KEITH ANGEN
IT looked like a masalai island and seemed to have popped out of the black night sea and grabbed hold of the ship’s hull.
“What happened, Michael!” the captain exclaimed as he hastily entered the wheelhouse from the captain's cabin.
As he spoke, two big waves thumped the side of the ship and we all grabbed hold of something.
“What course are we steering?” Captain Karl asked me, a trainee sailor.
“Steering course three-three-zero, Captain,” I replied.
Captain Karl fiddled with the GPS then said, “We’re doomed. Pack your important stuff and get ready to abandon ship. Tell the crew to assemble on the stern deck.”
I forgot about Michael, the chief officer on watch, and ran down from the wheelhouse into my cabin. My heart was beating hard and all I could think of was to get into my life jacket and prepare to jump into the sea.
The abandon ship drill I’d learned at the Papua New Guinea Maritime College was being put to the test in a real life emergency.
The crew rushed from their cabins looking confused, their eyes wide open.
“We’re abandoning ship, everyone muster on the stern deck,” I relayed the captain's message. They moved there and waited for the captain to give final orders. But the captain was still inside his living quarters.
The deck lights came on and the sea on the port side looked a blurred green colour. Another wave thumped the starboard side and the ship swayed.
Michael fell to the deck, stripping skin off his knees and was helped to his feet by a crew member.
Still we waited for the captain to give his final order.
But the order to abandon ship never came. The captain stood on the starboard bridge wing looking around.
“There are trees,” I said to myself, and then said aloud to the other crew, “We’re beached.”
Then everybody saw the surf breaking on the sand. It was a miracle. The ship was on the beach and stable, like a parked car.
Most of the crew had no seamanship training, and were in a state of great alarm.
I reflected on the survival at sea training sessions on MV Kabul and felt calm.
It had been a quarter to three in the morning when the vessel jerked several times before the captain rushed into the wheelhouse to investigate.
Michael was the duty officer on watch and I was the helmsman at the time MV Kabul met her fate. During watch keeping an officer is responsible for navigation while the helmsman receives steering commands and applies the steering on the helm.
So it was that MV Kabul, which had once freighted store goods from Rabaul to Buka and backloaded copra and cocoa, became stranded on the beach of Lamassa Island in New Ireland. None of us had any idea what the place was called.
The crew sheltered under a makeshift tarpaulin on the beach of this unknown place. Our camp was about ten metres wide on dry beach sand between the shore line and a swamp.
A native Papua New Guinean would consider this a ples masalai, place of the swamp spirits.
Nearby was a reed-filled fresh water lagoon. There were crocodiles here – and in the swamp. We were anxious not to be on their menu.
“When we sleep, the watchman must keep an eye out for the crocs,” Captain Karl instructed. “If you see anything crawling towards the camp, wake us up. We are living among crocodiles. At night they will come around.”
Each night the crocodiles’ red eyes reflected the torch light. There were enough pairs of eyes to indicate about 10 crocodiles. Nobody left that shelter at night.
As we unloaded water and food from Kabul, we met up with some local villagers who brought fruit and vegetables. Captain Karl gave them cans of fish and rice in exchange.
During that period of isolation awaiting rescue, tapioca cake became a favourite delicacy. Scraped pieces of tapioca root was wrapped in banana leaves and roasted in the mumu, earth oven then boiled in coconut milk.
The tapioca cake picked up the spirits of the stranded crew. The generous villagers also brought young coconuts for us to drink.
The crew used empty jars of peanut butter and turned them into improvised lamps that burned using diesel fuel from the ship. Fishing spears were made from wire and fastened to bamboo the size of the thumb finger, known as tiktik in the native language.
I speared mullet and batfish in the lagoon and along some of the canals between the rows of reeds. I positioned himself on low lying branches of the mangkas tree, getting a clear view of the water below. The mullet swam in schools up and down the canal.
“Are you from the Sepik?” the bosun, Clement, asked. “I see you are a skilled spear fisherman.”
“My mother is from the river and my father is from the mountain,” I explained. “But I grew up in a place surrounded by mangrove swamp with a beach within walking distance.
“I spent a lot of time as a kid spear fishing. One of my elder brothers taught me.”
I was 24 back then and did not think much about going home. The camp became home so quickly. It resembled the environment where I grew up as a child. Surviving in this place was not a problem.
Our stranding lasted for three weeks before a passing small copra boat took us to Rabaul.
The captain and agent of MV Kabul left the camp together with the ship’s owner, who had visited the camp by helicopter in the first week of the stranding.
The workshop engineer and ship's engineer took a risky voyage by banana boat to Rabaul crossing the strait between Lamassa Island on the south eastern corner of New Ireland and south western corner of East New Britain.
Finally, the remaining crew arrived in Rabaul. It was an adventure. The stranding of a ship's crew turned into a holiday camp. Everyone was healthy and well.
Lamassa Island lingers in my memory as an adventure. The place was a masalai island where tapioca cake beat pizza every day.