Engdal Eskil - Catching Thunder: the true story of the worlds longest sea chase

About the Authors

Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Ster are both feature journalists at the Norwegian broadsheet Dagens Nringsliv . They have both been recipients of the prestigious SKUP Award for Investigate Journalism, in addition to numerous other awards and distinctions.

About the Translator

Diane Oatley is a writer, independent scholar and translator. Originally from the United States, she transferred to the University of Oslo in 1983, completing an MA in comparative literature there in 1990. She is a member of the Norwegian Non-fiction Translators Association and the Norwegian chapter of PEN.

CATCHING THUNDER

THE TRUE STORY OF

THE WORLDS LONGEST SEA CHASE

ESKIL ENGDAL AND KJETIL STER

TRANSLATED BY DIANE OATLEY

Catching Thunder: The True Story of the Worlds Longest Sea Chase was first published in 2016 by Fagbokforlaget, Norway, under the title Jakten p Thunder .

First published in English in 2018 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK.

Published by agreement with the Kontext Agency.

Translated by Diane Oatley.

www.zedbooks.net

Copyright Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Ster 2016.

Copyright this translation Diane Oatley 2016.

This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA.

The rights of Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Ster to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Typeset in Haarlemmer MT and Akzidenz-Grotesk Pro by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon

Cover design by David A. Gee

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781 786990877 pb

ISBN 9781786990891 pdf

ISBN 978178699090 7 epub

ISBN 9781786990914 mobi

CONTENTS

APRIL 2016

He hasnt 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 planes 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 poachi ng 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.

HOBART, AUSTRALIA, DECEMBER 2014

The Shadowlands . There is no evidence of it on any map, but Captain Peter Hammarstedt sets the ships 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 mans 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. 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.

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 cant 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 lami nated 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.