Here is a newspaper article on the incident, and here is the website that broke the story originally.
To summarize: passengers on cruise ship saw a small fishing boat adrift at sea, on a day when they saw no other ships or boats. As they were birdwatchers, they had very good binoculars and could see the boat’s crew waving shirts vigorously up-and-down as a distress signal. The passengers reported it to the cruise-ship crew, but the captain (at least as a crewman relayed to the passengers) decided they were signaling the cruise liner to stay away from their nets and thus steered the cruise ship away from them. :smack:
The passengers weren’t convinced, so they e-mailed the U.S. Coast Guard to report the incident even though the incident was not in U.S. waters. The boat was rescued two weeks after the sighting, but as stated above two of the three had died in the meanwhile.
I would say rather sarcastically, “Oh Lord, not again!” but Captain Lord at least had the excuse for not acting sooner that he would have been putting his own ship at serious risk of sinking itself. :dubious: It wouldn’t have killed this captain to stop, launch a boat, and go see what was going on. An hour lost, at most, on a cruise when nobody is in a particular hurry. Not stopping, it turns out, did kill someone. :mad:
I dunno, waving T-shirts is a pretty ambiguous sign, and ships have so many standardized ways of signalling distress that I’m inclined to cut the Captain some slack for assuming they were OK.
Is there a standized way of saying definitively “stay away from our nets” and “thank you for staying away from our nets”? Because if the three adrift Panamanians didn’t signal that, I don’t think it lets the cruise ship captain off the hook here. My point is that the captain didn’t know what the signals meant; he guessed at a meaning that would allow him to take the least inconvenient action.
But the “panama-guide.com” page that I (badly ) linked to in my first posting says that the cruise-ship captain
In the YouTube video interview embedded in the webpage, the survivor is asked if the boat had a radio and he shakes his head.
Thus, the only “contact” was the vigorous cloth-waving by the fisherman. :smack:
Reading the post by xenophon41 on preview, I agree that the cruise captain chose the most convenient interpretation. That’s why I made the reference to Captain Lord of “they’re just company signal rockets/we can’t see his lights anymore because he turned/etcetera” infamy.
The captain may have been in contact with a fishing fleet unconnected with the disabled vessel at some point prior to siting the boat in question. If he’d just altered his course per their direction, I have to agree with Simplicio that this would have been a factor in his decision not to investigate their situation. But I think the timing of the request and the course correction would have had to have been very close sequentially to the siting be a decent excuse.
The Captain didn’t claim to have been in radio contact with the stranded fishing boat. He claimed he was in contact with a separate fishing fleet. When he saw the stranded boat, he assumed wrongly it was part of fleet he’d just talked to. The fact that the stranded boat didn’t have a radio doesn’t contradict his story.
I used to work for a sea rescue service, and its pretty common to make some sort of physical acknowledgement when another craft complies with a request made on radio. I don’t think it was unreasonable for the Captain to assume that’s what was happening here.
(plus, while I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, the fishermen should’ve had a radio. Or flares. Or a flag. Or a sign. Or someway of making any of the dozen or so internationally recognized distress signals)
People wave at Cruise ships all the time. I don’t think its reasonable to expect the Captain to stop the ship everytime to make sure they aren’t really in distress.
To be fair, given that they didn’t even have a radio, I doubt they’d be up to speed on those laws. If I were in the same situation I’d have done the exact same thing and I’d have been pissed off that the cruise ship went in the opposite direction.
Then again, if I had some nets I didn’t want the cruise ship entangling, I’d have also done the exact same thing, so I don’t doubt that the cruise captain had the best intentions.
Hindsight is always clearer, but it seems to me that anyone with the time and resources to operate a vessel should have the time to learn this sort of thing and obtain minimal safety gear.
Anyway, the point is that (based on the facts given) it would have been reasonable for the cruise ship captain to assume that the fishing vessel was not in any kind of distress given that none of the traditional distress signals were being displayed.
Isn’t there some kind of authority or international body the captain could have radioed and asked to check things out? Who’s in charge of rescues on the high seas?
I think the captain of the cruise ship should have investigated a bit more. When the cruise ship sighted the fishing vessel they were both about 150 miles from land. According to the article, panga fishing boats do not typically operate beyond the sight of land. I’m not a sailor though. Is this something the captain or other members of the crew should have been aware of? This doesn’t absolve the skipper of the panga boat for not having the proper safety gear or knowledge of maritime emergency signaling protocols.
If someone had written the scenario as a script for a movie I would find it an unbelievable comedy of errors. Everything had to go wrong for the pangu crew. The engine had to die, then they score big on the luck lottery when a cruise ship just happens by, but the cruise ship confuses the pangu boat as belonging to another fleet and the pangu crew do not have the proper equipment or knowledge of maritime protocols to effectively communicate their need for help.
I’m also wondering what happened re: the email the bird-watcher sent to the US Coast Guard. According to the link, when she realized the cruise ship wasn’t stopping and she thought the fishing boat was in distress, she emailed the US Coast Guard and included the last known GPS coordinates of the fishing boat. In the email she acknowledged that it wasn’t in US waters - but is it possible to find out if they did receive the email? And what would they have done about it - would they have forwarded the information to the coast guard of the nearest country? What if it wasn’t in anyone’s territorial waters?
I am very familiar with the coastal waters of Panama and the practices of small-boat fishermen there (as well as pelagic birding). In fact I will be cruising those waters next week. As the article says, boats this size do not typically venture out of sight of land. At the time it was encountered by the cruise ship, the boat was way way farther out than a boat that size should have been. This would be like encountering a VW bug in the middle of the Sahara. Any competent seaman should have recognized that something was very, very wrong. A boat that size, that far out, should automatically have been considered to be in possible distress. The fishing boats that go out that far are much larger.
The contention that the cruise ship was trying to avoid fishing nets, if that is what the cruise ship crew member said, would have to be a fabrication. If the boat had been deploying a net behind, it would have been evident in the binoculars. In fact, the birdwatcher’s account to the Coast Guard says that they could see the nets hung from the masts at the time. Since the birder’s could see this, and they provided their binoculars to the crew member they talked to, it should have been evident to him too.
The captain was clearly not in contact with the panga by radio, since they had no radio. It’s not clear what “fishing fleet” could possibly have been meant in the account, since the birders reported no other vessels in sight at the time. If the cruise ship was in contact with any other vessels by radio, they were evidently out of sight over the horizon. So the cruise ship could not have been avoiding their nets.
In short, the whole account offered by the cruise line is absurd. A small boat that far out should have been considered as almost certainly in distress and investigated. The boat was not deploying its nets, as was visible in binoculars, so there would be no reason to avoid it.
It’s not clear whether the crew member who the birders contacted accurately reported what the captain said (or even if the crew member actually spoke to the captain). But there certainly should be a inquiry to determine who on the cruise ship was responsible for not responding to a vessel that was obviously in distress.
The vast majority of such boats in Panama lack the safety gear that might be required in developed countries. (I’m not exactly sure what might be required on a small boat intended for coastal waters in the US.) Regardless of what the standard signaling protocols might be, frantically waving a shirt and life jacket should have been recognized as indicating distress.
In March, there are strong trade winds in Panama that would have blown the boat away from shore. There is also often a strong offshore breeze in the late afternoon. They may have had paddles, but would probably not have oars. If they were just going out fishing for the day, it would be unlikely that they would have had enough fabric to make an effective sail and in any case the wind would have blown them away from shore.
) linked to in my first posting says that the cruise-ship captain