Catching Thunder

by Eskil Engdal

  The nations of Operation Spillway cannot accept an environmental organization assuming a role as enforcer of the law. Sea Shepherd can never step in for the police. And it is more than legal arguments and general hostility towards Sea Shepherd that causes Australia, New Zealand, Norway and the USA to hesitate about sending ships to compel the Thunder to put into a port. In the country that has the world’s largest fleet of battleships, they have no faith in such a mission. It will be a “complicated mess”, the USA’s man at Operation Spillway, Stuart Cory argues. What will they do with the crew? Put them in jail? They haven’t committed any crime in the USA. And what will they do with the ship? Nobody wants a rusty old hulk full of asbestos and other environmental toxins sitting in their harbour. It is not the crew and the ship they are after, it is the owners.

  “You don’t arrest the car of the bank robber, you arrest the robber,” Cory argues.5

  It is New Year’s Eve and the Thunder appears to be completely dark.

  “Let’s have a look at them,” Peter Hammarstedt says and orders the crew below deck and two photographers on deck.

  Then the Bob Barker moves into action and puts in close to the Thunder’s starboard side. The photographers succeed in capturing the face of a 50–60 year old man. When the officers later move outdoors, their faces are hidden behind ski masks. The captain on the Thunder speaks Spanish, but with an accent. On the net floats they’d left behind when they fled, a Spanish name was engraved: A Poutada, a fishing gear company in Ribeira, Spain.

  Where do they come from? Who is controlling the operation? And who is giving the orders?

  16

  THE WALL OF DEATH

  BATAM, INDONESIA, OCTOBER 2014

  At one o’clock in the morning on 21 October 2014, the Thunder set out on its final voyage. For weeks the ship had been docked at an anchorage site outside Batam, a restless, free trade zone just south of Singapore. To prevent disclosure of the vessel’s true identity, its name was now the Batu 1.

  A half year earlier, the ship had been put under arrest in Malaysia. The crew had sat in their cabins for months, smoking, playing cards, trading films and trying to keep the heat at bay while waiting for word regarding their fate. Finally, the ship was released upon payment of a fine of USD 60,000.

  After the problems with Interpol, the blacklists and the arrests the ship owner had tried to sell the Thunder. A European couple had inspected the ship in Singapore and expressed a willingness to purchase it, but the deal was never closed. Now it was as if the ship owner had given up on maintenance of the Thunder. Even the Internet connection on board had been removed.1

  A bunkering vessel had supplied the Thunder with almost 600 tons of diesel. The officers were flown in via Istanbul and transported out in groups on the ship agent’s dinghies. They were the same as always, hard-working and persevering men from Spain, Chile and Portugal. Men who didn’t ask questions and who followed orders.

  The majority of them had lived most of their lives at sea, and either could not or were not willing to do anything else. In the Spanish region of Galicia it had become difficult to find young fishermen willing to sacrifice months at sea on a dangerous and complicated fishing operation on board a vessel that was ill-equipped for the uncompromising Southern Ocean. For those who signed on, the pay was generous. On the Thunder the Latin American officers earned between 2,000 and 3,000 dollars a month; the Spaniards double that amount. Many received a bonus for every ton of toothfish. The ship owner also treated each of the officers to five trays of Coca-Cola and six cases of beer.

  The deck crew was from Indonesia, where the workforce was cheap and reliable. But not indomitable: after the last voyage several of the Indonesian crew had rebelled and physically attacked one of the officers. Now only three of the 30 Indonesians on board had previously sailed with the Thunder.

  Although the Thunder’s hull was bleeding rust, the bridge was clean and recently washed. The dark woodwork around the instrument panel was still shiny. Next to the instrument switches, instructions in Spanish had been printed out using an old-fashioned Dymo label maker. On a shelf on the port side there was tea, coffee, clean cups and a kettle. There was also a mini-fridge and an ergometric bicycle. Oil-filled radiators that had not been used for a long time were bound securely to the bridge on either side. Only the mate’s chair testified to the Thunder’s age and the ravages of time; the blue synthetic material was cracked and provisionally patched up.

  The fishing captain Juan Manuel Patiño Lampon moved into the largest cabin. It had a small library, a separate telephone for the bridge, toilet, shower, dining area, a small office, a TV and a bed all of 150 centimetres wide. No frivolous luxury on board the Thunder. The captain, the 47-year-old Chilean Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo, had to make do with a smaller cabin afore. Behind his back the crew called him a lunatic due to his fiery temperament. The Spanish first mate Juan Antonio Olveira Brion, also trained as a shipmaster, had sailed with the Thunder for only one year. The Chief Engineer Agustín Dosil Rey was respected for his proficiency and was one of the few who knew how to enjoy the life on shore when the Thunder was docked. The quiet First Engineer Luis Miguel Pérez Fernández had said farewell to his two young daughters at home in Spain a few days before. Two years would pass before he would have the chance to see them again.

  After having struggled for hours at trying to disengage and raise the anchor, the ship finally set its course north. Instead of sailing through the narrow Sunda Strait, they sailed the long way round, north through Malacca and around the northern tip of Sumatra before continuing south in the vast and less trafficked Indian Ocean.2 When they reached the latitude of Jakarta, the Portuguese deck officer Manuel Agonia Dias Marques received the order to bring up one of the name plates stowed away in the room where work clothes and boots were stored. The Batu 1 became the Thunder.

  The voyage down to the Southern Ocean was routine in nature and uneventful. The shifts ran from eight until lunch was served in the messroom at half past eleven. Then a new shift began, lasting from two until seven, then a shower and dinner. An officer passed the time with beer, hard liquor and action films in his cabin, while most of the others were busy preparing the nets. They were custom-made and had been loaded on board in unassembled parts at the harbour in Batam – more than 60 kilometres of synthetic nets and 10 kilometres of mainlines. The total length of the net was seven times the height of Mount Everest. In its entirety, the gear weighed more than 70 tons.

  In the course of the voyage, the net was assembled according to the fishing captain’s instructions. Every fishing captain has his own way of constructing the gillnets, his own signature technique for the splices, knots and components. The net is his masterpiece.

  The fishing captain Lampon used 50-metre chains of nets that were spliced together until they were 15–20 kilometres long. At each end the 7-metre high net was anchored using heavy steel shackles. The mainline, which would descend to depths of almost 2,000 metres, was made of spliced ropework that grew thinner and thinner towards the bottom, so the net did not become too heavy and difficult to handle. The final gillnet would be so effective that it captured everything that came swimming its way. That is why it was called “the wall of death”.

  When the Thunder reached the Banzare Bank, they dropped the first four chains of nets. The catch of a mere four tons of toothfish made Lampon uneasy and despondent. He walked back and forth across deck without telling anyone what he was thinking. He knew that the Perlon, another pirate vessel, was located six nautical miles away, but decided against calling her up. Lampon did not want other fishing captains to know where he was fishing.

  Then he put the Thunder in motion.

  Slowly, it glided across the Banzare Bank and Lampon’s gaze remained glued to the sonar until he found a new deep hollow where there could be toothfish at the edges. His subsequent attempts struck gold. The cold storage room was filled with 30 tons of first-class f
ish. On the black market, the fish was worth half a million dollars. Nonetheless, it was still far from enough.

  As they were in the process of putting out another net, Lampon noticed a dot on the radar moving quickly towards them. Was it the Perlon?

  “It looks like we’ve got company,” he said. He left the bridge, hurried down the stairs from the wheelhouse and knocked on the sleeping captain’s door.

  At first they thought it was a patrol ship. Then one of the workers on the production line of the Thunder’s fish factory recognized the ship, its rectangular blue, black and grey camouflage paint and the predatory shark-jaws on the hull. He had been watching the Sea Shepherd series Whale Wars on Animal Planet, and on the bridge he explained about Sea Shepherd’s perseverance and fierce confrontations with the Japanese whalers. When the captain shut himself into the navigation room to consult with the ship owner over the phone, Lampon gave the order for the crew to get to work. The factory was to be washed down, fish heads, entrails and waste were to be thrown overboard. Any fish on board was to be put into cold storage immediately.

  “Pica! Cut the nets,” Lampon ordered.

  The Portuguese boatswain found a knife and started sawing at the thick ropes. In a rush and on turbulent seas it was a perilous job. Should a foot or arm become tangled up in the ropes, the next stop would be in the 2,000-metre depths.

  A flock of shrieking gadfly petrels soon gathered above the Thunder.

  One of the lowest ranking officers in the ship’s hierarchy thought they should give in and follow Peter Hammarstedt’s order to sail with the Bob Barker to Australia. Among the Indonesians a confused atmosphere reigned. They knew they were fishing illegally and for a long time believed they were being chased by a battleship.

  In the navigation room, four of the Spanish-speaking officers convened in front of a half-metre tall red and gold Madonna figure hanging on the wall behind the map table. None of them were counting on much help from the other side. They knew the ship chasing them was much faster than their own, so they would try and enlist the assistance of the elements to give their pursuers the slip. Following a brief consultation, Lampon took the wheel and set their course for a belt of floating drift ice. But the sight of the first floes of pack ice before the bow gave them pause. Should they venture through the ice? Shipmaster Cataldo opposed the manoeuvre. With a “do whatever the hell you want with the ship,” he escaped into the messroom.

  As he was eating his evening meal, he felt the collisions with the ice shudder through the vessel. Still, the Bob Barker didn’t get stuck as they had hoped. After two hours in the ice the ship owner called and ordered them to set their course for open waters. Then their pursuer would give up.

  A storm front coming in from the north could be seen on the radar. It could be their salvation. A ship of the Thunder’s size and stability could manage the storm better than the smaller Bob Barker. When they finally reached the storm, they could see their pursuer struggling out of the swells as if gasping for breath, before descending once more into the troughs between the waves. The white shark jaw, however, popped up again. The Thunder’s helmsman said he wanted to continue regardless of what happened to the Bob Barker in the storm.

  But the Bob Barker attached itself to the Thunder’s stern and held its own.

  17

  THE WORLD RECORD

  THE INDIAN OCEAN, JANUARY 2015

  “We have broken the world record for chasing a poacher!”

  In the lounge of the Bob Barker applause breaks out when Peter Hammarstedt gathers the crew for the morning meeting on 8 January. When there was no news to report, Hammarstedt turned the mission into a story unrelated to the daily routines, a story in which he can personally control the dramaturgy and create a feeling of moving forward also when things are at a standstill. In the past few days the Thunder has been lying virtually dead in the water.

  The lounge is the ship’s clubhouse and museum, not unlike a common room in a student dormitory. A flat screen television hangs above a shelf containing a clutter of worn out DVDs, and a battered acoustic guitar rests in a corner. Along the bulkheads hang portraits of all the activists who have served on board, beside a bamboo cane thrown by a Japanese whaler. The shabby, shapeless couches invite sinking into and the shelves overhead are full of reading materials. The book many of the crew want to read is the documentary about the search for the fishing vessel the Viarsa 1, the story of the last world record.1

  In 2003 a patrol vessel from Australia chased the ship out of Australian waters in the southern part of the Indian Ocean and all the way to the southern tip of Africa. The chase, which went on for 21 days, has since been referred to as the world’s longest pursuit at sea. Hammarstedt has studied the history of the Viarsa 1 in detail,2 and he has no intention of repeating the mistakes of that episode. The Viarsa 1 was taken carrying 97 tons of toothfish. The vessel was observed within Australian waters, but after criminal procedures lasting several years in Australia, the ship’s officers were acquitted. The prosecuting authorities did not have the floats and fishing gear and could not prove that the fish was poached in their waters.

  That is why Operation Icefish now consists of two vessels: one to resume the chase and one to haul in the nets and secure evidence.

  For Hammarstedt it has virtually been an obsession that the chase after the Thunder would go on for longer than the Viarsa 1 chase. He has Sea Shepherd’s press division send an email to the Guinness Book of World Records.3 He now hopes that the chase is moving towards an imminent conclusion and that the authorities of the African nations located to the north will find the courage to force the Thunder in to land. Hammarstedt wants to return to the Banzare Bank to find more members of “The Bandit 6”.

  To the north lies the Mozambique Channel, the strait between Mozambique and Madagascar which is so narrow that it is impossible to navigate without moving into one country’s exclusive economic zones. If the Thunder decides to sail there, not only Mozambique and Madagascar, but also France, which controls several of the islands in the channel, will have the hunter and its prey in their national waters.

  From Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon an alert has been issued informing of the approach of the Thunder and the Bob Barker and in Mozambique the Director General of Fisheries is putting all ports from Maputo in the south to Pemba in the north in a state of preparedness. The patrol vessel the Antillas Reefer, a former pirate craft rebuilt using Norwegian and Icelandic development aid funds, is being prepared to receive the Thunder.4

  “Mozambique leads the charge against the Thunder,” Peter Hammarstedt writes in an article on Sea Shepherd’s website.5 He has a number of ulterior motives for the article. He wants to goad the rich, Western nations, who he feels should have forced the Thunder into shore a long time ago. And he wants the captain of the Thunder to know that sailing north towards East Africa will serve no purpose.

  A certain fear also reigns amongst the crew of the Bob Barker that the Thunder will set its course for the coast of Somalia. A ship named after an American multimillionaire can easily attract undesired attention.6 East African pirates will probably be far more interested in the Bob Barker than in the Thunder.

  On the Thunder several of the officers are starting to lose faith in the shipmaster’s strategy. So far he has lost every duel. Now the two ships are slowly circling each other in the southern part of the Indian Ocean, like two boxers trying to find their opponent’s weak spot.

  18

  “THE ONLY SHERIFF IN TOWN”

  THE INDIAN OCEAN, JANUARY 2015

  The Thunder is performing strange manoeuvres. The ship moves in circles, directing a searchlight on the Bob Barker, then suddenly stops and drifts for a few hours. Then the mate puts the ship in motion again, heading for a point in the middle of nowhere.

  Every day the Thunder’s captain receives an update from his wife, who is sitting home in the couple’s luxury apartment i
n Viña del Mar in Chile and following the chase on the Internet. Now he knows Hammarstedt by name and from his photograph and he knows that the Thunder – the ship that as few people as possible were supposed to know about – is currently one of the world’s most photographed vessels.

  He is desperate, he drinks and he is beginning to come apart at the seams, Hammarstedt thinks, after having called up the Thunder to receive an explanation for the confusing light signals. The Thunder’s captain is clearly drunk and as usual he refuses to give his name. Before hanging up he calls Hammarstedt an idiot and says that he doesn’t have the authority to pursue him.

  What worries Hammarstedt more than any of Cataldo’s excesses is the photograph he sees on “Marine Traffic”. A China flagged ship has sets its course in their direction. It can be on the way to a research base in Antarctica, or it can be on the way to help the Thunder. Hammarstedt calls an extraordinary crew meeting in the lounge.

  “Last night we saw a Chinese vessel heading in our direction. That brought to mind the possibility that the Thunder may try to offload their catch at sea. Alternatively they get fuel or water or other supplies from another vessel. If they do refuel at sea, we must assume that they might outlast us. That is a situation we can’t allow to occur. In the same regard, we can’t have them offloading to another vessel, then the physical evidence of the crime is gone. I won’t let them take off with this fish. And I won’t allow them to refuel,” Hammarstedt says.

  If a ship were to come to the Thunder’s aid, Hammarstedt would launch the dinghies and cut the fenders off the supply ship so the two could not position themselves side by side. His final recourse will be to put the Bob Barker between the ships.