Lessons from an interview

In The Sunday Times today there is an interview with the president of the Fisheries Cooperative, which makes for interesting reading. He more or less implies, with that evasive ‘you said it, I didn’t’ approach to conversation so beloved of suspicious islanders, that the Simshar was fishing for tuna illegally.

Q. Maybe it was fishing illegally?

A. The people on board the Simshar were good people. When people talk of illegal activities, they immediately think of the worst. Maybe they feared that they were fishing when the tuna season was officially closed. It is in fishermen’s nature to catch fish for a living.

Q. So what you’re saying is that the Simshar was fishing illegally.

A. Maybe it still had the tuna fishing lines in tow.

Well, that throws new light on Mrs Carabott’s assertion that Mrs Bugeja tried to dissuade her from alerting the search and rescue services because “they’ll take our boat”. And there’s more.

Q. Are Maltese fishermen concealing their Vessel Monitoring System when they’re fishing illegally?

A. They can only do so if they switch it off, which would be irresponsible…..The Simshar was under 12 metres in length, so its owner had no obligation to have a VMS. But since it was equipped with one, it was ultimately the authority’s responsibility to ensure it was working. The Simshar’s VMS was not working during its final trip.

How’s that for passing the buck when it comes to responsibility for the functioning of the equipment on your own fishing-boat? If the VMS isn’t working, it’s not your problem but ‘the authority’s’. So you head out to sea without it, and then when trouble happens…..you can blame ‘the authority’, even if it means lives are lost, including your son’s and your father’s. And we don’t even know yet whether it really wasn’t working, or whether it had been switched off to avoid detection of the boat in places where it shouldn’t be.

Here’s some more passing the buck, in reply to a question about the fact that none of the safety equipment on board appeared to have worked.

I recall that three weeks before the incident Simon’s life vest was inside the cabin, as was the life raft. But life rafts have to be regularly serviced and nobody has taught fishermen how to maintain life rafts.

Dear God in heaven: “nobody has taught fishermen how to maintain life rafts.” Indeed. Presumably, every time fishermen buy a piece of equipment, from a satellite phone to a CD player for home, they find out how to use it and look after it. How is a life raft any different? I’ll tell you how: unlike with a CD player, the consequence of it failing to be correctly looked after is death – four deaths, in this case. I can’t imagine how fishermen, of all people, take such a cavalier approach to safety at sea. I absolutely hate anything to do with boats, and will only set foot on one that isn’t moored at a yacht marina if made to do so at gunpoint. But even I know how a life raft is maintained: you get it serviced every two years at a shipyard. And if you don’t, and your boat goes down, the life raft won’t open. And you or others who are with you end up dead.

And have you heard the latest conspiracy theory? The boy isn’t dead at all. He’s been kidnapped by Sicilian fishermen. That’s what happens when newspapers report his father’s insistence that he died in his arms as though it is hearsay, report on the search for his body as ‘the search for Teo’ as opposed to the search for his corpse, and are even now referring to the boy as missing. Missing? Why not at least use the euphemistic phrase ‘lost at sea’? Kidnapped by Sicilian fishermen….u Giezu Giez. Referring to Simon Bugeja’s insistence that Teo died as mere hearsay has serious consequences, though no newspaper reporter appears to have picked up on this. If Bugeja is not taken at his word, Teo’s death cannot be registered before seven years elapse. Because he was a child, the only problems this will create are psychological ones. Yet if Noel Carabott’s body was not found, and Simon Bugeja was not believed when he said that Carabott died, then Mrs Carabott would have been left without a widow’s pension for seven years.