Catching Thunder

The True Story of the World’s Longest Sea Chase

Eskil Engdal, Kjetil Sæter

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786990877
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786990907
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Institutions & Public Administration
• Index: Biological Sciences

December, 2014: In the forbidding waters off Antarctica, Captain Hammarstedt of the Bob Barker sets off on a voyage unlike any seen before. Across ten thousand miles of hazardous seas, Hammarstedt's crew will relentlessly pursue the Thunder – an infamous illegal fishing ship – for what will become the longest chase in maritime history. Wanted by Interpol, the Thunder has for years evaded justice: hunting endangered species and accumulating millions in profits.

The authors follow this incredible expedition from the beginning. But even as seasoned journalists, they cannot anticipate what the chase will uncover, as the wake of the Thunder leads them on the trail of criminal kingpins, rampant corruption, modern slavery and an international community content to turn a blind eye. Very soon, catching Thunder becomes not only a chase but a pursuit of the truth itself – and a symbolic race to preserve the well-being of our planet.

A Scandinavian bestseller, Catching Thunder is a remarkable true story of courage and perseverance, and a wake-up call to act against the destruction of our environments.

1

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.

2

“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.1 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 toothfish 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.2

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 toothfish 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.3 All the vessels have been blacklisted by CCAMLR, the organization that manages the living marine resources of the international maritime zone surrounding Antarctica.4

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.5 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Authors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map
• 1. The Pirate
• 2. “The Bandit 6”
• 3. Operation Icefish
• 4. The Occupation
• 5. Hot Pursuit
• 6. Operation Spillway
• 7. The Ice
• 8. Vesturvon
• 9. The Pirate Capital
• 10. The Storm
• 11. The Secret Channel
• 12. The Longest Day
• 13. The Shipmaster
• 14. Desolation Island
• 15. The Phantom Ship
• 16. The Wall of Death
• 17. The World Record
• 18. “The Only Sheriff in Town”
• 19. The Flying Mariner
• 20. A Bloody Nightmare
• 21. La Mafia Gallega
• 22. God’s Fingerprint
• 23. Buenas Tardes, Bob Barker
• 24. Message in a Bottle
• 25. Raid on the High Seas
• 26. Operation Sparrow
• 27. Exercise Good Hope
• 28. The Bird of Ill Omen
• 29. The Wanderer
• 30. The Man in the Arena
• 31. The Third Ship
• 32. “You Are Nothing”
• 33. The Snake in Paradise
• 34. The Armpit of Africa
• 35. Mayday
• 36. A Weird Dream
• 37. A Last Resort
• 38. The Island of Rumours
• 39. 48 Hours
• 40. Three Condemned Men
• 41. The Luck of the Draw
• 42. The Escape
• 43. The Unluckiest Ship in the World
• 44. The Judgment
• 45. Prisoners’ Island
• 46. The Man From Mongolia
• 47. The Last Viking
• 48. Operation Yuyus
• 49. The Tiantai Mystery
• 50. A Dirty Business
• 51. The Showdown
• 52. The Madonna and the Octopus
• 53. The Final Act
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• About Zed