Three crewmen died and three others were missing after a South Korean fishing vessel with a crew of 51 sank in icy waters in the Southern Ocean yesterday, as New Zealand rescuers abandoned their search.
The bodies of three Indonesian crewmen were recovered, but the South Korean master of the New Zealand-chartered Oyang 70 and two other Indonesian crew members were unaccounted for.
“Sadly, the chances of survival are now nil,” search and rescue coordinator Mike Roberts said after a 12-hour search by six fishing vessels in the area and an aerial sweep by a New Zealand Air Force Orion.
Forty-five survivors were recovered from life rafts, and Roberts said it was extraordinary that not more crewmen had died or been hurt.
“From what we understand, this was a catastrophic incident. The Oyang 70 sank in just 10 minutes. It is incredible that so many survived without injury,” he said.
The survivors, some of whom had mild hypothermia, were recovered from five life rafts by the New Zealand fishing vessel Amaltal Atlantis, which also located the three bodies.
The nationalities of the crew were listed as South Korean, Indonesian, Filipino and Chinese.
“We’re just looking after them as well as we can and once we’re released from the search we will be bringing them back to New Zealand,” Amaltal Atlantis skipper Greg Lyall said.
Roberts said the decision to end the search was difficult but a missing sixth life raft is believed to have gone down with the vessel and the crew would not have survived long in the bitterly cold water.
“The three [missing] men have been in the water for 12 hours,” Roberts said when he called off the search, adding that was beyond survival time in the icy waters even if they had been wearing full immersion suits.
It was not known what caused the South Korean-flagged Oyang 70 to go down, but Roberts said the sea was calm and it did not appear weather was a factor.
“We understand that she was hauling or recovering her fishing gear, with fish in the net, and she suddenly capsized and sank within 10 minutes,” Roberts said.
New Zealand’s Rescue Coordination Centre was activated when it received an alert from the positional indicator beacon on the 82m trawler at 4:40am.
Soon after, a mayday call was relayed by the nearby Amaltal Atlantis, which reported the Oyang 70 had sunk about 400 nautical miles east of the southern New Zealand city of Dunedin.
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