Tanker Rescues 27 From Lost Tuna Seiner off Galapagos
Last weekend, a merchant tanker rescued 27 fishermen who were forced to abandon a burning vessel off the coast of the Galapagos Islands.
On Saturday, the fishing vessel La Pena - a 240-foot tuna seiner flagged in Venezuela - was operating about 500 miles north of the Galapagos Islands in the Eastern Pacific. At about 1550 hours, the U.S. Coast Guard's rescue coordination center in Alameda, California received a notification from satcom and navigation company Garmin. The firm sells handheld satellite messaging devices that can be used to send text messages and distress signals, and its command center had received an SOS alert from a Garmin user aboard La Pena.
The device allows two-way communications, and the watchstanders in Alameda were able to text back and forth with the survivors in real time - a feature not available with an EPIRB. The survivors said that La Pena had caught fire while under way and had gone down. All 27 crewmembers were alive and afloat in the vessel's lifeboat, but had no lifejackets or provisions on board with them. They had the Garmin device, which had 37 percent battery (and decreasing).
To conserve power for comms, watchstanders in Alameda told them to turn it off for 90 minutes, then turn it on to send an update. In the meantime, the Coast Guard went about looking for a vessel that might be near enough to divert and come to their aid. The location off the coast of Central America is thinly served by conventional SAR assets, but near to the sea lanes for the Panama Canal, and reasonably well-trafficked. An AMVER query turned up two ships within 100 nautical miles, and one of them, the Seaways Kenosha, volunteered to divert and pick up the survivors.
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Seaways Kenosha doubled back on her previous course and arrived on scene at about 0330 hours on Sunday. Her crew quickly and safely recovered all of the survivors from La Pena, and the ship resumed her commercial voyage to La Pampilla, Peru. Plans are under way for returning the survivors to shore, the Coast Guard said.
“The outcome of this case is a direct result of the vigilance and professionalism of our watchstanders, who quickly pieced together limited information, coordinated with multiple domestic and international partners and directed nearby vessels to the scene,” said Capt. Patrick Dill, chief of incident management, Coast Guard Southwest District. “Their actions, together with the rapid response of motor vessel Seaways Kenosha, helped ensure 27 mariners were brought to safety from a life-threatening situation in a remote area of the Pacific Ocean.”
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