Two Diverting Ships Rescue 27 From Burning Tuna Seiner Off Galapagos
A satellite text message and an AMVER call reached a casualty 450 miles offshore
A tuna seiner that caught fire in the eastern Pacific has been evacuated with all 27 crew recovered, after an alerting chain that ran from a handheld satellite messenger to a commercial ship on passage.
At about 2000 hours on Thursday the US Coast Guard's Southwest District received distress alerts from the fishing vessel Drennec. Alongside an EPIRB signal, the service received a message sent from a Garmin inReach satellite text-messaging device over the Iridium network. The crewmember carrying the device informed Garmin that the vessel had caught fire at a position roughly 450 nautical miles southwest of the Galapagos Islands, and that everyone aboard had abandoned ship safely into a life raft. Garmin passed the message to the Coast Guard.
The casualty position lies far beyond the reach of helicopter search and rescue capability. Watchstanders at Southwest District instead activated the AMVER system, which identifies merchant vessels in a position to assist. The boxship Oluf Maersk and the fishing vessel Ricky A both agreed to divert from their voyages.
Both arrived on scene, and Ricky A recovered all 27 members of the Drennec's crew in good health. The vessel plans to land them at Guayaquil. Rescue coordinator Doug Samp called the recovery of 27 crew within 11 hours of the distress alert in so remote an area an incredible achievement.
Drennec is an 80-metre tuna seiner homeported at Guayaquil, Ecuador. The vessel does not appear to report positions regularly over AIS, and its pattern of commercial activity is not established from open transmissions.
That absence is characteristic of much of the distant-water tuna fleet, which operates far outside coastal receiver range and where an AIS gap of days is unremarkable rather than suspicious. It also means that in a high-seas casualty the alerting chain rests on carriage-mandated distress equipment and on personal satellite devices, with AMVER supplying the only practical picture of which hulls are close enough to turn.
The two responding ships were both on commercial voyages when the call went out. Neither the fire's cause nor the extent of damage to the Drennec has been established.
