who is not interested in stopping the Thunder.

  “Sea Shepherd believes that despite all the talk of apprehending the Thunder there is very little enthusiasm to actually stop the ship from operating. Why? Well, first the ship has reportedly earned more than USD 60 million on illegal fishing since 2006. That kind of money buys influence. In addition, organized crime syndicates in Galicia, Spain involving Antonio and Toño Vidal and others, own and operate many of these illegal poachers and may actually control the operations of the Thunder,” he writes on one of the last days of December 2014.

  In the 1990s, Watson wreaked havoc in Norwegian waters. He crashed the ship Whales Forever into the Norwegian coast guard vessel the KV Andenæs and was charged with negligent navigation, a fraudulent distress call and for entering Norwegian territorial waters without permission. Now the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Trade and Fisheries are satisfied that Sea Shepherd is occupied with something more useful than actions targeting Norwegian whaling. A Norwegian local politician goes so far as to claim that Watson and Sea Shepherd should be treated as an international terrorist organization, along the lines of Baader-Meinhof, Al-Qaida and IS.3

  On the same day that the Bob Barker set sail for the Southern Ocean, Sea Shepherd was warned by research scientists that boarding an illegal fishing vessel could constitute grounds for criminal prosecution for piracy and vandalism of private property. Sea Shepherd had no authority and the organization’s “citizen’s arrest” was not recognized by international law. In addition, they could be charged with illegal fishing themselves for hauling in the nets of others, the scientists warned.4