Chapter 23
Earlier that morning and unknown to anyone, a French research vessel, La Lisette was moored seven miles off the coast of Cape San Vicente in the North Atlantic, at the southern-most tip of the Portuguese peninsula, at the farthest end of continental Europe.
Months before he died, Jim Ashby had wanted to find out anything he could about the sinking of the Captain Stratos. For this reason, he’d chartered the Lisette on its way back to Le Havre from the Antarctic. It was to stop off and examine the area of the fatality and locate the wreck if possible.
As the search began, a storm could be seen, brewing on the horizon. Slowly, it was making its way eastward, ready to sweep in across the Algarve and the nearest towns of Lagos and Faro.
The Lisette’s captain knew they didn’t have long before heading in to port so he ordered his crew to work more quickly to get their divers into the water.
The Captain Stratos was said to have sunk in over a thousand feet of water with the loss of everyone on board including the ship’s master and crew, almost three years earlier. Remarkably, since that time, no-one had located or surveyed the wreck or found out what had caused the ship to go down. None of the cargo had washed up or been salvaged.
Although the divers could not go beyond thirty or forty feet before suffering decompression sickness, the Lisette’s captain had been asked to do everything he could to find the wreck. His ship had underwater cameras fixed beneath the hull and with these and a rudimentary sonar system, he hoped to get some idea of where the wreck was situated, what its condition was and the extent of any underwater debris such as cargo. Sometimes when a ship goes down, a large number of loose objects leave a trail as they’re scattered across the ocean floor. The divers would be looking for random objects as a marker. Whether any of the cargo would be seen was anyone’s guess.
What they expected to find, no-one knew. After half a day, they hadn’t had much luck discovering anything – not even the precise location of the wreck : the position given in the distress calls had so far drawn a blank. There was nothing at all to indicate that the co-ordinates given were the final resting place of the ship.
The information available was limited – satellite navigation systems and digital beacons hadn’t been invented : the Portuguese coastguard had picked up a number of signals requesting assistance ; these were also received by some ships in the area on the fatal night ; the Captain Stratos had struck some unchartered rocks or a submerged obstacle off the coastline, was holed in the forward section, rapidly taking in water and listing bow-first. When the distress calls were finally answered and two other ships arrived in the area of the sinking four hours later at daybreak, they found nothing apart from a large oil slick on the surface of the water. This seemed to indicate that the ship had gone down very quickly. There was no sign of the crew or the Captain or any lifeboats and it was assumed that everyone had perished and had not had time to abandon ship. The oil slick was observed to cover a wide area of the water around the last position given in the distress calls which meant that oil was leaking out of the wreck.
With nothing else to go on, the Portuguese maritime authorities notified the Greek owners and the London shipping agents in Lagos and Lisbon that the Captain Stratos was a total loss : there was no sign of the ship itself to be seen in the water or the cargo it had been carrying or anything at all which could be salvaged. There was no sign of survivors.
At the position on the map where the Stratos was reported to have gone down, the captain of the Lisette decided that a further three hours in the afternoon was long enough. The approaching storm was only a matter of miles away. The crew were ordered to bring up the divers and quickly make the ship ready to reach the nearest port before the storm made landfall.
For the Lisette’s master, the entire exercise had been a waste of time. The pictures they’d taken were murky at best and showed nothing that even hinted at the outline of a wreck or any strewn cargo. The divers had been unable to see much and were prevented from going down to the full depth where the wreck was apparently lying. The sonar had failed to turn up anything.
Most surprising of all, was that none of these had identified any underwater rocks which were uncharted and which the master of the Captain Stratos had reported hitting before his ship went down.
Within an area of five square kilometres from the exact position of the sinking, there were no rocks or obstacles. In fact, the notations given on the most up to date charts of the area were entirely correct. Also, there was no other sunken wreckage which the Stratos could have struck. And this meant that if the position reported to the coastguard was wrong, then the ship could have sunk almost anywhere along the entire Portuguese coast.
Plantation A Legal Thriller Page 23
