Catching Thunder

The True Story of the World's Longest Sea Chase

Zed Books Ltd

Contents

THE PIRATE

APRIL 2016

He hasn't slept in the past 24 hours, he says.

The rain is beating down against the large window panes of the airport terminal. He is standing in the arrival hall and holding a sign bearing our names, as if we were meeting for a conference or a safari.

There is nothing distinguishing him from the cluster of taxi drivers battling their way through the tiny group of travellers who have just landed in the provincial town, the name of which he has asked us not to reveal.

"Who gave you my phone number?" he asks over and over again on our way out to the waiting car.

He feared it was a trap – that it was the past that had brought down the plane's landing gear.

"These people are capable of murder to protect their name and their profits."

His sole motivation for wanting to meet us is greed, the same motivation that sent him on mission after mission to the Southern Ocean. He is demanding a considerable amount of money for telling his story, along with the assurance that we will disclose neither his identity nor that of the city, the country or even the continent where we meet.

Every morning he arrives, trudging dutifully to the hotel, listing names and places, trying to untangle the various poaching expeditions, to remember details that time has erased from his mind. He is neither well-spoken nor particularly observant. Now and then the stories are choppy waves that suddenly break – and then spill out into a large, uniform mass.

As soon as he is done with his story, he hurries off to the day job that has kept him alive since he was forced to go ashore from the Thunder. His only friends appear to be some neighbourhood dogs and a young nephew.

When he signed on with the Thunder in Malaysia, the ship had been wanted by Interpol for one year. On the way from land in the dinghy that transported him through the darkness to the Thunder's anchoring site, he had an uneasy feeling that something terrible was going to happen.

"THE BANDIT 6"

HOBART, AUSTRALIA, DECEMBER 2014

The Shadowlands. There is no evidence of it on any map, but Captain Peter Hammarstedt sets the ship's course for this region on the afternoon of 3 December 2014. He sails the MY Bob Barker down the River Derwent, towards the capricious Storm Bay and out on a 15-day voyage to an out-of-the-way purgatory with the worst winds and the highest waves of all the oceans in the world.

He is headed into no man's land. There he will bring down a mafia operation. There are very few people who believe he will succeed.

His boyish haircut and reluctant beard growth make the Swedish-American shipmaster seem younger than his 30 years. Despite his youth, he is already a veteran of the militant environmental movement Sea Shepherd. The target is a fleet of vessels that are poaching the Patagonian toothfish, a deep sea delicacy that can be just as profitable as narcotics or human trafficking. The trawlers and longline fishing vessels operate in a region so inhospitable and inaccessible that the chances of locating them are negligible. Should he find the vessels, he will chase them out of the Southern Ocean, destroy the fishing gear and hand the crew over to the coast guard or port authorities.

Before setting out from the Tasmanian capital of Hobart, Hammarstedt studied the target of his search in depth. He scrutinized the maps of the regions where the fleet of illegal fishing vessels had formerly been observed by research vessels and surveillance planes. Now he is trying to think like a fisherman, studying the underwater topography and the banks where large concentrations of Patagonian tooth-fish might be found. In the Ross Sea, the bay cutting into the continent of Antarctica, there are a number of legal fishing vessels. The area is also regularly frequented by Navy vessels, which makes it less likely that fleets of poachers will be found there. Instead, he decides to sail towards the Banzare Bank – an underwater plateau jutting up out of the plunging depths of the Antarctic. It is this region that Hammarstedt calls the "Shadowlands". He is pleased with the term; he came up with it himself. It sounded edgy, almost a little Pulp Fiction-ish, he thinks. It will take him two weeks to sail there. From there he will start the search.

Eventually, as the Bob Barker nears the 60th parallel and the northern border of the Southern Ocean, he has the crew of 31 men and women do training drills. In "the Screaming Sixties" the clear blue surface of the ocean can rise up without warning and transform into deep green, ferocious walls of water and hurricanes are so common that they are never given names. The volunteer crew practises "man overboard" procedures, evacuation, confrontation tactics and the use of shields in the dinghies.

When Hammarstedt engaged in close combat with Japanese whaling ships, he met with aggressive resistance, but he knew that they would not undertake any actions leading to the loss of human lives. With a pirate fleet he can't anticipate what lies in store. The illegal fishing activity taking place in the Antarctic constitutes one of the most lucrative fish poaching operations in the world and Hammarstedt has prepared the crew for the possibility that the pirates can resort to the use of weapons.

On the starboard side of the bridge he has posted a laminated sign in A4 format. The words "Wanted – Rogue tooth-fish poaching vessels – The Bandit 6" are printed on it in blood-red letters against a sandy-brown background. The culprits are the ships the Thunder, Viking, Kunlun, Yongding, Songhua and Perlon – a fleet of battered trawlers and longline fishing vessels that have been plundering the valuable Antarctic Patagonian toothfish stock for years. All the vessels have been blacklisted by CCAMLR, the organization that manages the living marine resources of the international maritime zone surrounding Antarctica.

The 64-year old Perlon has been blacklisted by the authorities since 2003. The Yongding has been looting the Southern Ocean for at least ten years. The Kunlun is the smallest, but perhaps best known and is affiliated with a Spanish mafia network. Then there is the large Songhua, with the characteristic low deck afore, which has being fishing illegally in Antarctica since 2008.

At the very top of the poster are photos of the two ships Hammarstedt has been daydreaming about. The Viking – a rusty hulk that glides silently in and out of Asian ports with its illegal cargo – the first fishing vessel ever to be wanted by Interpol. And then the Norwegian-built trawler the Thunder, also wanted by Interpol. The owner is to have earned more than EUR 60 million on the plundering of the Antarctic. It is the Thunder he wants most to find.

Hammarstedt has put copies of the Interpol notices on a shelf on the bridge. If he finds one of the vessels, he will pose by the railing with the mafia ship in the background and the laminated Interpol notice in his hand. Then the ship's photographer will take a picture of him.

After nine days at sea, at 61 degrees south, they spot the first icebergs: two towering ice cathedrals with dripping facades and ephemeral spires. Hammarstedt guides the Bob Barker around the icebergs so the crew can dwell upon the landscape, as a hint of what lies in store.

The first person to sail into the Antarctic Circle, James Cook, had a terrified and freezing crew on his hands, who later described the frozen wasteland as the forecourt of Hell. "The whole scene looked like the wrecks of a shattered world, or as the poets describe some regions of hell; an idea which struck us the more forcibly, as execrations, oaths, and curses re-echoed about us on all sides," the scientist George Forster wrote, a crew member on Cook's second journey.

For the crew of the Bob Barker the Antarctic is an idea of the world as they wished it to be: pristine, peaceful and timeless. Beneath them lies a lost continent, the Kerguelen Plateau – an enormous land mass that was formed by a series of volcanic eruptions 110 million years ago. The continent was three times larger than Japan; tropical flora and fauna were presumably to be found here. And then, 20 million years ago, the continent slowly began sinking. Today it lies hidden more than one kilometre beneath the ocean's surface. The only dry remains of the lost continent are Kerguelen, McDonald and Heard Islands with mountain peaks higher than any to be found on the Australian mainland and named after French explorers, Australian scientists and Norwegian whalers. Norwegian Bay. Mount Olsen. Mawson Peak.

In the depths between the continental shelf and the continental slopes lives the Patagonian toothfish, a petulant and repulsive giant that can grow to a weight of 120 kilos and live more than 50 years. It starts its life in the shallows close to land and it is not until the age of six to seven years that it sets out to swim down into the ice-cold darkness of 1,000 to 2,000-metre depths. After a specimen was caught and described at the end of the nineteenth century, it lived in oblivion until it was rediscovered by chance and served at restaurants in the USA in the 1980s. The fatty, pearly white and boneless meat created a gastronomic sensation. The flavour of the tooth-fish resembled a mixture of lobster and scallops, and some called it the best tasting fish in the world. A British restaurant critic offered his readers the following advice: "It is seriously endangered, so you'd better eat as much as you can while stocks last."

The hunt for "the white gold" generated hidden fortunes, cost hundreds of lives in shipwrecks and accidents at sea and came close to wiping out the slow-maturing delicacy.

On the eve of 16 December, the Bob Barker sails into the southern part of the Banzare Bank. The ocean around him seems untouched by time, but on the map Hammarstedt can read fragments of the continent's history. He sees remnants of greedy ambitions and incredible heroism: stretches of open sea, hills and mountainsides that have been named after wives and mistresses, rulers, patrons, heroes who froze to death, or sheer hallucinations.

The Banzare Bank was discovered and named by the Australian polar hero Douglas Mawson. On his first large-scale expedition to Antarctica, Mawson spent two winters at a stony outpost that turned out to be the windiest place on earth. During a sledding trip he lost two members of his team. When Mawson set out on his next expedition from Cape Town in October 1929, the "heroic" era of explorations of the Antarctic had come to an end. But there were still large white patches on the map.

The Banzare expedition's express objective was scientific, but in reality it would undercut "aggressive" Norwegian expeditions and territorial claims. In January, Mawson met the Norvegia expedition led by the Norwegian pilot and polar pioneer Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen. The two agreed to explore the Antarctic, each on their respective side of the 45th parallel, an agreement that is considered to be the first international treaty in Antarctica.

Peter Hammarstedt's hope is that clear regulations and agreements will also be imposed on modern day fishing and environmental protection – and that somebody will ensure their compliance.

The Swedish captain guides the ship into the shelter of an ice tongue to protect it from the swells rolling in from the west. He will commence the search from here. First, he will sail directly into the middle of the bank and then cross it from west to east. It will take two weeks to cover the entire area, the radar will pick up on each and every movement within 12 nautical miles, and the light of the Antarctic summer will allow him to search around the clock. Hammarstedt knows the fishing vessels he is chasing have probably also posted a sentry who is monitoring the radar and that the Bob Barker could be detected long before they gain any actual visual contact with a vessel. He has, however, studied the six ships thoroughly and believes the Bob Barker with its 3,000 horsepower is faster than they are.

When he assembles the crew in the lounge, a number of them are wracked with seasickness.

"We will start the search from the west. Then we'll go south towards the ice. We could come across a ship at any time. Crow's nest watch starts tonight. Action station drill after lunch and first aid training after that," Hammarstedt says.

The search will probably take several weeks.

The banks of fog rising from the ocean thicken. Every half hour Hammarstedt is on the bridge checking the radar image. It is covered with a scattering of dots – icebergs that have broken away from the Amery Ice Shelf, a gigantic platform of ice extending out from the Antarctic land mass. The only thing distinguishing an iceberg from a ship on the radar screen is the speed. If a vessel is fishing, it will move slowly, perhaps at the same pace as the icebergs. For that reason Hammarstedt wants an additional pair of eyes that can decipher the objects picked up by the radar.

The weather hits harder in the crow's nest than anywhere else on the ship. The person standing at the top of the mast has nothing more than a thin steel shield for protection from the wind. This individual must constantly scan the water surface in search of ships and net floats. One is more likely to spot something from the corner of the eye than straight ahead in one's field of vision. Most of the crew members volunteer for a shift in the crow's nest; everyone wants to be the first one to spot the Thunder.

Forty to fifty objects are now visible on the radar. It's like staring at a pepperoni pizza and the bridge sentry calls up to the watchstander in the crow's nest constantly, reporting the direction and distance to whatever cannot be identified on the radar. But the only thing in sight is the glassy ocean and an iceberg drifting in and out of the fog. One day after they have commenced the search, the Bob Barker is located 300 nautical miles from Davis Bay and 150 nautical miles from the ice edge.

"We could find them at any minute," Hammarstedt says.

On the radar, Hammarstedt suddenly sees one of the slowly floating dots move in the opposite direction, away from the icebergs' sluggish trajectory. It is maintaining a speed of six knots on a course headed southwest. It has to be a ship. Has the ship seen the Bob Barker ? Should he change course to cut them off or will that attract attention?

A few minutes later, in the crow's nest, the seaman Jeremy Tonkin spots three orange, interlinked fishing buoys bobbing in the ocean on the starboard side of the Bob Barker. It is very likely that they belong to an illegal fishing vessel, Hammarstedt thinks. As soon as there is visual contact from the bridge with the unknown vessel, he tells the crew to stand by.

The ship is enveloped in fog when he first catches sight of it.

"That's a fishing boat," Hammarstedt says.

"Oh yeah," first mate and second-in-command Adam Meyerson confirms. "It looks very much like the Thunder, Peter. It's got the same paint configuration and the forward bridge."

From photographs Meyerson is able to recognize the outline of the vessel now emerging out of the mist, its protruding wheelhouse and the characteristic steep stern of the old trawler.