As he prepares to leave after almost a decade reporting from China, our reporter reflects on his ringside seat watching a developing country transform itself

When I moved to Beijing in August 2003, I believed I had the best job in the world: working for my favourite newspaper in the biggest nation at arguably the most dramatic phase of transformation in its history. In the past decade, it has given me a front-row seat to watch 200-odd years of industrial development playing at fast forward on a continent-wide screen with a cast of more than a billion.

That said, I am glad my daughters were young and easy to please back then or we might well have taken the first plane out of the country. As we drove from the airport to our apartment, I tried to maintain an upbeat chatter. “Look at all the kites,” I said as we passed Chaoyang park, even though my heart sank at the tatty buildings, endless construction sites and stultifying haze. In my head, I asked myself: “Have I done the right thing for them?”

We had come from Japan – a democratic, comfortable, polite, hygiene-obsessed, orderly, first-world nation – to the grim-looking capital of a developing, nominally communist country that looked and sounded like a giant building site. For all enthusiasm, my family must have felt we were taking a step backwards in lifestyle.

It required an adjustment of preconceptions. Like many newcomers, I delighted at discoveries of Chinese literature and Daoist philosophy, Beijing parks, the edgy eccentricity of Dashanzi and the glorious mix of classicism and obscenity in the Chinese language, though I never managed to master it. The mix of communist politics and capitalist economics appeared to have created a system designed to exploit people and the environment like never before. It was so unequal that Japan appeared far more socialist by comparison. And it was changing fast. As swaths of the capital were being demolished and rebuilt for the Olympics, there was an exhilarating (and sometimes disorientating) sense of mutability. Everything seemed possible.

Looking back over the stories that followed, it is hard to believe so much could be compressed into such a short span of time – the outbreaks of Sars and bird flu, the attempted assassination of the president of Taiwan, deadly unrest in Tibet, the devastating earthquake in Sichuan, murderous ethnic violence in Xinjiang, as well as the huge regional stories: two tsunamis – in 2004 in the Indian Ocean and last year in the Pacific, a multiple nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, and the protracted rattling of nuclear sabres on the Korean peninsula.

One of my first tasks in 2003 was to chose a Chinese name. I opted for “Hua Zhong”, partly because it sounds a little like “Watts, Jon”, but mainly because the characters mean “Sincere to China” – something I was determined to be as a reporter. Nine years later, that sentiment has not faded. But at various times, I have been called a communist sympathiser, supporter of Taiwan, a stooge of the Dalai Lama.

However, my focus has been on development and its impact on individuals and the environment. In 2003, China had the world’s sixth-biggest GDP. It passed France in 2004, Britain in 2006, Germany in 2009, and Japan in 2011. On current course, it will replace the US as No 1 within the next 15 years. It has already top in terms of internet population, energy consumption and the size of its car market.

A decade of dominance

The primary driver for change has been the movement of people. Over the past nine years 120 million Chinese people – almost twice the population of the UK – have moved from the countryside to the city. This mind-boggling shift has its problems, as I found in Chongqing, but for the most part, China appears to have avoided the worst of the poverty, crime and ghettoes seen in other rapidly urbanising countries.

Yet it also seems more brittle, perhaps because of the other big economic engine: infrastructure investment. In this period, China has been re-wired and re-plumbed. There has been an extraordinary expansion of power, transport and communication networks that have linked the nation like never before: west-east gas pipelines, south-north water diversion, hundreds of airports and a massive new electricity grid linking wind and solar power plants in the deserts to power-hungry consumers in cities and industrial plants.

This has been a decade of cement and steel, a time when economic development has pushed into the most remote corners of China with a series of prestige projects: the world’s highest railway, the biggest dam, the longest bridge, putting a man into space, the most ambitious hydroengineering project in human history and, of course, hosting – and dominating – the Olympics for the first time.

It has been a privilege to watch this redistribution of wealth and power from the developed to the developing world. On a global level, such a shift will require nothing less than a grand accommodation – or a violent conflict. Beijing appears to be preparing for both. Other news during this period showed a hardening of China’s military muscle: a breakthrough satellite-killing missile test, the launch of a first aircraft carrier, the development of a new stealth fighter and a steady increase in military spending.

Criticism has rarely been appreciated. All too often, there have been flare-ups of anti-foreign media hostility. Some of my colleagues in other media organisations have received death threats. I never expected China to be an easy place to work as a journalist. For political and cultural reasons, there is a huge difference in expectations of the media. For historical and geo-strategic reasons, there is a lingering distrust of foreign reporters.

Run-ins with the police, local authorities or thugs are depressingly common. I have been detained five times, turned back six times at roadblocks (including during several efforts to visit Tibetan areas) and physically manhandled on a couple of occasions. Members of state security have sometimes followed interviewees and invited my assistants “out for tea”, to question them on who I was meeting and where I planned to visit. Censors have shut down a partner website that translated Guardian articles into Mandarin. Police have twice seized my journalist credentials, most recently on this year’s World Press Freedom Day after I tried to interview the blind human-rights activist Chen Guangcheng in hospital. When that happened, I debated with another British newspaper reporter who was in the same position about whether to report on the confiscation. He argued that it was against his principles for journalists to become part of the story. I used to believe the same, but after nine years in China, I have seen how coverage is influenced by a lack of access, intimidation of sources and official harassment. I now believe reporters are doing a disservice to their readers if they fail to reveal these limitations on their ability to gather information.

Yes, there is often negative coverage and yes, many of the positive developments in China are underemphasised. But I don’t think it does the country’s international image any favours to clumsily choke access to what is happening on the ground.

Treated like a spy, I have sometimes had to behave like one. At various times, I’ve concealed myself under blankets in a car, hidden in a toilet, waited until dark in a safe house and met sources in the middle of the night to avoid detection.

At other times, it is Chinese journalists and officials who pull the screen of secrecy aside. Take the foot-and-mouth outbreak on the outskirts of Beijing in 2005. I was first alerted to this by a Chinese reporter, who was frustrated that the propaganda department had ordered the domestic media not to run the story.

Foreign ministry officials often tell me China is becoming more open and, indeed, there have been steps in that direction. But restrictions create fertile ground for rumour-mongering. One of the biggest changes in this period has been the spread of ideas through mobile phones and social networks. The 513 million netizens in China (up from 68 million in 2003) have incomparably greater access to information than any previous generation and huge numbers now speak out in ways that might have got them threatened or detained in 2003. Microblogs are perhaps nowhere more influential than in China because there is so little trust of the communist-controlled official media.

It has been fun watching netizens create an ingenious new language to evade restrictions. In this anti-authoritarian world, the heroes are the “grass mud horses” (which, in Chinese, sounds the same as a core banned phrase: “Fuck your mother!”) while the villains are the river crabs (which is pronounced like “harmony” – the favourite excuse of the authorities when they crack down on dissent). But ultimately, a journalist wants to see things for him or herself. I will never forget the epic road trips – across the Tibetan plateau, along the silk road, through the Three Gorges and most memorably from Shangri-la to Xanadu. Along the way, I met remarkable people with extraordinary stories. True to the oft-heard criticism of the foreign media, many were from the “dark side”: a young man in Shaoguan who confessed – as the shadows lengthened on the building site where we had our interview – to killing Uighur co-workers at his toy factory because of a rumour they had raped Han women; a gynaecologist in Yunnan who argued with great conviction that it had once been necessary to tie pregnant women up to carry out abortions; the young boy who found the body of his dead grandmother who killed herself a year after his father – an illegal migrant – phoned her to say he was about to drown in what became known as the Morecambe Bay disaster.

Other stories literally turned up on my doorstep – such as the petitioner who arrived at my office a few weeks before I left. We had never met, but it was easy to identify Yang Zhong, who stood out a mile with his country boots, green overalls and bags crammed full of injustice. The look was all too familiar. I have lost count of the number of petitioners who have asked the Guardian to investigate land thefts, corruption cases, industrial accidents, rapes, murders and other alleged abuses of power.

Yang had come from Jinshantun village in the far northern province of Heilongjiang to accuse a local forestry chief – Wang Liguan – of illegal logging in one of China’s last great protected forests and for having him locked up and beaten when he dared to complain. Typically, his story, minutely recorded in reams of papers and even on a DVD, was anything but black and white.

Weak laws and strong censorship make it difficult for such people to have their cases heard in the domestic system so they turn to foreign news bureaus. There were so many grim accounts it was impossible to give them all the time and attention they deserved.

Heroism and brutality

But there were also stories of success, heroism and inspiration as a nation embraced new wealth and battled for new ideas: the business empires built by enlightened philanthropists such as Yin Mingshan of Lifan auto, the internet fortunes accrued by entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma of Alibaba and Robin Li of Baidu.

Compared with nine years ago, people in China have more freedom to shop, to travel and to express their views on the internet. The Communist party tolerates a degree of criticism,but step over the invisible line of what is acceptable and the consequences are brutal. In my first years in China, I interviewed several outspoken opponents – Liu Xiaobo, Gao Zhisheng, Hu Jia and Teng Biao. I was impressed back then that they were at liberty to speak out. It seemed like the act of a confident government. But all of them have subsequently been locked up and, in at least two cases, tortured.

The blame for that surely lies with the authorities. But I have sometimes felt pangs of guilt. I first interviewed Ai Weiwei in the summer of 2007 for an Olympic preview. He was one of the creators of the “bird’s nest” stadium and I was expecting him to tell me how proud he would be when it was unveiled at the opening ceremony. Instead, he told me he would not attend in protest at the “disgusting” political conditions in the one-party state and then launched into a withering assault on propaganda. It was the first time he had expressed such views to the foreign media – a great scoop, but also one fraught with risk. At the end of the interview, I cautioned the artist: “Are you sure you want to say this? It could get you into a great deal of trouble with the authorities.”

“Absolutely,” he replied. “I only wish I could say it more clearly.”

Despite that confirmation and the similarly critical comments he subsequently made to other media organisations, I felt partly responsible when Ai was detained last year.

Whether the repression is getting better or worse has been a constant question with few clear answers. My feeling is that China has become a less tolerant country since 2008.

That was a coming of age of sorts, when China stopped seeming like a work in progress and started looking and behaving like a superpower. On the Beijing skyline, the scaffolding and cranes had been replaced by stunning architectural wonders. The ever-present sentiments of victim-hood and nationalism found powerful outlets in the Tibetan uprising, torch relay protests and the Sichuan earthquake. Meanwhile, those who had supported moves towards a more open, liberal, internationalist China saw the value of their political stock plunge almost as fast as the Dow Jones index in the global financial crisis. With the western model apparently shattered, many in China understandably felt less inclined than ever to listen to outside advice.

In the four years since, China has become a more modern and connected nation, but – despite the official hubris – it also seems more anxious that the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa may spread. The government now spends more on internal security than defence of its borders – a sign that it is more frightened of its own people than any external threat.

Little wonder. This has been an era of protest in China. The government stopped releasing figures a few years ago, but academics with access to internal documents say there are tens of thousands of demonstrations each year. The reasons are manifold – land grabs, ethnic unrest, factory layoffs, corruption cases and territorial disputes. But I have come to believe the fundamental cause is ecological stress: foul air, filthy water, growing pressure on the soil and an ever more desperate quest for resources that is pushing development into remote mountains, deserts and forests that were a last hold-out for bio and ethnic diversity.

This is not primarily China’s fault. It is a historical, global trend. China is merely roaring along the same unsustainable path set by the developed world, but on a bigger scale, a faster speed and at a period in human history when there is much less ecological room for manoeuvre. The wealthy portion of the world has been exporting environmental stress for centuries. Outsourcing energy-intensive industries and resource extraction have put many problems out of sight and out of mind for western consumers. But they cannot be ignored in China.

The worst problems are found in the countryside: “cancer villages”, toxic spills, pitched battles to block a toxic chemical factory, health hazards from air pollution and water and the rapid depletion of aquifers under the north China plain – the country’s bread-basket.

The implications are global. China has become the biggest greenhouse-gas emitter on the planet. This year, it will probably account for half the coal burned in the world. The number of cars on China’s roads has increased fourfold since 2003, driving up demand for oil. Meanwhile, there is less and less space and respect for other species. For me, the most profound story of this period was the demise of the baiji – a Yangtze river dolphin that had been on earth for 20m years but was declared extinct in 2006 as a result of river traffic, pollution, reckless fishing and massive damming.

I switched my focus to environment reporting. It was not just the charismatic megafauna and the smog, though the concern about air quality never went away. It is really not funny to send your children off to school on days of high pollution with a cheery “Try not to breathe too much”, knowing they will probably be kept in at break-times because the air outside is hazardous.

As I have noted at greater length elsewhere, I had come to fear that China may be where the 200-odd-year-old carbon-fuelled capital-driven model of economic development runs into an ecological wall. Britain, where it started, and China may be bookends on a period of global expansion that has never been seen before and may never be repeated again.

Developed nations have been outsourcing their environmental stress to other countries and future generations for more than two centuries. China is trying to do the same as it looks overseas for food, fuel and minerals to satisfy the rising demand of its cities and factories. This has been extremely good news for economies in Africa, Mongolia, Australia and South AmericaI sympathise with China. It is doing what imperial, dominant powers have done for more than two centuries, but it is harder for China because the planet is running short of land and time.

With their engineering backgrounds, President Hu Jintao (a trained hydro-engineer) and premier Wen Jiabao (one of China’s leading experts on rare earth minerals) are probably better aware than most global leaders about the challenge this poses. While there has been almost no political reform during their terms of office, there have been several ambitious steps forward in terms of environmental policy: anti-desertification campaigns; tree planting; an environmental transparency law; adoption of carbon targets; eco-services compensation; eco accounting; caps on water; lower economic growth targets; the 12th Five-Year Plan; debate and increased monitoring of PM2.5 [fine particulate matter] and huge investments in eco-cities, “clean car” manufacturing, public transport, energy-saving devices and renewable technology. The far western deserts of China have been filled with wind farms and solar panels.

That is the most hopeful story of this grey era. If China could emerge from the smog with a low-carbon economy, it would be a boon for the world. But talk of the world’s first green superpower remains as premature as the image of the “red menace” is outdated.

When my predecessor, John Gittings, left China after 25 years, he presciently foresaw how the the old cold war stereotypes would be shattered by the country’s speed of development. But that is just the start of realignment. In the future, I believe the most important political division will not be between left and right, but between conservers and consumers. The old battle of “equality versus competition” in the allocation of the resource pie will become secondary to maintaining the pie itself.

But the transition has some way to go. In the next 10 years, China is likely to build more dams than the US managed in its entire history and, despite the Fukushima disaster, it plans to construct more about 20 new nuclear power stations. But even with this huge expansion of non-fossil-fuel-based energy, if the economy continues to grow at its current pace China will require about 50% more coal than it currently burns.I expect there will be a slowdown before then as overseas markets contract and domestic investment suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Long-hidden environmental costs – over-depletion of key resources and under-regulation of waste – will force their way onto corporate balance books and national budgets in the form of turbulent commodity prices and higher clean-up expenses. China may well look back on the Hu and Wen era as a golden age of growth and perhaps a missed opportunity to put in place the reforms needs to adjust to leaner times.

Respect, sympathy – and pessimism

Meanwhile a new leadership – almost certainly to be headed by Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang – will take the helm at this autumn’s party congress. They will have their work cut out. While the Hu-Wen era was one of construction, Xi and Li will have to put more effort into maintenance. This will require more than the creation of wealth and construction jobs; it will require a system with greater flexibility, efficiency and a new set of values. I expect that transition will be more turbulent than anything seen in the past 10 years. But success or failure, I believe it will remain the most important story in the world.

So why am I leaving? Well, over the years, I have come to feel increasing respect, sympathy and affection for China, but also more pessimism. Journalists here are worn down like brake pads on a speeding juggernaut. Such cynicism is not healthy. I hope a change of scene will allow me to see China – and the world – afresh. Regardless of Beijing’s choking smog, traffic and politics, it will be hard to match living and working in China. I shall miss hikes along wild stretches of the Great Wall, swimming under remote waterfalls, wandering through vibrant hutongs, incredible food and some of the smartest company I have encountered anywhere in the world.

In the past few weeks, I have said goodbyes to places, friends, long-suffering assistants and sources, some of whom have become global names as their country has risen in prominence over the past nine years: the environmentalist Ma Jun (winner of this year’s Goldman Prize), the lawyer Teng Biao, journalist Li Datong, the rights activists Hu Jia (winner of the Sakharov human-rights prize), and Zeng Jinyan; the social network guru Isaac Mao, the public intellectual Wang Xiaoshan and the artist Ai Weiwei (recently named “the most powerful artist on earth”).

On my final weekend in China, I went to Weiwei’s grey-walled home in the Caochangdi art district. He was with his wife, two aides, a film crew and two lawyers, but as gregarious and mischievous as ever.

“It’s hot. Let’s take our clothes off,” said Weiwei, who proceeded to strip to the waist. I was too shy to follow suit. So was everyone else. The lawyers simply proceeded with their brief about the next stage in his tax case.

I couldn’t stay. The China story was moving on again. News had just come in that the Chen Guangcheng was at Beijing airport, about to board a plane to the US. After six years of house arrest and prison, he was finally flying to freedom. I said my goodbyes and wandered home to write up what felt like an uplifting article to finish on. I knew though, that it was not really the end. For all the hardship Chen endured, I guessed he would miss China. I certainly will. This is a peak and perhaps one for mankind.

• Jonathan Watts will be based in Rio de Janeiro as Latin America correspondent from July.

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When it opens this week, Granary Square will be one of the biggest public spaces in Europe – a focal point for the regeneration of King’s Cross, a neglected part of London. It will be managed in a private estate of 10 plazas and parkland near the rail hub.makes this clear. “Welcome to King’s Cross,” it reads. “Please enjoy this private estate considerately.”

Over the past decade, large parts of Britain’s cities have been redeveloped as privately-owned estates, extending corporate control over some of the country’s busiest squares and thoroughfares. These developments are no longer simply enclosed malls like Westfield in White City or business districts like Broadgate in the City of London – they are spaces open to the sky which appear to be entirely public to casual passers-by.

It appears from the scale of the change that privatisation of space is now the standard price of redevelopment. There are privatised public zones across Britain, including Brindleyplace in Birmingham, jointly owned by the property firms Hines and Moorfield, and Liverpool One, owned by the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor estate. In Exeter, Princesshay is described as a “shopping destination featuring over 60 shops set in a series of interconnecting open streets and squares”. The spaces here are owned and run by the property group Land Securities and the Crown Estate, which manages the monarch’s property portfolio. Land Securities also owns Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, a waterside complex of shops, bars and restaurants. Bishops Square, which includes Spitalfields market, two squares and historic streets in east London, was sold to JP Morgan asset management in 2010.

There are, of course, significant benefits to the redevelopments, though some worry that Britain’s landscape is being slowly redefined by private ownership in two ways. As the Occupy protest highlighted, private owners can refuse right of entry to members of the public, closing off swaths of the city.

Critics also warn that these spaces are being designed on a corporate model that favours ornament – and high levels of footfall for retailers – while community spirit and sustainability are not a priority.

Access to some of the best viewing areas for the Queen’s diamond jubilee river pageant, including a number of streets on the south bank of the Thames, was restricted to wristband-wearing guests, a ban enforced by private security guards.

Tower bridge and the Millennium bridge, both owned by the City of London, were reserved for invited guests and closed to the public. Members of the public were warned by organisers that the three bridges open to them – Lambeth, Westminster and Blackfriars – would be “extremely crowded”.

Occupy activist Naomi Colvin says: “It is a vision of society in which you work and you shop. At times when you are not working or shopping, you may go to restaurants.

“You may possibly go to some officially sanctioned kind of entertainment activity which is sponsored by X but there’s no scope for people to do something of their own – to do something spontaneous.”

Although it lies within the London borough of Newham and borders Hackney and Tower Hamlets, the Olympic park is not accountable to any of these councils. A quango called the London Legacy Development Corporation is in charge. After the Games, most of the Athletes’ Village will be developed by Qatari Diar – the investment arm of the Gulf state – as luxury rental apartments. The outdoor spaces will not be adopted by Newham but managed by their private owners. The council will be responsible for a limited number of “adopted roads”.

To the west, about a mile up the Thames from parliament, another new district is being created. Nine Elms, an area bigger than Hyde Park, will be the site of the new US embassy, but it will also host thousands of homes and offices, and the largest fruit and vegetable market in Britain – New Covent Garden Market. There will be a network of squares, footpaths and recreation spaces. The majority of the open space will be in private ownership.

‘A new piece of city’

It is common for developers to argue that they are creating new public spaces where none existed before. A spokeswoman for the London Legacy Development Corporation said of the Olympic Park: “It’s worth remembering this was industrial, unused, largely inaccessible land before the works started. The land was contaminated with industrial waste, the waterways clogged with abandoned shopping trolleys and car tyres. There was also a network of overhead power lines that prevented any development.” It is not a traditional park but “a new piece of city”, she added.

The corporation aspires to create 8,000 jobs in the Olympic Park by 2030. It will also be a place to live for thousands. There will be 7,000 homes in five neighbourhoods, 35% of which will be affordable housing. The Athletes’ Village development – to be known as East Village after the Games – will include more than 1,300 affordable homes.

There will also be many luxury homes created at the heart of one of the poorest parts of England. On a media tour of the park, a guide spoke of townhouses bordering parkland, with a “similar feel to what you might see in Regent’s Park”.

Nick Cuff, Wandsworth council’s planning chairman, makes a similar case for Nine Elms as opening up “new” space. “The regeneration of Nine Elms is creating vast areas of new open space on the south bank of the Thames,” he said in a statement.

“Chief among these will be a new stretch of the Thames riverside path and a linear park running right the way through the district from east to west. There will also be a network of new public squares, roads, footpaths, cycle lanes, outdoor shopping areas and recreation spaces which together will create an active, pedestrian friendly environment for Londoners to enjoy.”

Occupy activists challenge this upbeat narrative. When Occupy London seized an empty office block belonging to UBS, on the fringes of the City, a spokesman described it as “a public repossession”, reclaiming a symbol of wasted resources.

Colvin cites the empty UBS building as evidence of “an unhealthy trend” of allowing land to go to waste then claiming it must be redeveloped. “This is the pattern, just let things go to waste, knock it down, redevelop it. And then when you redevelop it, the creation of public spaces which are not public often seems to be a part of that.”

The loss of public space is not just a threat to street politics; it risks erasing local character in favour of corporate sterility, Colvin argues. Canary Wharf is “totally cultivated, totally deracinated”.

Samantha Heath, chief executive of the charity London Sustainibility Exchange, agrees that developers often want redesigned civic spaces to be ornamental and with a high footfall. She said: “If you look at the [private] open spaces – More London, say – its just a massive paved [area] … fountains which are very nice for cooling but don’t actually really cool you if there’s no shade. It’s energy intensive. In terms of upkeep you need to keep cleaning and grouting them out, but biodiversity is poor.”

Politicians of all stripes acknowledge the importance of making people feel part of a functioning community. Boris Johnson has spoken of putting “the village back into the city”.

At a public meeting last year, the mayor of London said: “It’s not a concept that I find people readily grasp but what I want is an atmosphere of trust and neighbourliness and a village atmosphere in parts of our city.”

But villages always included commonly owned public land, Heath said. “In the archetypal feudal village there was always that space of common land where everyone had the right to graze their pigs and behave in a sensible way. There wasn’t the sense this was the feudal landlord’s land. This was common land.”

The mayor has published a manifesto for public space, London’s Great Outdoors, which accepts there is a “growing trend” towards private management of publicly accessible space. Johnson writes: “Where this type of ‘corporatisation’ occurs, especially in the larger commercial developments, Londoners can feel themselves excluded from parts of their own city.”

In a report last year, the London assembly’s planning committee praised privatised spaces such as Mint Street Park, in Southwark, south London, which is now managed by a local steering group. But it highlighted examples of bad practice including a newly created open space at Paddington Basin where “overzealous security guards” often prevent photography.

Based on a sample of planning documents, the committee found boroughs lacked specific policies for dealing with public spaces in private developments. Meanwhile, local authorities under financial pressure are increasingly concerned about the upkeep of existing public land.

Heath said: “The big crisisthat is hitting most open spaces in London over the past 20 years is the revenue cost of maintaining open spaces, and local authorities who’ve got a lot of open space constantly worry about how they’re keeping it up, and how they stop vandals and graffiti, and maintaining good quality in terms of biodiversity.

“They may not want to give it away, but they certainly want to look at innovative ways of funding the upkeep.”

Sir Robin Wales, the elected mayor of Newham, accepts his borough could not afford to manage the Olympic Park. “Originally our view was the park should either be a royal park, or maintained by the [City of London] corporation. We know we don’t have an income stream.”

In the Occupy protest last year, activists targeting financial institutions camped outside St Paul’s cathedral because they were legally prevented from entering Paternoster Square, location of the London Stock Exchange and owned by the Mitsubishi Estate Company. The injunction stated: “The protestors have no right to conduct a demonstration or protest on the Square, which is entirely private property.”

Broadgate Estates, which owns and manages the 32-acre office and shopping zone set around four squares between Bishopsgate and Liverpool Street, also obtained an injunction last November. A witness statement supporting the application for an injunction stated: “There are no public rights over the common parts. (The gates to the Estate are ritually closed, once a year, to ensure that no such rights can arise by prescription).”

Obstacles to protest

Colvin said: “You probably remember the way Occupy London started, [people] started a Facebook page, saying: ‘let’s occupy the London Stock Exchange’. I’m not sure the people who started up that Facebook page understood that Paternoster Square was private land until we started getting the first press reports on it saying: have we talked to Mitsubishi, who own Paternoster Square?”

The Paternoster Square management’s application for an injunction noted: “The protest is inspired by the ‘Arab Spring’ movement.” But London’s protesters had to find their Tahrir Square elsewhere.

Colvin said: “A lot of this was news to us. We became aware … of different, more security-conscious estates around London. In that first few months, we had different places take out injunctions against us.”

Occupy are not the only activists inhabiting a shrinking public space. Living Wage campaigners say they too have faced obstacles to protest. London Citizens, the community organisation behind the campaign, began with hospitals, which are surrounded by public land. The second phase of the campaign focused on banks, which proved far less accessible. Campaigners who gathered outside Canary Wharf blocks to obtain testimony from low-paid workers were swiftly seen and picked up told by security guards: “This is private land”.

Neil Jameson, London Citizens’ lead organiser said: “There was a lot of understanding, particularly as we were lobbying also for the security staff to be paid a living wage, so there was never any struggle.

“They let us stay but made it very clear that every piece of land on Canary Wharf apart from the 50 yards outside the Jubilee line station [is private]. That’s public land and whenever there is a demonstration about anything on Canary Wharf it is on that piece of land – they are directed to a little plot.”

The injunctions against protesters have demonstrated the limits of tolerance when public space is in private hands. In the UK’s capital, even the most visible emblem of local democracy is in private hands. City Hall and the surrounding pedestrian area on the Thames is owned by More London and run as a “managed estate” with its own private security.

Additional reporting: Joshua Saunders

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That winter’s day in the park, although we weren’t to know it, was to be the last time I ever played football with my son. The memorable two-a-side match featured Peter and his cousin, with a combined age of 20, against his uncle and me, each aged more than twice that. The half-time score was: sons 15, puffed-out parents one (and a controversial goal at that).

There was no second half or injury time, just injury – to uncle’s ankles, which he was bound to sprain in those venerable mountain-walking boots. The 10-year-olds soon promoted themselves to playing with more able-bodied opponents, ie other boys, and I realised the final whistle had now gone on lads v dads. Our Match of the Day was now my Match of Yesterday.

“It’s as if that little boy has been taken away by aliens,” my late wife once remarked. Ruth did not believe that a spaceship had whisked our son away to the Earthling Museum on Planet Zorg and substituted a 17-year-old rave-music-mad Zorgling. She meant that he could just as well have been the victim of an alien abduction and substitution, as he grew from 3ft to 6ft, toddler to teenager, paddling-pool to surfboard.

Ruth was particularly conscious of the passage of time, as it was a commodity that, thanks to a brain tumour growing slowly but inexorably, she possessed less of than the rest of the family. As the children became more able, she became more disabled. Yesterdays are carefully noted when there aren’t too many tomorrows. I took the photographs of the children as they grew up, but it was Ruth who stuck them carefully in the albums, noting down the time and place.

You are always aware of a “first” when it happens. There are embarrassing baby-books with blank spaces parents can fill in, labelled “My First Tooth” or perhaps “My First Projectile Vomit”. You know when a child produces its first painting, or splodge. You keep the artwork in case Tate Modern wants it for a major retrospective in later years.

A “last”, however, can come and go without registering on the radar. I have never come across a “Book of Lasts” with sections to be filled in on final footy knock-about or ultimate nappy. There is no record of the last time I yelled: “For the last time, will you turn that television off!” Nor is there any record of the last time, perhaps years before, when anybody did obey that particular command.

On the evening when I read the last bedtime story to the youngest child, I was not aware that this was anything more than another instalment of a Swallows and Amazons novel.

“I think I’d like to read to myself from now on,” she said politely when I appeared after bathtime the following day, Arthur Ransome in hand. And that was it. She had closed another door and, indeed, book. If I’d realised in advance how significant the previous evening was going to be, I’d have hired a brass band and got Michael Morpurgo in to do the reading, with a film crew to record it for the family archives.

I had been reading to one, two or three of them to send them to sleep every night for the best part of two decades. The books went from the first child’s wordless picture-story to the third child’s practically grownup novel. I know parents are supposed to read to their kids, but sometimes my performance was too successful and it was me who entered the land of dreams first. Here, I would find myself reading from a more Freudian sort of book and would be awoken by a cry of “Why did you say, ‘Lots of naked ladies’, Daddy?”

The first last, if I may put it like that, must have been when our oldest was still in her cot. Among the soft toys, she was given was a cuddly mouse. By chance the next few presents were mice, which she enjoyed so much that friends chose mice deliberately to add to the gathering of rodents that I had to line up on her pillow. She couldn’t count – certainly not up to 17 – but she protested loudly if there were only 16 at bedtime.

“There are too many mice!” she suddenly declared one evening and hurled them to the floor. After that, her pillowtalk was with teddies and badgers only. As I had got used to gathering the mice from all over the house, it would have been good to have known on the previous evening that this was the final round-up for those small, whiskery toys.

Although she may sound rather high-handed in that instance, she proved very obliging in a later last. This involved her endearing mispronunciations, such as “marleyblade” for “marmalade” and “matato” for tomato. “Brilliant!” we thought. “Why not Orlando the Marleyblade Cat? And ‘You like tomatoes and I like matatoes’?” Children’s author Kathleen Hale and the Gershwins missed a trick here.

After a while, her mental spellcheck kicked in and she enunciated those words as clearly and correctly, as if she were auditioning for an infants’ branch of Rada. Then, realising the pleasure her accidental mispronunciations had given us, she would occasionally mangle them on purpose for our delight. Until she didn’t any more.

When was the last time I chose the restaurant? I can remember clearly the first time I didn’t, which was on London’s South Bank, when I meekly followed the (by now pretty grownup) youngsters in and out of different eateries, which they instantly declared to be too crowded or too deserted or too expensive or too cheap, or to have menus with too many mushrooms or not enough mushrooms. However, I did have a part to play; guess who picked up the tab?

Some firsts also involve a last. When a child climbs to the next rung on life’s ladder, it means the previous rung is no longer going to be trodden on. The first time they go solo in a canoe on a boating lake means they won’t be crewing a shared rowing-boat with you any more. The first time they send their own Christmas cards means you won’t be adding “… and Peter” (or whoever) to yours.

It is great when we parents at last see the small feet of a trainee cyclist pedalling at speed and the bike launched into independent orbit. After weeks of sprinting bent double like Groucho Marx doing a runner, we get our backs back. The downside is that the child seat on the parental bike will be empty from now on. Those companiable times on the same two wheels have reached the end of the road.

This is also true of four wheels, when teenaged children pass their driving tests, an achievement that, unlike late learners such as their parents, my lot managed first time. They no longer needed my services as a late-night minicab driver: “Pick me up from No 23 – follow the incredible noise and the policemen.” This is mainly a plus except that – call me needy, if you must – it’s nice to be needed in a Home-James-and-don’t-spare-the-horse-power sort of way.

The first child’s first term at university is a major milestone, a fingerpost pointing away from the family home. We dropped ours at a far-off seat of learning. I remember as if it were 1992, which it was, our daughter shrinking to a disappearing dot in the rear-view mirror while we drove somewhat tearfully towards the motorway.

It hit me that the previous night had been the last in which she would have slept in the family home as her main place of residence. From now on it would be student accommodation and then a shared house, to be followed by the whole mortgage bit.

It was no thanks to her parents that she ever reached university to study science. I drove her there, of course, but it makes a mockery of heredity that any child of ours (Ruth was a social scientist and I probably did English) should achieve three science A-levels.

It would have been early in her sixth-form career that we went to the last of her parents’ evenings at which we could understand what her teachers were on about. “Your daughter,” said one of them, “spends 40% of her time …” He paused. What was he going to say? Looking out of the window? Making Molotov cocktails in a test tube? “… Doing chemistry, 30% on physics and 30% on maths.” I proudly worked out that this added up to 100%, but that was my peak as far as her parents’ evenings were concerned. I had helped with primary-school homework but now I was struggling over anything involving figures or the periodic table (whatever that is – something to do with weekly magazines, maybe?).

“Mummy, what’s that language they’re speaking?” asked our youngest, overhearing her sister and fellow A-levellers revising in the kitchen.

“I think it’s chemistry,” Ruth replied. This was the subject I had failed at O-level and she hadn’t even taken. She was quite pleased she could even recognise it.

To give myself due credit (in case no one else does), I helped all three children with their English GCSEs, but after that stage my sole contribution on the homework front was to suggest that they got on with it.

After O-levels my class had been told to read Jude the Obscure for light relief. One of its least gloomy bits, ie in which no one hangs themselves, is the moment when the young hero realises he has shifted from being at the circumference of his own life, with little impact on what happens in it, to being bang in the centre. He is now responsible for what goes on and what goes wrong. And when children are at the centre of their own lives, their parents aren’t. They then start to supervise the lives of their parents. This parent, anyway.

“What are you wearing?” the children demand. They buy me intellectually demanding books. In the period between the death of my wife and the appearance of my partner, they scrutinised any ladies they happened to find me with.

That is not a complaint. I am more fortunate than a friend and his new partner who came to the cinema with me but could not stay for a drink afterwards. He explained that this was because of his son, who at the time disapproved of the relationship: “He hasn’t given me a late pass.”

No, this is not to say that I wanted – or Ruth would have wanted – our children’s childishness to be preserved in aspic as they proceeded through school, university, employment and, in one case so far, parenthood. Rationally, I approve that they have been reading to themselves for decades. On balance, I am glad they paddled their own canoes and pedalled their own bicycles.

When I was still living at home (in, as it happened, a converted hen-house, but we war-babies didn’t complain), my mother informed me in a very adult way that it was fitting for children to grow up and move away. Yet she was clearly upset when she visited me in my first flat, which showed that I had done just that. She was enormously consoled when I eventually had my own children for her to play with.

Similarly, a major consolation for all my lasts is the new batch of firsts, which I (but sadly not Ruth) have been and will be enjoying: my grandchildren’s first words, first books, first bikes. I’m even looking forward to their first chemistry lessons. And will my grandson and granddaughter be aware that each of their firsts represents the end of an era for their parents? No, it will be the last thing on their minds.

Read Article at Original Source

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2011

CHAPTER 1

MYSTERY SHROUDS FATAL SCALLOP BOAT SINKING

Riotous waves pummel Jos Arias. In the frantic scramble to abandon ship, he zipped his survival suit only to his throat and now the freezing Atlantic is seeping in, stealing his body’s heat.

The cold hammers him, a fist inside his head.

Seesawing across the ocean, he cannot tell east from west, up from down. At the top of a wave the night sky spins open, then slides away. Buckets of stars spill into the sea.

“Slvame, por favor. Slvame.”

Save me. Please save me, he prays to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

In the chilly, early morning hours of March 24, 2009, 57-year-old Jos Arias fights for his life, floating in the water 66 miles from Cape May. The nearest lights are from another fishing vessel, which does not see him, anchored less than a half-mile away. A little farther out, a mammoth container ship steams toward Philadelphia.

Although Arias does not know it yet, all six of his friends and fellow fishermen are dead, and the red-hulled scalloper, the Lady Mary, is resting, right-side up, on the sandy bottom of the Atlantic. The mystery of what sank her, which continues to haunt the maritime world, has just begun.

For months, what happened to the 71-foot Lady Mary baffled the Coast Guard, marine experts, fishermen, divers and heartbroken loved ones — all of whom wanted to know how a sound and stable boat with an experienced crew could disappear from the ocean’s surface in a matter of minutes and leave so few clues behind.

This story is about a tragedy no one lived to tell — except Arias, the only crewman plucked from the ocean alive, but who was asleep below decks when the sea suddenly began to swallow the boat. But from the tormented memories of its sole survivor, hundreds of pages of Coast Guard documents, the analyses of more than a dozen marine experts and the Lady Mary’s own ghostly remains, a picture has slowly emerged.

No single event doomed the six fishermen, rather a cascade of circumstances set in motion years earlier by a slip in penmanship on a vessel safety form, compounded by a clerical error. Darkness, deteriorating weather, a tired crew and an open hatch contributed to the vessel’s vulnerability. Then, a floating behemoth 10 times the size of the little scalloper came plowing through the fishing ground at nearly full throttle.

The men of the Lady Mary were like thousands of others who earn their living from fishing, toiling in a Wild West sort of world, in hazardous, ever-changing conditions with scant safeguards and few legal protections.

On today’s oceans, endangered whales have more protection than fishermen, though scores are killed each year.
And when fishermen die at sea, their deaths often remain unexplained, their bodies never found and their lives soon forgotten by the public.

As one mariner said, “There are no skid marks on the ocean.”

‘SEE YOU WHEN I GET BACK’

On the morning of Wednesday, March 18, 2009, a week before the Lady Mary disappeared, Jos Arias lingered on the dock of Cold Spring Fish & Supply in Cape May. Arias, like most commercial fishermen, lived frugally. He shared a spartan one-bedroom apartment in Wildwood with another fisherman and used a bicycle to get around town. A trip to the area known as the Elephant Trunk, the richest scallop grounds on the East Coast, meant he and the other six men aboard the Lady Mary might pocket $10,000 to $15,000 each — more for the captain — for a week to 10 days at sea.

The federal government strictly regulates commercial fishing, placing limits on the number of trips and the size of the catch. So at the beginning of each season, usually around March 1, fishermen are eager to get back to work.

Waiting for the rest of the crew to arrive at the dock that Wednesday morning, Arias noticed an 8-foot-long wooden plank leaning against the ice machine, not far from where the scallops are weighed and packed for shipment. Perfect, he thought to himself. He would use the wood to fix one of the bins in the boat’s fish hold. Arias picked up the plank and carried it onboard, placing it on the bow, or front, of the ship, next to the life raft.

According to the vessel tracking system operated by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Lady Mary cast off shortly after 10 a.m. Among the seven men were two brothers, Capt. Royal “Bobo” Smith Jr., 41, and Tim “Timbo” Smith, 39, the only children of 64-year-old Royal “Fuzzy” Smith Sr., who co-owned the boat with son Tim. One of Fuzzy’s brothers, Tarzon, (nicknamed Bernie) 59, was also aboard, as was a cousin, Frankie Credle, 56. The other two members of the crew were 23-year-old novice Jorge Ramos and Frank Reyes, 42.
Pointing the boat east, Bobo picked up his cell phone and called Stacy Greene, his 39-year-old girlfriend and the mother of two of his three biological children.

A teller at Crest Savings Bank in Wildwood, Stacy couldn’t answer, but she knew Bobo would leave a slew of messages.

“Babe, we’re leaving. We’re pulling away from the dock,” he said after Stacy’s voice-mail message played.

A few minutes later, according to phone records, he called again. The boat had probably cleared the lighthouse by then. Soon it would be out of range.

“Babe, got the outriggers out. See you when I get back, okay?”

When they were fishing, and well out of sight of cell-phone towers, Bobo often called Stacy on the satellite phone. Because they worked virtually around-the-clock, he sometimes dialed her at crazy hours, ringing her at 2 a.m. to ask what she was doing.

“What do you think I’m doing?” she’d say in mock anger.

Over the next six days, Bobo called Stacy on the satellite phone 10 times, not always reaching her. He called Fuzzy twice on Saturday, March 21. The first time was just after 2 in the afternoon, to tell him the crew was catching a good load of scallops and things were going well.

“Go bag ’em up, and don’t be guessing how much you got,” Fuzzy told Bobo.

He never liked to hear from his sons when they were out fishing, he just wanted them to get the job done and come home.

He worried about them, especially when they were on the same boat. Usually they took two boats and kept an eye on each other. When one of them called Fuzzy in the middle of a fishing trip, he always thought something was wrong.

At 10:37 that night, Bobo called his father back to tell him they had 200 bags of scallops — big ones, he told his father — and would probably be heading back on Tuesday, the 24th.

Three minutes later, Bobo called Stacy. The couple had broken up so many times over the years, often because of his drinking, but when he moved back into the house in Whitesboro in June of 2008, he quit and told her he wanted to be a real father to his kids.

The next eight months were blissful, according to Stacy. Bobo fixed breakfast for the children, attended every one of 8-year-old Jeremiah’s basketball games — in fact, every one of his practices — and on weekends drove the kids to the Family Dollar Store in Rio Grande to buy them presents.

Of course, that was when he was just back from a fishing trip and had money in his pockets. When he did have cash, he spent it freely, usually on the kids, but sometimes on complete strangers.

The previous November, when they were all driving down to Virginia Beach for a big family reunion, Bobo spotted a homeless man wandering on the side of the road. He pulled over, handed him all the food they’d just picked up at KFC and gave him $10 in cash.

“Here you go, man,” he said. “I hope you can make it.”

When fishing season opened in March 2009, Bobo was broke again. Just before leaving on the first trip of the year, he stopped by Adele’s Jeweled Treasures in Cape May and, according to store receipts, pawned the gold chain he always wore around his neck for $200.

Like Bobo, younger brother Tim was utterly and completely a fisherman. He even married a fisherman’s daughter. Carinna often went down to the boat before a trip, clean sheets in her arms, and made her husband’s bed.

She also liked to pack Tim’s duffel and sneaked “sea letters” — love notes, really — into the pockets of his clothes. Each day, when Tim dressed, was like Christmas morning, and he tucked the little presents into his shaving kit for safekeeping.

“Tell (the Realtor) I’ll have the money for the house when I come back in,” he told Carinna right before leaving that Wednesday morning.

He was going to use his share from the trip to make a down payment on a new home.

On the same block in Whitesboro on which Tim and Carinna lived, 37-year-old Jeannette Rodriguez was reluctant to see Frank Reyes leave on his first fishing trip of the year. The two had been together 20 years and although they’d never married, they had three children. Jeannette and Frank met at a Christmas Eve party in Wildwood. She was 18 and had just arrived from Puerto Rico. He was five years older, and conscious of the age difference, so he allowed their relationship to develop slowly over the months. Eventually, they moved in together.

Reyes, 42, was a cook at the Lobster House in Cape May and loved his job, but during the slow winter months the restaurant cut back on staff. Fishing was one way to fill the gap financially.

“Don’t go,” she would say to him. “It’s so dangerous.”

And sometimes he wouldn’t. Reyes never wanted his family to worry about him. So when he did go out, he never called his parents back in Puerto Rico and he always left before the kids were up. Personally he didn’t much care for fishing, but he had no fear of the water. In fact he loved it. Nearly every weekend in the warm weather he would go swimming off Sunset Beach, at the western edge of Lower Township. Early in the season the water was always too cold for Jeannette and the kids, but not for Frank.

“Only God would separate us,” he would tell Jeannette before leaving on a fishing trip, “so you have to trust me.”

On the morning of March 18 she drove him to the dock and kissed him goodbye.

“I’m going to be home Monday morning,” he said. “Take care of the kids.”

On the first two days of fishing, the crew had little luck and kept moving, until they were at the outer edge of the Elephant Trunk, named for the shape of the sea’s floor in that area. That’s when they hit the mother lode, dredging up shells with plump scallops the size of half-dollars inside.

On Monday, March 23, Arias got up early, ate a breakfast of ribs and bacon, then spent the next 18 hours in the cut room, separating scallop meat from their shells. Two-hundred bushels later, he finally ducked into the forepeak bunk room, below the galley in the bow of the ship, and slipped into bed, exhausted. It was just after midnight.

The other six men continued to work: Capt. Bobo kept watch in the wheelhouse; Tim, Bernie, Frankie Credle, Frank Reyes, and Jorge Ramos were all either on deck dredging or in the cut room shucking.

The boat was about 60 to 70 miles east by southeast of Cape May and carrying close to a full load: 18,000 pounds of scallops packed neatly into 50-pound muslin bags. One more shift, and the Lady Mary would probably head for home.

The boat was well-equipped for long voyages and included up-to-date navigational and safety equipment, including a covered life raft and an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, or EPIRB, which automatically emits a distress signal when it’s submerged in water.

Staggering their shifts, two men usually slept while everyone else worked. Arias and Timbo were scheduled to knock off at the same time, but Tim didn’t turn in right away. At some point after midnight he smoked a little marijuana, probably with Bobo, according to a toxicology report, before finally heading to bed.

Ramos was supposed to wake Tim and Jos at 6 a.m. when it was his turn to rest, but Arias wouldn’t have been surprised if Bobo told the others to take a break, too, then just let the boat drift for a few hours. It was getting difficult to work anyway. The seas were building and the wind was up.

In his bunk bed, Arias pulled a blanket up around his shoulders. He was used to the labored grunts of the engine and the high whine of the winches as they lowered and lifted the dredge, and though his hands and arms ached and the smell of fish and diesel fumes still oozed from the clothes he’d tossed in the corner, he fell asleep quickly.

One-hundred-and-twenty miles to the north, the container ship Cap Beatrice was steaming from Antwerp, Belgium, toward the Port of Philadelphia at nearly 20 knots. Owned by the Reederei Thomas Schulte company in Hamburg, Germany, the Cap Beatrice was sailing under a Liberian flag and was leased by the Hamburg Sud shipping company, the 16th largest in the world. Since launching in 2007, her route was usually a 70-day round-trip to various ports between Australia and the United States.

For some reason in mid-March 2009, the Cap Beatrice had made a detour to Europe, perhaps for repairs, and on the 24th was headed to the United States, presumably to resume her loop to Australia and back.

Capt. Vasyl Stenderchuk, a 55-year-old Ukrainian, was in charge of the 728-foot-long ship, and spent most of his days in the wheelhouse, some seven stories above the deck. Radar, along with a sophisticated Automatic Identification System and other navigation tools, keep the officer on watch apprised of other ships in the area.

AIS, however, can only detect ships carrying the same system and virtually no fishing vessels carry the expensive equipment.

In the deteriorating weather, the 40,000-ton Cap Beatrice was headed straight for one of the most crowded fishing grounds on the East Coast of the United States.

Arias slept soundly, even as the Lady Mary rolled and pitched with the waves. The wind continued to scoop up barrels of water and sling them over the gunnels. Heavy cables slapped against the deck and hull, and the sound of metal grinding was enough to wake the deepest sleeper.

Fishermen, however, get used to the movement and noise of a boat — or they don’t stay fishermen for long.

At 5:10 a.m., the Lady Mary automatically reported her position to the fisheries service for the last time. The next electronic signal she sent was from her EPIRB hitting the water at 5:40 a.m.

The only other information that is known for certain is that a phone call was placed from the Lady Mary at 5:17 a.m.

What else happened between 5 and 6 Tuesday morning, March 24, 2009, has been reconstructed from vessel tracking reports, information from weather buoys, and interviews not only with Jos Arias, but with marine experts, other fishermen out there that night, as well as Fuzzy Smith, the co-owner of the Lady Mary, who knew the boat, the crew and the routine aboard the scalloper better than anyone.

AWAKENING TO TERROR

Around 5 a.m. something happened to the Lady Mary. Arias wasn’t sure what, but he jerked awake. The boat had shuddered, lurched hard to the left, and nearly catapulted him from his middle bunk.

“Come on, Jos, the boat’s sinking!” Timbo shouted as he dropped from his upper berth on the other side of the room. In emergencies, the crew is drilled to go to the wheelhouse on the upper deck. Arias and Smith were in the bow of the ship, the farthest point from the bridge.

They scrambled out of the bunk room and up the steps into the galley. The water was ankle-high as they sloshed across the kitchen to the port-side passageway. Moving slowly down the narrow hall, they braced themselves against the wall. The freezing water was now up to their knees. Through the cut room and out the double doors they finally emerged onto the deck. The Lady Mary was now leaning harder to port and a third of the stern was awash.

Frankie Credle, dressed only in black boxer shorts, banged a piece of pipe against the metal steps and yelled something up to Bobo in the wheelhouse, but Arias, who speaks little English, did not understand what he was saying.

At 5:17 a.m., about 80 miles away the phone rang in Stacy Greene’s house. She was sound asleep, but her mother, Janet, a light sleeper, answered. The voice on the other end sounded like Bobo, but all she heard was, “Hey!” and then static.

“Hello? Roy?” she said, calling Bobo by his given name. When there was no answer, she hung up.

Reception from a boat that far out could be sporadic, and satellite calls from the Lady Mary were often dropped. Janet knew he’d phone again later, when he was closer to home, and went back to sleep.

Inside the wheelhouse, Bobo frantically tried to steer the Lady Mary. The engines were throttled up but it seemed to Arias as if the boat was somehow stuck and not moving. Outside the wheelhouse, on the upper deck, Frank Reyes clutched the starboard railing with both hands, frozen in fear.

“Jos, Jos, Qu vamos hacer?”

What are we going to do? he pleaded.

The two men, both Spanish speakers, were friends. Neither drank or smoked, which was unusual in the world of fishermen. Arias enjoyed spending time with Reyes and his partner, Jeannette Rodriguez, at their home in Whitesboro and eating the dinners Reyes loved to cook: spaghetti, turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes, rice and beans. Afterward, the two men would trade stories about their hometowns. Reyes grew up in suburban Hatillo, Puerto Rico, just two blocks from the ocean; Arias was raised in the rural state of Chiapas, Mexico, one of the country’s poorest regions.

Aboard the Kathryn Marie, several miles from the Lady Mary, Capt. Antonio Alvernaz was shucking scallops and keeping an ear out for the ship’s radio. Around 5:15 a.m. it crackled to life.

“Mayday!”

That was all Alvernaz heard — one word, in a panicked voice.

He rushed back into the wheelhouse, hoping to hear the person identify himself or give the name or location of his boat. Instead, the next voice on Channel 12 was that of Capt. Jos Neves, aboard the Paul & Michelle, a few miles west of the Lady Mary.

“Come back with that more clearly,” Neves radioed. “Come back with the name of your boat and position.”

Nothing.

“I couldn’t make out a thing,” Neves radioed next, to anyone listening.

“It sounded like a mayday,” Alvernaz responded.

Neither man could be sure, and with no name or location, there was no point in calling the Coast Guard. Both went back to work. Mayday hoaxes were a common occurrence, and Neves and Alvernaz didn’t think about the aborted call until eight or nine hours later.

Six miles due west of the Lady Mary, Jim Taylor, on the Elise G., also heard a frantic voice over the radio, but couldn’t make out what was said.

Taylor, 34, was first mate on the Elise G. and was keeping watch at the time. While the captain slept, the rest of the crew was dredging and cutting. For awhile Taylor had been watching a large ship on the radar — a container or cargo ship, he thought — as it crossed straight through the fishing grounds.

Only two vessels were within a mile of the Lady Mary, according to Coast Guard and Marine Fisheries records: The 728-foot container ship Cap Beatrice, and the 69-foot scalloper Alexandria Dawn, which was “laying-to” — using her dredge as an anchor — and so was not moving.

Other than the Cap Beatrice, the only other large merchant ships in the area were the Energy Enterprise and the APL Arabia, but they were 20 to 30 miles north of the Lady Mary, moving in opposite directions.
As Taylor hauled back on the dredge, he noticed to the east a huge ship suddenly turn on its deck lights.

“Like a Christmas tree, or a football stadium,” Taylor said. “It was the first time I’ve ever seen that.”

Anatoly Parayev, who later served as captain of the Cap Beatrice, said there is only one time he will turn on a ship’s deck lights in the middle of the ocean — when overtaking a fishing boat.

“To scare them off,” he said. “To warn them.”

On the massive, window-encased bridge of the Cap Beatrice, there are three satellite phones, a large-screen radar system with a maximum distance of 55 miles, and two pairs of high-powered binoculars. Seeing other large ships, either electronically or with the naked eye, is no problem, but keeping an eye on smaller vessels is another matter entirely. With its deck stacked with metal containers and the wheelhouse set back 590 feet from the bow, according to Parayev, the person on watch is blind to everything on the surface of the water inside a quarter-mile from the ship.

Taylor, aboard the Elise G., has been fishing since he was 18 years old. To him, it appeared the container or cargo ship had slowed considerably, perhaps even stopped. Not far from the ship, he noticed the green mast-light of a fishing boat flickering in the dark. Normally, just below the green light, is a white light, part of a signal system that indicates to vessels in the vicinity that the boat is a fishing trawler and is underway. Taylor observed neither a white signal, nor the fishing boat’s bright deck lights, which are usually turned on whether the vessel is dredging or not.

On the bridge of the Cap Beatrice, the AIS tracking system stopped transmitting the ship’s position shortly after 5 a.m. By law, virtually all deep-draft vessels (ships of 300 tons or more) are required to continually report their location when transiting international waters, except where the ship’s security is endangered. In these rare cases the nearest vessel-tracking service must be notified. Traffic monitoring is required by international law, mostly as a way for large ships to avoid hitting each other. AIS is a line-of-sight signal, and reception on land depends in large part on the height of the antenna.

That night there were no interruptions in the AIS transmissions from either the APL Arabia or the Energy Enterprise, according to the Coast Guard, although both were farther from shore than the Cap Beatrice.

ONBOARD THE LADY MARY

In the wheelhouse of the Lady Mary, Arias and the two Smith brothers pulled survival suits, also called immersion suits, out from under the captain’s bunk. The vessel was now listing 45 degrees to port. In a few minutes she would be submerged.

Arias knew he had to get to the highest point on the boat. He left the bridge and pulled himself up to the starboard railing. There, leaning against the outside wall of the wheelhouse, he put one foot into his immersion suit, then the other. His friend Reyes was just a few feet away, still gripping the railing, a look of desperation in his eyes. On the side of the wheelhouse, Arias grabbed a life ring off its hook and handed it to Reyes.

“Agrralo,” he shouted into the wind, “Te va salvar la vida.”

Hold onto it. It will save your life.

The Lady Mary dipped and swerved, skidding down one wave, then hurtling up another. The boat tipped hard again to port. Suddenly the 30-foot starboard outrigger swung up out of the water and jammed itself behind its cradle, high on the mast.

The water had risen to Arias’ waist. There was no time left, and no sign of Frankie Credle or Bernie or Jorge. Tim and Bobo had left the bridge, too, both in their survival suits. There was nothing more Arias could do for Reyes. He looked at his friend one last time, and let go.

A plunge into cold water, with the face unprotected, can set off a lethal series of physiological events. First, the shock of the frigid temperature causes a person to involuntarily gasp, which blocks the flow of air into the lungs. Drowning, more than anything else, is a kind of quick suffocation, and in frigid water the reflex to inhale can kill even the strongest of men in minutes.

Arias slid into the water on his back. He tried to move away from the Lady Mary as quickly as possible, using his arms like paddles and making sure to keep his face out of the water.

A few yards from the sinking ship, a voice cracked through the wind and waves. Someone was yelling, but Arias couldn’t see him or understand what he was saying.

“Quin es? Dnde est?”

Who’s there? Where are you?

No one answered. The bright deck lights of the Lady Mary blinked out. The engine sputtered to a stop. She was sinking quickly now.

Taylor, at the wheel of the Elise G., looked out the window to the east. It was, he recalled, five or 10 minutes since he’d spotted the container ship with its deck all lit up. The lights were off now, and the green light of the fishing trawler was nowhere to be seen. Taylor figured the boat was obscured from view behind the container and turned his attention back to dredging.
When the sea started to crest the wheelhouse, the only part of the Lady Mary still visible to Arias was the long arm of the starboard outrigger, pointing heavenward.

AN INCREDIBLE TWIST OF FATE

Rolling over the waves, his survival suit slowly filling with water, Arias hears nothing — no voice, no engine — only the wind thrashing wildly at the waves and the sound of his own heavy breathing.

Bobbing and weaving in the mountainous seas, he spots a piece of debris floating toward him and can’t believe his eyes — it’s the 8-foot-long board he picked up off the dock before the Lady Mary left port. After placing it on the bow of the boat, he’d never had time to use it to make repairs.

Now, reaching out, he lifts his arms wearily across the plank, then lets the waves take him where they will.

Jos Arias, a slender, middle-aged fisherman, a grandfather with graying temples, is alone in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

And dawn is still another hour away.

————————–

CHAPTER 2

COSTLY CLERICAL ERROR STALLS RESCUE EFFORTS

All his life, Royal “Fuzzy” Smith has followed the sea. One of 13 children from rural Bayboro, N.C., he took his first fishing trip with his father when he was just 4 years old. By the time he was 18, he was working full time on shrimpers plying the Intracoastal Waterway, a 3,000-mile ribbon of inlets, rivers and bays that stretches south from the Jersey Shore to Key West, Fla., then up into the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Apalachicola, Fla.

From a young age, Fuzzy could read the water — where it ran warmer, faster or deeper — and knew the tides without checking the charts. He fished from October to June, at night, when the shrimp came out to feed in the shallows, and especially around a full moon, when they rode the currents out to spawn.

He followed the shrimp south, catching Georgia whites and Key West pinks, and then followed them up into the Gulf of Mexico, hauling in Pensacola reds and Texas brownies.

Over the years, Fuzzy moved from mate to captain to owner, and when scallops became the big moneymaker, he gave up shrimping and moved his boats from North Carolina to Cape May. By the time his sons Bobo and Tim were of age, Fuzzy had a fleet of scallopers and was content to let his sons do the fishing while he managed the business on shore.

His office in Cape May is a one-room apartment in a squat, cinder-block building at the back of a parking lot across from the Lobster House. Photos of boats and family fill the room. The most recent is a picture of Bobo and Tim taken in November 2008 at a large family get-together in Virginia Beach. It’s almost dusk, and the sons are framed against a cornflower-blue sky. They smile into the camera, both dressed in crisp, white “Smith Reunion” T-shirts inscribed with a quote from Proverbs 3:5.

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”

From his desk in Cape May, Fuzzy kept watch over his boats and his boys. Looking out the window, he could see the clammers and scallopers huddled up against the dock and watch Bobo and Tim steer in and out of port. When they were on a trip for a week, two weeks, Fuzzy followed their progress using a special program on his computer, mainly to help them stay within the federally designated fishing grounds. If they strayed, fines would be levied.

But in truth, he was anxious about their safety. They usually fished together in two boats, so they could keep an eye on each other. But if it was a quick trip, it was easier to go out in one, and the best boat was the Lady Mary.

Those solo trips were when Fuzzy worried the most. If something went wrong, there was no second boat to help out. He kept the TV tuned to the Weather Channel, and when he couldn’t sleep at night he’d get up, turn on his computer, and in the sea-green glow of its screen look for his two sons somewhere out in the Atlantic.

Fuzzy was good at all the nuts and bolts. Although he filed his mail in a tall kitchen garbage can, he knew where everything was — bills and boat records, tax papers, trip reports and safety equipment registrations.
He wrote everything out in bold, black letters and numbers — in print, mostly, not cursive — and if, on the hundreds of forms he filled out every year, occasionally a “C” looked like an “0,” what could it possibly matter?

A CALL FOR HELP

At 5:40 a.m. on March 24, 2009, a geostationary satellite 22,236 miles above sea level wakes up. Its antennae have picked up a maritime distress signal from an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon.
About the size of a large flashlight, an EPIRB is a required piece of equipment on most commercial fishing vessels. When submerged — that is, when a ship begins to sink — the device automatically releases from a bracket attached to the outside of a ship’s cabin or wheelhouse and floats to the surface.

The EPIRB emits a distress signal, in bursts, every 52 seconds on a special radio frequency (406 megahertz), reserved for emergencies. Embedded in the signal transmitted in the early morning hours of March 24 was a unique 15-digit code identifying the Lady Mary and its owners.
The geostationary satellite is the first link in an electronic rescue chain, and it immediately notifies the nearest automated “local user terminal,” which is an unmanned computer at U.S. Mission Control Center in Suitland, Md. The center is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and its Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking program, or SARSAT, is in the same building on the Suitland campus. Atop the flat roof of the office, radio dishes sprout like mutant mushrooms, scanning the skies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Normally, the local user terminal attaches the EPIRB registration information to the electronic message it sends to the mission-control computer, and when the SARSAT computer receives the emergency data, it notifies a watch-stander — the officer in charge — at a rescue coordination center.
In the case of the Lady Mary, that’s the Fifth Coast Guard District’s headquarters, or Atlantic Area command center. But there’s a problem: The local user terminal can’t match the signal coming from the Lady Mary’s EPIRB with one of the more than half-million registered beacons in SARSAT’s database. Without a matching registration, there is no vessel name, and without a vessel name, the mission-control computer takes the local terminal’s information and “tables” it. The Lady Mary’s EPRIB also did not have a GPS, which was not mandatory.

No other alert is sounded. No one is notified. With the lives of seven fishermen in the balance, and despite the most sophisticated communications technology in the world, those who could save the men of the Lady Mary remain oblivious to the unfolding disaster.

At 5:45 a.m., Petty Officer 3rd Class Lake Downham is still asleep in one of the second-floor bedrooms in the hangar of Coast Guard Air Station Atlantic City. The heliport is actually 10 miles from the city’s neon signs and casinos, next to a commercial airfield in the Pine Barrens.

Downham’s 24-hour shift will be up at 2:30 p.m. The previous day he flew a training mission, checked and rechecked his gear, then lay in bed and watched the Philadelphia Flyers beat the New Jersey Devils for their third win in a row. Shortly after 9 p.m., he turned off his light and went to sleep.

At age 28, the 6-foot-4, square-shouldered officer has been in the Coast Guard for nearly a decade, the last three years as a rescue swimmer. Although he grew up in Pennsylvania, he spent summers with relatives in Ocean City, and the summer after graduating from high school worked as a lifeguard during the week and surfed on the weekends.

Almost every day as he sat in the lifeguard chair he would look up and see one of those orange-and-white Coast Guard helicopters zipping back and forth, either on a rescue or training run. Flying a chopper and making mid-ocean rescues seemed a lot more glamorous than blowing a whistle from the beach and occasionally pulling someone out of a riptide.

Tired of being a lifeguard and with little interest in filling out college applications, Downham joined the United States Coast Guard at the end of the summer of 2001. He spent the next few years as a boatswain’s mate on a cutter in Hawaii, carrying a gun and inspecting fishing vessels. Two months before his enlistment was up, he rescinded his discharge papers after realizing he’d never followed through on what he originally joined the Coast Guard to do — save lives.

ANOTHER CHANCE

Luckily, the high-altitude, geostationary satellite rotating in sync with the Earth is not the Lady Mary’s only hope. A lower, earth-orbiting satellite can get a fix on her even without a beacon number or name, but there is only a small, 15-minute window of opportunity when the satellite passes directly overhead. By the time the EPIRB aboard the Lady Mary activates at 5:40 a.m., the low earth-orbiting satellite is 20 minutes beyond her and just out of range.

Not until it passes over this patch of ocean again — an hour and 16 minutes later — will the satellite have another chance to hear the ship’s distress signal.

At 7:07 a.m., Petty Officer 1st Class Cullen Rafferty has been on duty as watch-stander at the Fifth Coast Guard District headquarters in Virginia for less than an hour. The morning has been slow, until a computer next to Rafferty clacks to life like an old teletype announcing breaking news. Rafferty prints out the distress message from mission control. No boat ID, no owner name, just a notice that an EPIRB signal has been detected by a low-orbiting satellite.

What will not be known for months is that a contractor for NOAA, which handles EPIRB registrations, made the tiniest of errors. In December 2006, Fuzzy purchased a new EPIRB and filled out the required paperwork from NOAA by copying the code that came with the device onto NOAA’s form. On Jan. 18, 2007, a clerk working for NOAA transferred the ID from Fuzzy’s form into the agency’s system, but misread the 13th digit in the 15-digit code.

Instead of ADCD023C3542C01, the clerk wrote down ADCD023C3542001. Fuzzy’s “C,” the third to last digit, was just the slightest bit sloppier than the other letters and numbers, and the clerk copied it down as “0.”

Just to the right of the code on the registration form Fuzzy filled out was a neatly typed sticker with the correct ID. The contractor, however, was trained only to look at the middle of the form — at the spaces filled out by the owner — according to the testimony of a NOAA official.

For more than two years, the wrong EPIRB code for the Lady Mary had been kept on file in NOAA’s Maryland office. Which means that as the 71-foot scalloper sinks to the bottom of the sea, a half-billion-dollar satellite passing overhead is all but blind to her.

When the low-earth satellite finally does register an alert with mission control, a computer indicates there are two possible locations for the signal: Sac City, Iowa — or a point somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Eight minutes later — at 7:15 a.m. — the satellite resolves the ambiguity to latitude 38 degrees, 35 minutes, 42.8 seconds north; longitude 073 degrees, 41 minutes and 27.8 seconds west. The alert is coming from 66 miles east by southeast of Cape May. Rafferty’s watch partner picks up the phone and calls Sector Delaware Bay in Philadelphia, which will contact the Coast Guard air station near Atlantic City.

Normally, an Urgent Marine Information Broadcast, or UMIB, is also sent out to all mariners in the area telling them to keep a lookout for a ship in distress. But at Sector Delaware Bay, the communications specialist responsible, Shayne Kendrick, who graduated from Mount Vernon High School in Virginia less than three years earlier, is feeling “overwhelmed” in his new job, which he later admits in a signed statement.

Forty-six minutes pass before Kendrick sends out the first UMIB at 8:01 a.m., and when he does, he makes a mistake. Petty Officer 1st Class Trista Fisher, also on watch, tells him to send the UMIB on two frequencies, VHF Channel 16 and HF Channel 2182, both reserved for emergencies. The signal emitted by VHF is line-of-sight, and only as good as an antenna is tall.

Most recreational vessels and fishing boats will only pick up a VHF message when they’re no more than 20 to 25 miles offshore. The high-frequency channel, HF 2182, can transmit much farther, up to 3,000 miles.

When Kendrick finally punches the information into his computer, he sends it on Channel 16, but not on Channel 2182. The radio message disappears some 40 miles short of the two dozen fishing boats working near the stricken Lady Mary.

LEAPING INTO ACTION

Lake Downham is up and showered and has just spread his gear out on the long tables in the crew room when the station’s Klaxon alarm goes off shortly before 7:30 a.m. — WHAAA-hoo! WHAAA-hoo! WHAAA-hoo!
“EPIRB signal 60 miles offshore,” a voice over the intercom announces. “Put Ready Helo on line. Launch Bravo crew.”

That means Downham. An aviation survival technician, second class, he’s one of the guys helicopters drop into hellacious seas to save people’s lives.

Downham quickly changes from his flight suit into his orange, waterproof and fireproof dry suit. While the pilot and co-pilot are briefed on weather and rescue coordinates, Downham repacks his mask, snorkel, fins, flashlights, three knives, gloves, extra batteries, extra straps for his fins, and several chem-lights — small, taffy-shaped flares.

Before heading out of the hangar to the helicopter, he also grabs breakfast — a chocolate protein shake — from the crew-room refrigerator.

Three hundred miles to the south in Virginia, Coast Guard Petty Officer Rafferty frantically makes survival calculations: air temperature offshore (33 degrees); water temperature (40.6 degrees). He feeds the information into a cold exposure survival model and what spits out is not comforting: Based on the approximate time of sinking and the height and weight of an average man wearing some protection from the cold, Rafferty gives the fishermen just 1 to 1.5 hours of functional time, which means the ability to move, and a survival time of 1.5 to 3.1 hours.

At the hangar, the pilot and co-pilot are briefed on weather conditions and the EPIRB coordinates, and the helicopter is slowly cranked up. Downham, along with the pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Tina Pea; co-pilot, Lt. Matt Tuohy; and the flight mechanic, Petty Officer 3rd Class Jason Oyler, are strapped in and ready for takeoff. Pea pushes down on the throttle of the Coast Guard MH-65C and slowly noses the helicopter up and forward.

At 7:53 a.m. they are airborne, lifting quickly away from Atlantic City. Pea banks to the left and whirls southeast out over the ocean at 140 mph. With a strong tail wind out of the north, they should be on the scene in less than 30 minutes. By that time, and if found right away, the men of the Lady Mary will have been in the water close to three hours.

A SUDDEN RUSH OF HOPE

Dawn arrives early out in the middle of the Atlantic, and sometime before 7 a.m., as Jos Arias continues to pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the first few cracks of light split the bruised horizon. He is losing feeling in his fingers and toes and struggles against exhaustion to keep his face out of the water.

Rising to the top of a wave, he suddenly catches sight of what looks like an enclosed orange life raft about 100 yards away. His vision is blurry and his mind confused, but he’s sure of what he’s seeing and a surge of hope makes him think the others might be alive. As Arias slides into the next trough, the raft disappears behind a wall of water.

“Tim! Frank! Bernie! Bobo!” he yells into the wind.

At the crest of the next wave, he sees the raft again and tries to kick his way toward it, but within seconds stops, exhausted and limp. Expending energy causes heat loss, and humans lose heat 25 to 30 times faster when they’re in water than on land.

The blood flowing to Arias’ muscles has thickened and slowed. Hypothermia is beginning to set in.

As the Coast Guard helicopter thunders across the ocean, it’s too noisy inside for conversation. Downham sits uncomfortably on a pad on the floor — there is room for only three seats in the chopper, so the rescue swimmer is odd man out. The ride is bumpy as the helicopter is buffeted by the wind. Strapped to the inside wall of the craft, and left to his own thoughts, Downham stares out the window at the shifting mosaic of whitecaps below.

He’s taken so many wasted trips — maybe 100 — when an EPIRB is set off either accidentally or by a raucous teenager, or someone on a boat who’s had too much to drink. The crew has to launch on every alarm, but they never know until they arrive at the beacon’s location whether it’s a real rescue situation or not.

Since 2006 Downham has helped save a dozen or so fishermen from their boats or life rafts, two jet skiers stranded in a marsh, and the pilot of a Cessna airplane that went down in a blueberry patch not far from the hangar. None had life-threatening injuries.

The visibility is better than 10 miles and the cloud ceiling high, but pilot Tina Pea and co-pilot Matt Touhy are having trouble with the chopper’s new 406-frequency EPIRB direction finder. It keeps pointing back to land.

Pea decides to switch to an older direction finder 200 times less powerful. For it to work the helicopter must be within five miles of the source to pick up the signal.

By 8:20 a.m. the crew finally spots a debris field. If they’re not over the spot of the distress call, they’re damn close.

A couple of miles south by southeast of the life raft, Jos Arias sees the helicopter booming in from the east and frantically waves at it, trying to get the attention of the pilot.

During his nearly three hours in the water, he has been clutching the religious medal of Our Lady of Guadalupe that he wears around his neck and repeating to himself, “Me van a salvar. Me van a salvar.” I’m going to be saved, I’m going to be saved.

The orange-and-white helicopter descends from the sky like a quetzal from the cloud forest. Arias’ Mayan ancestors called the colorful bird “God of the air,” and as the helicopter’s rotors thump overhead, happiness floods the fisherman’s heart.

“Gracias, Dios mo. Gracias,” he says to himself. Thank you, my God. Thank you.

He tries to shout to the helicopter, but the wind scatters his voice. Ensconced in his immersion suit, he waves one arm, then the other, making sure never to let go of the board, but it’s not easy. Even when dry, the survival suit weighs 12 pounds, but because so much water has seeped in, it probably weighs twice as much.

The helicopter, tightening its search pattern, moves a little north of Arias.

“Me ven, no?” They see me, don’t they?

“That’s a life raft, 3 o’clock!” Downham yells out. He’s spotted a swatch of orange, bobbing in the heavy seas, and he thinks he can see an arm waving. It’s 8:36 a.m.

The helicopter hovers, just 300 feet from the surface of the roiling sea. It is a delicate dance, trying to hold position in 35-knot winds above a moving, surging surface. An MH-65C helicopter normally carries 1,600 pounds of fuel, which it burns at a rate of about 600 pounds an hour when flying. When hovering, however, it burns more, as much as 750 pounds an hour.

All of which means Bravo crew has less than two hours — maybe a lot less — to make a rescue and get back to base.

Adrenaline surging, Downham removes his helmet and takes out the ear plugs that help save his hearing from the violent roar of the rotors and engine. He puts on his fins, mask and snorkel, and hooks onto the hoist that will lower him into the water.

When the flight mechanic, Jason Oyler, pats Downham on the chest — the “go” sign — he detaches himself from the safety belt tethering him to the inside of the helicopter.
Oyler uses the hoist to raise Downham a couple of inches off the floor to make sure the harness is secure, then swings him out and slowly lowers him into the sea.

Even in his dry suit, Downham is staggered by the cold. At 80 miles an hour, the rotor wash scalds his face, and with his flotation vest, lifting harness, radio, strobe light, pocket flares and knives, he has added another 45 to 50 pounds to his already considerable frame.

Disconnecting from the hoist, he is in essence a 300-pound man swimming toward a moving life raft, in 10-foot seas, half a football field away.

Before he gets to the raft, Downham realizes the “arm” waving at the helicopter is actually the flap over the entrance to the covered raft. Peeking inside, his spirits sink again. No one. Just a few supplies — food, a radio, the usual survival items, wrapped in plastic, unopened.

After radioing the information to the helicopter, Downham slits the lifeboat with his knife and deflates it. He can’t leave the raft floating, since it would likely result in more alarms being called in to the Coast Guard by other vessels.

Once back in the helicopter, Downham removes his mask and fins. As Pea turns the craft in a circle around the raft, she loses her bearings for a moment.

“Where’s the raft? All I can see is a red buoy down there,” she says.

Downham, looking out the window, knows that’s not right.

“I got a plank in the water, 2 o’clock and there’s a survivor suit on it,” he shouts out.

The survivor suit moves.

“There’s someone in the water!”

Quickly, Downham dons his gear again, and about 8:40 a.m. is lowered on the hoist and swims out to the man in the water. Six-foot swells carry the rescue swimmer up and down the heaving seas. Every few seconds, Jos Arias catches sight of the man in the dry suit, his neon-yellow arms thrashing powerfully toward him.

“I’m a Coast Guard swimmer and I’m going to get you out of here,” Downham announces to Arias, just like he’s been taught. The middle-aged fisherman is still clinging to the piece of wood he carried onto the Lady Mary before the trip began.

“Thank you. Gracias. Thank you,” Arias says, over and over, switching between English and Spanish. Downham struggles to pull the man’s arms off the plank and push it away, but Arias resists. The piece of wood has saved his life. Downham will have none of it. His job is to rescue people in distress, and that’s what he does, even if it means he has to manhandle them a bit.

A NEW, POTENTIALLY LETHAL DANGER

The fastest way up into the helicopter is the harness, or lifting strop, since it’s secured under the arms and legs, but when someone has been in cold water for any length of time, it’s also more dangerous. Hanging vertically from the strop, the body’s blood will suddenly drain away from the core where it was redirected in the frigid water to keep the heart and lungs warm. Saved from hypothermia, the victim could easily go into cardiac arrest before reaching the helicopter door.

Downham gives Oyler a thumbs up, which means drop the 4-foot-long metal basket. Buoyant cushions attached to the top edges of the basket allow it to float, and Downham pushes Arias in, headfirst. The slack cable whips around both men, threatening to entangle them, so when Downham signals Oyler to start the hoist, the rescue swimmer clings to the bottom of the basket until the cable is taut, then drops 5 feet back into the water. Oyler will send the hoist down for him after Arias is safely aboard.

When both men are in the helicopter, Downham opens a special hypothermic blanket and drapes it around Arias’ shoulders. Then Oyler taps Downham on the back. The flight mechanic points out the door of the helicopter, and down. Someone else has been spotted in the water.

As he’s lowered a second time, Downham sees the orange survival suit is facedown, and he’s worried he’s too late. Swimming through the churning water, he can tell the man’s eyes are open.

“Hey! Hey!” he yells as he turns the body face up, just as he’s been taught. He rubs hard on the man’s sternum with his knuckles to try to get a pain response. The technique can sometimes rouse a person from unconsciousness, but Downham’s sternum rub produces no reaction at all. The victim’s eyes are fixed, his mouth is open slightly and a white cable is wrapped around his legs.
Downham calls again for the basket, pushes and pulls the body into it, then gives Oyler the thumbs up. When it’s his turn to be hoisted, Downham just reaches the helicopter door and sees Oyler again pointing downward — another survival suit in the water.

The helicopter has been hovering for nearly 20 minutes, quickly burning through its “bag” of gas. Before Downham is lowered again, co-pilot Tuohy gives him a sign: five fingers, or five minutes to “bingo,” the cutoff time for the chopper to get back to land with a safe margin of fuel.

When Downham reaches the second body, it, too, is turned facedown, eyes open and unresponsive. It’s clear from the stiffness of the arms and legs that rigor mortis has set in. Downham realizes he can’t call for the basket — it’s only 4 feet long and is meant for sitting. This man is at least 6 feet tall and has rigor mortis. He doesn’t even know Tuohy has been unable to move the first body out of the basket. The strop is the only alternative.

This is his fourth time in the water, and Downham tries not to think about his screaming muscles. The cold is starting to numb his fingers, even though he’s wearing special gloves, and he fumbles to secure the harness to the body. When he finally does, he hooks himself onto the hoist, just above the body, and the two are lifted together.

After he unhitches, Downham helps Oyler pull the body in, but the man’s legs are so rigid they stick out the door of the helicopter. Pea has to head back — now — or she risks ditching the chopper in the sea. But she can’t go until the door is closed. It takes all the strength Downham and Oyler have to bend the body and get the legs inside.

It’s close to 9 a.m. when Pea points the helicopter northwest. They had a tail wind out. Now they’re in a head wind. The trip back will not only take longer, it will use up more fuel.

After Downham removes his mask, snorkel and fins, he feels helpless for the first time. Neither body appears to have vital signs, but he can’t just sit there. With Oyler’s help, he reaches into the basket and pulls on the man’s legs until his back is flat against the bottom, then begins CPR.

Arias tells Downham the man on the floor of the helicopter is Capt. Bobo; the one in the basket, Timbo.

Hunched over in the tail of the chopper, Arias watches solemnly as Downham unzips Tim’s survival suit, then takes out his knife and cuts the suit at the waist to expose more of his chest. When he does, seawater gushes out. Downham flinches, worried all the saltwater might short-out the helicopter’s electronics. After slicing through Tim’s wet undershirt, and applying several conduction pads to Tim’s chest, Downham tries to shock the fisherman back to life, twice.

Every time he looks up from his work, he catches Arias’ eyes, and when he does, Arias asks, almost pleadingly, “He okay, yes?”

Downham pulls an oxygen mask over Tim’s face and begins CPR: 30 compressions, then two pumps of the oxygen bottle; 30 compressions, two pumps, over and over for 45 minutes, all the way back to the air station.

When the helicopter lands at 9:30 a.m. with a nearly empty tank, two ambulances are on the tarmac. Arias, flopping around in his bulky survival suit, is escorted into one of them and taken to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, 12 miles away in the heart of Atlantic City.

Bobo is placed in a body bag and carried from the helicopter on a stretcher.

Tim, still cradled in the basket, is carefully lowered to the ground. The entire time, Downham continues CPR, even as Tim is lifted onto a gurney.

Both bodies are put in the second ambulance, to be taken to the morgue at Shore Memorial Hospital, nine miles from Atlantic City.

Finally, Downham stops the compressions.

“Is there anything else I could have done?” he asks the EMT.

“No,” the man replies. “Nothing.”

———————–

CHAPTER 3

WORST FEARS ARE REALIZED, SIX MEN LOST AT SEA

Edith Jones, longtime partner of Bernie Smith, lies on the couch in her apartment in Wildwood. It is 11 a.m., and Jones is expecting Bernie back the next day. On ABC, Channel 6 in Philadelphia, Rachael Ray has just finished interviewing the latest winner of TV’s “The Biggest Loser” reality show. Jones is waiting for “The View” to start when Action News breaks in with a special report.

The Lady Mary, a fishing boat out of Cape May, appears to have sunk, the announcer says. One man is reported to be alive, two others are either dead or in very critical condition, and four are still missing.

Jones leaps off the couch and calls her daughter Rebecca.

“Bernie’s boat went down!” she screams into the phone.

For 15 years, Jones, now 70, and Bernie, one of Fuzzy’s younger brothers, lived together in a photograph-filled apartment in Wildwood. He was devoted to Jones, and when he wasn’t at sea the two were rarely apart. Bernie, 59, cooked for her, even accompanied her to the laundromat, and when they weren’t watching “Dancing with the Stars” or his favorite show, “Friday Night Smackdown,” they were out dancing in Cape May. She often wore her red chiffon dress, he his red tie and tux. Even when they attended the First Baptist Church in Whitesboro every Sunday, they liked to wear matching outfits.

As Bobo did with Stacy, Bernie always called Edith after she dropped him off at the dock for another fishing trip and the boat was pulling out of port. Usually she wasn’t even back home yet when her phone rang.

“I love you, honey” was always the first thing he said. The two talked for 15 or 20 minutes, past the lighthouse and the Coast Guard buoys, until reception was lost.

In 2007 Jones retired after 27 years as a housekeeper at the Crest Haven Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Cape May Courthouse. Her first husband, Alford, died in her arms when he was just 58. Several years later she met Bernie. The love of her life, Bernie didn’t mind when Edith said he and Alford were so alike they could have been twin brothers.

“Don’t make no plans,” Bernie joked with Edith on the morning of March 18 as the boat steamed east toward the Elephant Trunk. “We’re going to Virginia Beach when I come back.”

“All right,” she said, but the line had already gone dead.

The Lady Mary was out of reach.

A DANGEROUS CALLING

Fuzzy wasn’t expecting his sons back until Wednesday morning. That gave him just enough time to drive home to Bayboro, N.C., run some errands and see his wife, Hazel. A few hours later he’d turn around and be back in Cape May in time for the Lady Mary’s arrival. There would be scallops to weigh and checks to cut for the crew.

The commute was a long one, 12 hours each way, but Fuzzy drove it 40, 50, 60 times every fishing season. He’d grown used to it, prizing the quiet time alone. He ran his Ford Lariat up onto the Cape May ferry, and when the boat hit the shore in Lewes, Del., 90 minutes later, he turned the truck south down the Delmarva Peninsula and across the Chesapeake Bay. Before he reached Bayboro, 200 miles to the south, he would thread his way through dozens of small towns stitched into the Virginia and North Carolina coastline.

The sky was high and cloudless — the kind of day air traffic controllers refer to as “severe clear” — and the good weather put Fuzzy at ease. Bobo and Tim would soon be hauling back and heading home.

Commercial fishermen always have risked life and limb to pursue a profession where a mere change in wind or a minor mechanical malfunction might mean they never get home. Every year throughout the 1800s, the village of Gloucester, Mass., the oldest seaport in the country, lost about 200 fishermen — approximately 4 percent of its population — to weather and accidents.

Advancements in navigational technology and boat design made the occupation safer and the industry profitable, but it also created crowded seas. Overfishing and environmental concerns eventually led to shorter fishing seasons and strict enforcement, all of which meant crews took more chances — going out in bad weather or overloading their boats with too much catch — to meet regulations and make deadlines.

In August 1985, 20-year-old Yale student Peter Barry died with five other crewmen aboard an Alaskan salmon boat. His parents — his father was a former congressman and a member of the staffs of two U.S. presidents — succeeded in pushing Congress to pass the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act of 1988. The new law mandated lifesaving and firefighting equipment on all fishing vessels, as well as survival suits and EPIRBs on vessels operating in certain waters.

Deaths declined by more than 30 percent over the next five years. But fishermen, notorious for their fiercely guarded independence, resisted many of the recommendations. Commercial fishing remained — and remains — the most dangerous occupation in America with a fatality rate 30 times that of the average American worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Between 1992 and 2007, 1,093 commercial fishing vessels and 934 men and women were lost at sea, the Government Accountability Office reported last year. Fully a third of those deaths were Atlantic Coast fishermen.

In New Jersey alone, more than 100 commercial fishermen have died on the job since reliable records began to be kept in 1931. Last year 11 died, the worst since the winter of 1999 when the same number was lost. In the aftermath of those deaths, a special Coast Guard task force issued a report and made 59 recommendations. More than a decade later, only a handful have been officially adopted.

The 80-page document opens with an 1816 quote from Sir Walter Scott, expressing a reality that is often still true, nearly 200 years later:

“It’s not fish you are buying — it’s men’s lives.”

HAVE YOU HEARD?

Fuzzy was nearly to the North Carolina border when his cell phone rang. It was Keith Laudeman, owner of the Lobster House.

“Fuzzy, where are you at? Have you heard anything about the Lady Mary sinking?”

“What!? No, no way.”

Fuzzy immediately dialed Bobo’s cell phone, then Tim’s. Both calls went to voice mail. That wasn’t surprising, he realized, they were still too far out. Heck, he talked to Bobo three days earlier and everything was fine. Fuzzy kept driving south toward Bayboro, running names and numbers through his head. Who could he phone to get more information?

A half-hour later, Laudeman called back.

“Fuzzy, you better come on back here,” he said. “Something’s not right.”

Without even thinking, Fuzzy U-turned across two lanes of traffic and gunned his truck north.

Around the same time, Carinna Smith, Tim’s wife, was ironing a blouse for work when her phone rang, too.

“Have you heard from Tim?” Carinna’s friend, Martha Crawley, asked.

“I’ll hear from him soon. He’s due this week.”

“You know a boat went down, don’t you?” Martha asked, gently.

“No, no. I’d hear from his dad if anything was wrong.”

An hour later, at the Woodbine Developmental Center, Carinna’s cell phone rang again. This time it was her pastor, Thomas Dawson, from the First Baptist Church of Woodbine.

“Carinna, have you heard from Tim?”

“No, I’m due to hear from him,” she said for the second time that morning.

“A boat went down,” Dawson said. “Do you know the name of Tim’s boat?”

Carinna’s mind raced in a million different directions. Why couldn’t she remember?

“Well, they’re all named after his grandmother, Mary something or something Mary.”

“Lady Mary?” the Rev. Dawson asked.

“That’s one of them.”

Carinna couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it. Tim was too good a fisherman, and he was with Bobo and Bernie and Frankie Credle. Together, they were four experienced captains. How could they sink? She remembered when they first met, the movie “The Perfect Storm” had just been released. The story of the six New England fishermen killed when their boat went down in one of the worst storms of the century frightened her, but Tim was reassuring.

“Baby, you know things are in place. I’m always watching the weather. If water gets in, alarms go off.”

And when the weather wasn’t good, he would call her and say, “Baby, I’m laying up.” She trusted his judgment and several times actually went out with him on the boat when he went fishing. She loved watching him work the winches and steer the boat, bringing in a full load of scallops. She was proud of Tim, and so she learned not to be afraid when he was out.

In fact, she embraced Tim’s love of the sea. Three hundred guests were invited to their wedding, and Carinna did the decorations herself for the reception at the Rio Grande fire hall. She collected hundreds of snail shells, boiled and bleached them, then dipped them in glitter and deposited one at every place setting.

THE TERRIBLE WAIT AT THE DOCK

If the sea was going to be her husband’s life, it would be hers, too.

When Carinna hung up with Pastor Dawson, she immediately dialed Fuzzy.

“Dad, they said a boat went down!”

“I know,” Fuzzy said. He was still driving north. “I’m trying to find out now.”

Carinna remembered Tim telling her, “Baby, if I fall overboard this time of the year, it ain’t good.” She couldn’t stay at work and she was too distraught to drive, so Crawley picked her up and drove her to Cape May.

Waiting at the dock was awful, and each new bit of information made it more so: A life raft had been spotted, but no one was inside. Three men had been recovered from the water, but only one was definitively alive.

Carinna kept Fuzzy apprised of all the reports. He was a fisherman, and he knew how bad it was. His sons were dead. Now he dreaded they’d never be found.

When word reached him that two bodies had been recovered, he prayed over and over: “Please God, let them two boys be mine.” In his entire life, he’d never prayed for a single thing.

“I won’t ever ask for nothing else,” he pleaded. “Just let those boys they got out of the water be mine.”

All afternoon, friends, relatives and fishermen gathered on the Cold Spring dock, as if hoping their presence might be enough to will the Lady Mary home safe and sound. Under an excruciatingly blue sky, they huddled and embraced and whispered encouragements to one another. But they all knew. How could they not?

Few survive the total loss of a vessel, especially that far out, and in water that cold. Most fishermen understand and accept this, but not their families, who for centuries have waited on shores for men who never came home.

For the most part, the other fishing vessels out in the Elephant Trunk still didn’t know anything was wrong with one of the boats in their fleet. The Urgent Marine Information Broadcasts coming out of Sector Delaware Bay were sent out only on one frequency, which couldn’t reach more than 20 or 30 miles out, and the rescue helicopter’s few attempts to broadcast were thwarted by having to hover so low over the rough seas.

Not until late in the afternoon of the 24th did any of the other fishing vessels know one of their own had gone down. At 3:40 p.m., some 10 hours after the Lady Mary sank, and more than four hours after the Coast Guard ship Dependable arrived on scene, the cutter issued an urgent radio broadcast for all vessels to be on the lookout for “possible PIW” — “persons in the water.”

Twenty minutes later, the scalloper Kathryn Marie radioed back to report she’d heard a short, frantic call about 5:15 a.m., but nothing else after that.

At 5:47 p.m. the fishing vessel Margaret Rose volunteered to help. Then Jim Taylor aboard the Elise G. offered to assist. Forty minutes after that, the fishing boats Miss Planters and Nancy Elizabeth joined the others in what would prove to be a fruitless search for the missing men of the Lady Mary.

At the Coast Guard air station, Lake Downham was back in the hangar’s crew room by noon. High on the room’s back wall are the testaments to the lives he and his fellow rescue swimmers have saved. The dozen or so life preservers and flotation devices bear inscriptions, scribbled in black ink, with the vessel’s name and the date of rescue or the persons on board (POB): “Killing Time,” “Gypsy Blood (Aug. 2004),” “Tapped Out (5-12-08),” “The Chief (7 POB).”

A couple of his colleagues asked Downham if he was okay.

“Yeah, sure,” he answered, although truthfully he wasn’t sure.

Downham unpacked his gear and rinsed his equipment, then joined the co-pilot, Matt Tuohy, to hose down the inside of the helicopter. When someone dies during transport, or a body is recovered at sea, the helicopter must be specially cleansed.

After showering, Downham’s shift was nearly up. Another rescue swimmer offered to take the rest of his watch. Inside his cherry-red Pontiac Grand Am, Downham flipped on the satellite radio and turned to Howard Stern.

Settling back, he stretched his well-muscled arms out toward the steering wheel. Both are covered in tattooed seascapes — violent ones, with skulls, lightning, ominous purple clouds and white-capped waves. Downham’s mind wandered. He’d never seen a dead body, and he’d certainly never recovered one. He wondered, in an almost clinical kind of way, whether it was going to affect him. Would he be able to sleep that night? What would he feel like when he woke up the next day?

An hour later he pulled up to the house in Sea Bright he shared with his future wife, Alexis. She was still at school, teaching, so Downham donned his wet suit, grabbed one of his surfboards, and headed to the beach. The wind had changed and the waves weren’t particularly good. Still, he stayed out on the water for two hours.

BEHIND THE DOOR

When the local news reported three fishermen had been taken to the hospital, Carinna and Crawley got back in the car and drove to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Atlantic City. A nurse told her only one of the men from the Lady Mary was there — Jos Arias. Two bodies, she said, were taken to Shore Memorial Hospital.

Not until their bodies were being transported from the Coast Guard air station to the hospital were Tim and Bobo Smith declared dead: Tim at 10:01 a.m., Bobo at 10:06.

Nine miles from Atlantic City, Shore Memorial’s secondary ambulance entrance doubles as the drop-off for valet parking. This is also where the body bags are delivered, then wheeled down a serpentine series of hallways that dead-ends at the morgue. The doorknob-less entry is key-card only.

At 4 p.m., Ralph Henkel, from the Atlantic County Medical Examiner’s Office, escorted Carinna, Crawley, Carinna’s mother, Shirly Harris, and Pastor Dawson toward the door of the morgue. Fuzzy, having driven all the way back, joined them, but refused to go any farther. Harris stayed behind as well.

“Are you ready?” Henkel asked Carinna.

She nodded yes.

Inside the morgue, coroner Hadow Park stood between two gurneys. Lying on the one closest to the door was the body of Royal “Bobo” Smith Jr. and next to it, the remains of Timothy Smith. At first, Carinna could only see Bobo. He looked so peaceful, she thought, not a mark on his face.

When the coroner stepped to the side, Carinna inhaled sharply. There he was, her beloved Tim, lying side by side with his older brother. A wail of horror and grief could be heard on the other side of the morgue’s thick wooden door and Fuzzy’s legs buckled.

Carinna reached toward the body of her husband. His lips were so blue and when she bent to kiss them, so cold.

“I love you, Tim. I love you, baby,” she said over and over. “I’ll see you again. I promise. I’ll see you again.”

Crawley and the Rev. Dawson helped her out into the hallway.

“It’s them!” she cried out to Fuzzy.

The two collapsed in each other’s arms.

An examination of Tim’s body revealed a distended stomach, the result of swallowing large amounts of water, and white, frothy fluid in the trachea, the larynx and the lungs — all consistent with asphyxia due to drowning.

Bobo’s body, the coroner noted, had fully developed rigor mortis, which in cases of recent drowning was evidence of a brief, violent struggle to survive. In all likelihood, when Bobo’s face hit the frigid water he involuntarily gasped, drawing water immediately into his lungs and sending him into a panic from which he couldn’t recover. Cadaveric spasm — the rigidity of the arms and legs — is a kind of flash-freezing that occurs almost instantaneously when a victim drowns this way. The more Bobo battled to breathe, the less likely he was to live.

At 7:51 p.m. on Wednesday, nearly 37 hours after the search and rescue was initiated, the Coast Guard suspended the mission. Two helicopters, two cutters and a C-130 long-range surveillance plane had covered some 3,417 square nautical miles, but turned up nothing more than debris.

After his rescue, Jos Arias spent three hours at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center. The doctors examined him head to toe, checked his temperature and blood pressure, and eventually deemed him well enough to return home. The board he’d clung to all those hours had kept his upper body out of the water, helping him to retain heat longer, thereby slowing the effects of hypothermia.

His problem now was that he was shoeless, and his only clothes — underwear really — had been ripped by the EMTs in the ambulance when they tried to check his body for injuries. From the hospital’s special closet of secondhand clothes, a nurse picked out a pair of pants, T-shirt and sneakers. A young woman with the Coast Guard offered him a sweater and blue jacket, then drove him home to Wildwood.

Climbing the rickety staircase on the outside of his second-floor apartment, Arias was hungry and exhausted, his body thoroughly beaten down by the weather, the waves and his desperate struggle to survive. Alone now, the images piled up in his mind — the Lady Mary lurching to port, the helpless look of his friend Frank Reyes, then swimming free of the Lady Mary before she slipped under the waves.

Arias couldn’t eat and he didn’t want to think. He lay down on his bed, just a mattress on the apartment’s small living-room floor, and closed his eyes.

—————–

CHAPTER 4

A BEHEMOTH ENTERS THE FISHING GROUND

Just before dawn March 24, 2009, on black, moonless seas, the container ship Cap Beatrice was steaming toward the Delaware breakwater where the bay and the ocean meet. Here, deep-draft vessels like the Cap Beatrice pause and take on a river pilot, who then guides the ship up the Delaware into the Port of Philadelphia. Occasionally a ship will wait at the breakwater if a berth in port is not immediately available, but containers, which often carry food and other perishables, normally do not.

From her position 66 miles off the coast at 5 a.m., the approximate time the Lady Mary sank, the Cap Beatrice needed only about three hours to reach the breakwater. It took her 17, according to the records of the area’s river pilots association, as well as the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay, which monitors the area’s river and bay traffic.

“Generally, ships wait one or one and a half hours at the breakwater,” said Capt. Dick Buckaloo, acting president of the Pilots Association for the Bay and River Delaware. “For containers, downtime is lost money for them. So it’s odd when a container waits.”

What the Cap Beatrice was doing remains unclear, even to the Coast Guard, which received no signal for six hours from the ship’s Automatic Identification System, a tracking device that records speed, position and direction. Her last transmission was recorded by the Coast Guard at 35 seconds past the hour, 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Because of the missing AIS data, all the Coast Guard could conclude was that the Cap Beatrice “hung” around for seven or eight hours at the breakwater, said communications officer Timothy Marriott, who testified at the marine investigation into the sinking.

“That’s unusual,” said Capt. John Hagedorn, who teaches in the marine transportation department at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y. “Either there was some problem on the ship or someone shut it off.”

A river pilot boarded the Cap Beatrice after she reached the mouth of the Delaware at 1:11 a.m. March 25, according to Paul Myhre, the director of operations at the maritime exchange, and steered her the final 86 miles up river to the port. She arrived at the Packer Avenue marine terminal at 7:30 a.m., and longshoremen began to unload the ship at 10 a.m.

Technically, the investigation into the sinking of the Lady Mary was already 24 hours old. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, the Coast Guard’s commandant or one of its district commanders, “upon receipt of information of a marine casualty or accident, will immediately cause such investigation as may be necessary,” including taking possession of all voyage data and navigation records of vessels possibly involved in, or witnesses to, the casualty.

The Cap Beatrice left the Port of Philadelphia at 1:34 a.m. Thursday, March 26, 2009, heading south to Savannah, Ga., then back through the Panama Canal and eventually to Australia.

Although the Cap Beatrice was docked for nearly 18 hours, no one from the Coast Guard contacted her captain, Vasyl Stenderchuk, the shipping agency that leases her, Hamburg Sud, or the German company that owns her, Reederei Thomas Schulte. In particular, no one from the Coast Guard interviewed Capt. Stenderchuk or requested him to save the information on the ship’s black-box voyage-data recorder, even though it could have filled in the missing AIS record.

Not until the Cap Beatrice returned from its trip to Australia did officials from the Coast Guard’s marine investigation interview her captain and crew, and New Jersey State Police divers inspect her bulbous bow. By that time, the Lady Mary had been lying on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for two months.

Two days after visiting the Cap Beatrice, the Coast Guard announced it found no evidence of a collision between the Lady Mary and the container ship.

OUTDATED RULES

There are no road signs on the high seas, no speed bumps, traffic lights, cameras or cops. Most coastal countries designate traffic lanes in and out of their ports, and some, like the United States, impose speed restrictions on ships transiting parts of the ocean traveled by endangered whales. Otherwise, the biggest ships — or the fastest ones — usually have the right of way.

If the Lady Mary and Cap Beatrice collided, or came close to colliding, in the early morning hours of March 24, 2009, they were no match for one another. The 728-foot container ship is more than 10 times the size of the 71-foot fishing vessel and was traveling 10 times as fast. Yet both vessels were relying on antiquated rules of navigation pertaining to square-rigged sailing ships first outlined by Great Britain 170 years ago and signed into U.S. law under Abraham Lincoln.

If one ship is overtaking another it is generally the responsibility of the ship coming up from behind to change course, even if the overtaking vessel is much larger and therefore less maneuverable.

The mammoth ships that today transport 90 percent of the world’s traded goods are far less nimble than even the clipper ships of the 19th century. The largest container ship in the world, Denmark’s Emma Maersk, is 1,302 feet long — 52 feet longer than the Empire State Building is tall. The Cap Beatrice is a medium-size container ship, but her rudder alone contains enough steel — 25 tons — to manufacture 250 automobiles. Just to turn around takes 15 to 20 minutes and more than a mile of sea.

Because she was traveling at nearly 20 knots the morning of March 24, the Cap Beatrice — had she come close to or hit the Lady Mary — would have been a mile past the boat in just three minutes, according to Ron Betancourt, a licensed mariner and maritime lawyer in Red Bank.

A little more than a week after the Lady Mary sank in the Atlantic with four of her crew still missing, a vessel from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration located her. Then, on April 29, the Coast Guard arranged for a small, unmanned submarine to take video of the wreck. The Lady Mary was sitting in 211 feet of water, on the sandy bottom of the ocean, right-side up, leaning slightly to port.

On April 14, 2009, the Coast Guard opened an official Marine Board of Investigation. The head of the three-member panel was Cmdr. Kyle McAvoy. The board’s role, as McAvoy made pains to clarify on the first day, was not to assess blame, but rather to determine the causes of the casualties. In his opening statement, McAvoy said it was the job of the board to assess “whether any incompetence, misconduct, lack of skill or willful violation of the law … caused or contributed to the casualty … and to make appropriate recommendations in this regard.”

During a recess in the hearings, a group of seven experienced wreck divers, all of them from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, volunteered to visit the Lady Mary. Their mission was to recover any bodies, but also to take detailed video and photos.

On May 12, 2009, in the chilly, early morning darkness, the divers left Cape May and headed east to the Elephant Trunk with navigation maps, air tanks, scuba gear — and several body bags.

It had been 49 days since the Lady Mary sank, and it took the divers five hours to get out to the site. They descended in teams of two, every 10 minutes. Steve Gatto of Sicklerville videotaped the outside of the wreck. In the ghostly green glow of the diver’s light, the Lady Mary appeared whole, even untouched. With her stern slightly raised, she seemed to hover just above the bottom, as if at any moment she might start her engines and be on her way.

Gatto was astonished as he slowly swam down and around the bow. Most of the boat was unscarred. Across the hull he could clearly make out the name “Lady Mary,” painted in neat, white script outlined in black; the windows of the wheelhouse were all intact; the winches wound and ready to dredge.

What could have happened? Gatto wondered.

Peering into the captain’s bridge, he found the first signs of catastrophe: chairs overturned, cups and dishes scattered, a Bible wedged against the wall. Two satellite phones dangled from their cradles, and in the galley, colorful scallop-buckets floated like party balloons along the ceiling.

The only sounds were the hiss and bubbling of Gatto’s scuba tank, and every now and then the “whoop-whoop, weeeee” of a distant whale.

Sliding down from the wheelhouse to the deck, Gatto panned the camera toward the dredge, full of scallops, lying in a heap in the back left corner of the boat. Fuzzy had painted two big white eyes on the metal net, the better to “see” all those scallops on the seafloor. When he swam out and around the corner of the rusty hull, Gatto was taken aback. The Lady Mary’s stern was severely damaged, but locally, on the port side, and just below the waterline.

A ramp off the stern, once used to help haul up the dredge, was ripped and pushed down on the left, and nearly to the transom, the back wall of the boat. One of the thick struts connecting the ramp to the transom was buckled into an “S” shape and had punched through the transom into the stern storage compartment, called the lazarette.

The 6-foot-long rudder was sheared off at the weld and lay flat on the sand, connected only by a safety chain, and the 5-inch-thick, solid steel propeller shaft was bent straight down.

Gatto and the other divers had seen hundreds of wrecks up close, helped raise a couple of them and even recovered the bodies of fishermen from sunken vessels, but none of them had ever seen this kind of destruction.

“It was unreal,” said Harold Moyers, owner of the dive boat Big Mac, “incredibly extensive.”

Tom Packer, another volunteer, swam into one of the bunk rooms, lifted the mattresses, then picked through the scattered clothes and other debris. No bodies.

Joe Mazranni, a defense attorney from North Brunswick, was given the job of checking the cut room, where the scallops are removed from their shells. The cut room is accessed from the deck, and when Mazranni swam inside through the double doors he found a survival suit, out of its bag and partly unrolled. It was obvious someone had run out of time and been unable to get into the suit.

Mazranni then squeezed through a small opening and swam down 10 to 12 feet into the fish-hold below the deck. In the darkness all he could see was the small circle of space his flashlight illuminated — just bits and pieces of the room, really — so it was hard to get a sense of the space. He wondered if he was in the engine room by mistake. Then his light picked up a pile of boards. It was the fish-hold, all right. The boards were the removable slats of the storage bins.

Moving a couple of feet at a time, Mazranni next shone his light on what he thought was another survival suit — until he saw a pair of feet and legs. It was one of the missing fishermen and he was buried under the boards. All Mazranni could see of him was from the waist down.

The diver was almost out of oxygen and had to surface. When he came down the second time, however, Mazranni had trouble seeing through the silt he’d stirred up earlier. Like a blind person, he used his one free hand to feel for whatever was directly in front of him.

Suddenly his glove touched something soft. He instinctively recoiled. It was a man’s head. Mazranni pushed back a bit and shone his light where his hand had just been — into the lifeless, wide-open eyes of a middle-aged man. Mazranni was relieved to find the flesh of the man’s face relatively intact. Usually fish eat the softest tissue first, the eyes and lips, but the man’s head, with its neatly trimmed white goatee, appeared remarkably unscathed.

‘IT HAPPENS TO OFTEN’

The Coast Guard keeps many records detailing accidents and deaths at sea, but none specifically related to collisions between fishing boats and deep-draft vessels. Two years ago, when the Coast Guard issued a report on fishing vessel casualties between 1992 and 2007, it cited only four fatalities from all types of collisions, including passenger vessels, cruise ships and sailboats, during that 16-year period.

However, an analysis of 2,548 Coast Guard incident reports, all of them closed cases, in its Maritime Information Exchange, revealed that in just one six-year period between 2002 and 2007 there were at least 70 collisions between U.S. fishing boats and large commercial ships, and six deaths.

“Ships are so large and have so much mass behind them, it’s like a bull swatting a fly,” said Jim Kendall, a longtime fisherman and now executive director of New Bedford Seafood Consulting in Massachusetts. “It happens too often, way too often.”

In the 20 months since the sinking of the Lady Mary, at least two commercial fishing vessels off the mid-Atlantic Coast have been hit by large merchant ships: On April 14, 2009, in heavy rain and fog, the 85-foot scalloper Dictator was hit by the 965-foot container Florida, 21 days after the Lady Mary went down and in the same fishing ground. On July 30 of this year the 72-foot Atlantic Queen, fishing 11 miles off Long Island, was hit by the 625-foot cargo ship Baldor, which sheered off 15 feet of the Atlantic Queen’s bow.

No one was seriously injured in either incident.

Precise numbers on collisions are hard to come by because many fishing vessels are lost at sea with no survivors and no witnesses — just questions. Although at least six fishermen were killed in collisions with cargo ships between 2002 and 2007, another 39 died when 18 fishing boats sank, apparently with little warning, and all hands were lost.

“A lot of times a vessel goes missing and no one knows the cause,” Kendall said. “When you have something that large coming down on you, they can ride right up over you and possibly they don’t even know it.”

When collisions do occur between large merchant ships and much smaller fishing vessels, the boats can sink quickly, according to Arn Heggers, former fishing vessel safety coordinator for Maine and New Hampshire and now a civil servant with the Coast Guard, specializing in emergency preparedness. When he instructs commercial fishermen about what to do in collisions, he warns them they will likely have no more than a few minutes to get into a survival suit or life raft, and in the case of a collision with a large merchant ship, “probably a lot less.”

“When a larger vessel collides with a smaller one,” Heggers said, “it pushes the smaller boat right under the water. Imagine you are driving on a highway — a large tanker would go right over the top of you.”

When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied ship-transit risks more than a decade ago, they found three times as many collisions occurred in darkness as in daytime and the highest percentage — one-third — occurred between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m.

BACK TO LAND

With the help of his fellow divers, Joe Mazranni removed the debris from around the body in the Lady Mary’s fish-hold. The dead man was dressed in sweatpants, a tight-fitting thermal sweater and socks, but no shoes. Mazranni had seen the photographs of the men still missing and believed he’d found Fuzzy’s brother, Bernie. Using ropes, the divers pulled the body from the wreck and, while still underwater, placed it in a body bag, then lifted it to the surface.

The four-hour ride back to Cape May was quiet. An overcast day turned sunny in the late afternoon, but at night it was a chilly trip in to port. Some of the men ate, others slept. In addition to recovering a body, the divers had taken extensive video and hundreds of photographs and along with written assessments of the damage they observed, turned it all over to the Coast Guard.

“Everyone’s reaction was the same,” Moyers said of the other divers. “That boat got hit.”
Twenty miles from Cape May, the divers radioed the Coast Guard about the body they’d recovered and arranged to meet officials at the dock.

There was just one more call to make. Five miles from shore, Mazranni took out his cell phone and dialed Fuzzy.

“I think we got Bernie.”

———————-

CHAPTER 5:

A CASE OF HIGH SEAS HIT-AND-RUN?

A Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation into the sinking of the Lady Mary convened in April 2009. Several weeks of hearings were held over the next eight months, with testimony from Jos Arias, the only survivor of a seven-man crew; Fuzzy Smith, the co-owner of the boat; and at least a dozen other witnesses, including Lake Downham, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer who pulled Arias from the water.

More than a year and a half after the accident, the marine board has yet to release its report, although Cmdr. Kyle McAvoy, the chairman of the three-member investigative panel, says it is largely written.

“We’ve worked very hard to address all the possibilities,” he said. “It comes down to a few things: a weather event, some sort of event on the surface with another vessel, or a mechanical problem during the night that led to a slowly evolving problem.”

As late as September, McAvoy said the agency was leaning away from the idea that the Lady Mary was the victim of a high-seas hit and run. Instead, the agency was considering the theory that the boat was swamped and the damage to her stern was the result of its impact with the sea floor. He has declined any comment since.

Two sources close to the investigation said the Coast Guard’s final report may suggest several possible scenarios. These sources detailed the Coast Guard’s thinking to The Star-Ledger on the condition they not be named because they are not authorized to speak about the investigation.

The scenarios being explored, according to the two sources, include some combination of human, mechanical and meteorological causes based on last year’s hearing and the Coast Guard’s own investigation. Among the factors:

• The Lady Mary was an old boat, converted between 2001 and 2003 from a shrimper to a scalloper, and was never tested for stability because it was not required by federal law.

• The wind was blowing hard and the waves were 6 to 9 feet the night of March 23 into the early hours of March 24, making conditions difficult for the Lady Mary.

• A hatch on the back deck to the lazarette, a storage area, was always left open, which made the boat vulnerable to swamping in bad weather.

• Blood tests on the bodies of Bobo and Tim Smith revealed marijuana in both men’s blood, possibly impairing their ability to respond to an emergency. (A forensic toxicologist testified at the hearings he was unable to determine when the marijuana was smoked or how much was ingested.)

Some of the possible scenarios would seem to run counter to evidence presented at the Coast Guard’s hearings. Coast Guard reservist Aldo Guerino testified the Lady Mary’s safety equipment was up to code, had passed a voluntary inspection less than a year before she sank, and was well maintained.

Michael Duvall, a former captain on the Lady Mary, also testified “the boat handled great,” even in severe weather.

“I could lay her in a trough, 15-16 foot trough … with my coffee cup sitting right on the dash and never spill the coffee,” Duvall said. “She was a good sea boat. (An) excellent sea boat.”

About one thing there is general agreement among all the experts: The mystery of what sank the Lady Mary lies with a crushed ramp, a broken rudder and a bent propeller. What force could have mangled all that steel? Everyone acknowledges there are only two possibilities: She was either damaged on the surface in a collision, or she was damaged 211 feet down when she hit the sea floor.

For seven months The Star-Ledger investigated the wreck of the Lady Mary, examining internal Coast Guard documents and 800 pages of testimony from the Coast Guard hearings, observing fishermen at work on a scalloper similar to the Lady Mary and in similar wind and wave conditions as on the night she sank, and testing the buoyancy of survival suits in cold sea water, especially when they are not worn properly.

More than 100 interviews were conducted with some of the country’s foremost naval architects, marine engineers, wreck divers, maritime forensics specialists, fishermen present in the Elephant Trunk when the Lady Mary was lost, mechanics who worked on her engine on land, as well as Coast Guard officials and those involved in the rescue of Jos Arias.

The Star-Ledger asked more than a dozen maritime experts — among them a fishing boat stability expert, a hydrodynamicist who studies how ships sink, a rudder designer, and one of the few marine forensics specialists to inspect pieces of the Titanic — to examine videos, photos and Coast Guard investigation documents. None of these experts concurred with the theory that the Lady Mary’s stern was bent and crushed by the impact with the sea floor. Only representatives from one company believe this scenario.

“It’s garbage for anyone to think the bottom caused all that destruction,” said George Edwards, a naval engineer at CSC Advanced Marine Center in Washington, D.C. “It’s just not possible.”

The preponderance of opinion, and much of the evidence found by the newspaper, point to a collision with another, much larger vessel — something powerful enough to bend and rip thousands of pounds of steel and send the Lady Mary to the bottom of the sea before she could even shoot off a flare. Navigation records from that night show there was only one such merchant ship in the area at the time — the 728-foot-long container ship Cap Beatrice.

AN EXPERT’S OPINION

William Garzke is a pioneer in the field of shipwrecks. A long-standing member of the Society for Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Garzke is also founder and chairman of SNAME’s renowned marine forensics committee, which devotes its time to the scientific investigation of sunken ships. He has consulted on a number of Coast Guard investigations and is probably most well-known for his work analyzing pieces of the Titanic, after which he concluded a flaw in the design of the hull’s joints likely doomed the “unsinkable” ship.

When Garzke and the 14 other members of the forensics committee, at The Star-Ledger’s request, examined the video and photographic evidence of the Lady Mary and analyzed Coast Guard documents and navigational records, they all agreed about the damage to the fishing vessel.

“It’s hard for me to believe it was just the sand that caused it,” Garzke said. “(It) was a collision with another object. That’s the likeliest possibility.”

Alexander Schulte, the head of Reederei Thomas Schulte in Hamburg, Germany, which owns the Cap Beatrice, has repeatedly declined to comment on the Lady Mary tragedy despite numerous calls and e-mails.
Oliver Kautz, the quality manager for OCEAN Shipmanagment, owned by Reederei Thomas Schulte, initially spoke about the incident, but later said he was told by his superiors to say no more. Kautz oversees the parent company’s fleet. In earlier conversations and e-mails he said the company had conducted an “intensive internal investigation” in which it assisted the Coast Guard, but “unfortunately both investigations have not brought the case forward.”

The dockside manager in Philadelphia for Hamburg Sud, the company that leases the Cap Beatrice, allowed The Star-Ledger to board the ship in April when she was in port and sailing under a new captain, but refused a second request in July when the Cap Beatrice returned once again under the command of Capt. Vasyl Stenderchuk, who was in charge the night the Lady Mary sank. Several e-mails sent to Stenderchuk’s Linkedin.com profile also have gone unanswered.

As noted, not all the experts consulted by The Star-Ledger agreed with the collision theory. The professionals in the marine division of Robson Forensic in Lancaster, Pa., which provides investigative and consulting services to lawyers, concluded the Lady Mary was swamped — perhaps by a bow wake from a passing container ship — and that all her stern damage was the result of hitting the sea floor.

“If she develops even a slight port list, which is what we believe happened,” said Bart Eckhardt, president of Robson Forensic, “then the Lady Mary could not shed water. When this happens, and there’s wave action, the water becomes trapped between the bulwark and the house. … The situation becomes catastrophic.”

Eckhardt and his three-member team believe the Lady Mary sank, stern first, at a speed of 4 to 7 meters per second, basing their conclusions on the Coast Guard’s assessment of the Lady Mary’s terminal velocity — the speed she was traveling when she hit bottom. A copy of the assessment was obtained by The Star-Ledger and provided to various experts. Robson says that if the boat did have a port list and was traveling at the speed estimated by the Coast Guard she would have hit the sea floor at a 49 degree angle — which they believe accounts for the damage to the stern.

However, SNAME’s marine forensics committee, which viewed those same Coast Guard calculations, believes they are flawed.

“(They) are very off-the-cuff and can’t stand up to rigorous examination because there are too many vaguely qualified assumptions,” said Sean Avery, a hydrodynamicist who models the various ways ships sink. “If you simulated the free fall through the water column 10 times, you would get 10 different answers. … This is tricky to do right.”

The experts who point to a collision say the following points support their conclusion:

• The severity and direction of the damage, which suggests a sudden and powerful impact from a very large moving object.

• The rudder stock, which appears to have been sheared off in a collision as opposed to breaking due to corrosion and metal fatigue.

• The severely contorted propeller stock, which is bent down, as if from contact with a much heavier object, as opposed to up, which would be expected with a bottom hit.

• The marks on the propeller blades, which indicate they were still turning when the propeller was pushed against the rudder. That scoring could only have happened on the surface, when the Lady Mary’s engine was still engaged, say proponents of the collision theory. When she finally sank she lost all power, which means the propeller was no longer turning when the Lady Mary hit the sea floor.

• The way the port side of the transom is bowed-in, indicating an impact from a rounded object, such as a container ship’s bulbous bow.

One of the Coast Guard assumptions in the terminal velocity calculations, according to members of the forensics committee, is that the rudder buckled when the boat hit the bottom.

“I don’t agree with that,” said George Edwards, a committee member and naval engineer at CSC Advanced Marine. “That would only apply if the boat went down on a fairly even keel,” that is, if it sank right-side up, such that the end of the rudder hit first and the rudder was vertical.

The problem with this scenario, he said, is that “sinking on an even keel also results in the lowest possible terminal velocity.”

In other words, the slower the sinking, the softer the landing; the softer the landing, the less damage.

Instead, said the forensics committee, to even consider the possibility the Lady Mary crumpled when she hit the sea floor, she would have to sink stern first at a nearly vertical angle.

Like the other divers, Steve Gatto, who was in the first group to dive on the wreck of the Lady Mary, believes the vertical-hit scenario is improbable because of the pristine condition of the gallows, a large rectangular frame that supports the dredge. It rises high over the deck and is angled over the stern’s ramp.

“If the Lady Mary sank nearly vertically, the gallows would have hit the bottom first,” he said. “Yet we inspected it carefully and it had no damage whatsoever, not even a scratch.”

Gatto has nearly 30 years experience diving on wrecks. He has helped raise sunken fishing boats and assisted in the recovery of bodies. If the Lady Mary struck the bottom either vertically or at a 49 degree angle as Robson suggests, he says, the propeller stock would have bent upward, not downward, as the dive photos and video show.

“With that angle and force, I’d expect to see the (propeller) blades bent back, too, maybe even broken, but they’re not,” he said. “The blow came from behind and pushed the boat down.”

Robson said it used the Coast Guard’s calculations to do a complete reconstruction, and it stands by its analysis, including the 49 degree angle of impact.

The SNAME forensics committee counters that a reconstruction entails far too many variables to be accurate and that the only thing that explains the damage done to the Lady Mary is a surface collision.

Another issue, says SNAME’s Avery, is the rudder. If it was damaged when the boat hit the sand, its “shoe,” the bracket underneath the rudder that holds it in place, should still be there, he says.

The divers, however, never found it.

The only plausible explanation for the shoe not being in the vicinity of the boat, says SNAME’s marine forensics committee, is that it was knocked loose by impact on the surface.

“I’ve designed rudders for boats that size,” Edwards said. “I’ve done the calculations for that type of rudder. What’s left, where the rudder shoe came off, is consistent with it being hit from above and forced down.”

The conditions out in the Elephant Trunk on the morning of March 24, 2009, were rough, but not excessive as far as commercial fishermen are concerned. According to the nearest offshore buoy, seas were 6 to 9 feet and the winds 25 to 30 mph, from the north by northwest.

What has puzzled many of those involved in the case was how quickly the Lady Mary appeared to sink. In the debris field there were unused survival suits, emergency flares and hand-held distress signals, and no one in the empty life raft.

For this reason, many experts find it hard to believe the Lady Mary simply foundered and sank. A boat without power, even in rough seas they say, does not go down in a matter of minutes.

“You can be dead in the water, it still takes time to sink,” said Bruce Belousofsky, a retired Coast Guard commander, former vessel safety inspector and president of Blancke Marine Services, a naval architecture and engineering firm in Woodbury. “Flooding in those conditions is a process, and there are high-water alarms. It’s hard to be taken by surprise.”

When he heard the Lady Mary went down, he thought it was unusual.

“It had to be something very, very dramatic to sink that vessel without giving those guys much time to get out.”

A CRUCIAL CLUE

If there is a smoking gun in the sinking of the Lady Mary, divers Gatto and Harold Moyers believe they found it.

When they filmed the wreck underwater, each diver said he noticed that the stay wires on the stern ramp, which run from the top of the gallows to the lowest corners of the ramp, were broken at the welds. The port stay wire, encased in a steel sleeve, was tied back with rope, albeit haphazardly, to a cleat on the stern.

Gatto and Moyers believe that in rough seas, after a collision, and with the boat essentially dead in the water, the heavy cable would have been swinging around the deck “like a club.” They theorize a crew member, perhaps Frankie Credle, quickly tied it out of the way.

The broken stay wires, which would have been mended if they had both suddenly broken on their own earlier in the trip, are the key for Gatto.

“You can’t tie back a stay wire on the bottom of the ocean,” he said. “Something happened before it sank.”

Gatto, Moyers, Belousofsky and the SNAME marine forensics committee all believe the Lady Mary was moving — or trying to move — hard to port when she went down, perhaps trying to get out of the way of an approaching ship. Photos of the interior of the Lady Mary’s wheelhouse and control panel, specifically the open throttle and the rudder gauge, said Belousofsky, appear to confirm the boat was turning when she foundered. The slashes in the rudder also seem to confirm this, he and the others say, because the prop had to be turning to gash the rudder in this way.

In a collision, with the boat trying to take evasive action, the rudder could have been pushed up against the propeller by the larger ship’s rounded bulbous bow, according to these experts, at which point it would bend the propeller shaft downward and in the process stove in the transom.

In seas of 6 to 9 feet, say Gatto, Moyers, Belousofsky and the others, a collision with a ship 10 times the size of the Lady Mary could have pushed her stern down so far that her decks were awash in a matter of seconds.

A TWO-MONTH WAIT

In the course of its own investigation, The Star-Ledger also found possible problems with the Coast Guard inquiry.

It was not until Memorial Day 2009 — two months after the Lady Mary sank — that the Coast Guard finally contacted the Cap Beatrice on her way back in to the Port of Philadelphia. The ship anchored at the southern end of Delaware Bay where Coast Guard officials interviewed the crew, and scuba divers from the New Jersey State Police entered the choppy seas to examine the ship’s bulbous bow.

Coast Guard officials offered no explanation as to why they waited to inspect the Cap Beatrice when she returned to Philadelphia, but 48 hours after the crew was interviewed, the Coast Guard released a statement announcing no evidence of a collision had been uncovered.

A number of people, including Belousofsky and Garzke, are critical of the Coast Guard’s investigation.

In June 2009, Gatto invited Cmdr. McAvoy to a meeting of the SNAME forensic committee in Washington, D.C., which McAvoy accepted. The committee made a number of recommendations, including the necessity of raising the rudder, and also provided McAvoy with a copy of its guide to marine investigations, because, Garzke said, McAvoy seemed “mystified about forensic techniques.”

McAvoy says he has spent his entire 20-year Coast Guard career in the field of marine safety, specializing in inspections and marine casualty investigations. He also has two master’s degrees in the field of marine engineering from the University of Michigan.
Much of his experience, he says, has been with large commercial ships, freighters, tankers and passenger vessels. Now based in Washington, D.C., at the Coast Guard’s Office of Traveling Inspections and National Centers of Expertise, McAvoy says he has taken part in 20 to 24 casualty investigations over the past two decades — none involving sunken fishing vessels.

The requirements to become a Coast Guard marine investigator include a three-week course in Yorktown, Va. A number of performance qualification standards must also be met, such as “initiating an investigation” and “generating a timeline.”

A 2008 audit of marine casualty investigations by the Office of the Inspector General found 68 percent of the casualty investigators the panel interviewed and tested were “substandard.”

McAvoy was interviewed five times by The Star-Ledger. He discussed the process — and progress — of the investigation of the Lady Mary, as well as his background, but would not speak about the specifics of the case. When McAvoy was contacted last week, Lisa Novak from Coast Guard public affairs in Washington, D.C., spoke for him. “We are not giving any interviews until the investigation is over,” she said, but could not predict when that would be.

The Star-Ledger also uncovered evidence of problems during the search and rescue mission.

Testimony at the hearing suggests the Coast Guard might have been hampered by the fact the helicopter crew was unfamiliar with the use of its new 406 EPIRB direction finder when trying to locate possible survivors. Instead, the crew had to rely on an older device with less range, potentially delaying the first sighting of the life raft.

After then locating Jos Arias in the water, the helicopter was too low to radio back to land information about how many fishermen were still missing. That meant another delay before the officers at Sector Delaware Bay could send an urgent marine broadcast.

Finally, when a Coast Guard communications officer in Philadelphia eventually did radio all the mariners in the vicinity of the sinking, the officer failed to use the frequency most likely to reach them — a mistake he acknowledged in a Coast Guard report.

In addition to the Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board, which assisted in the investigation, has declined further comment until their official reports are made public.

A BODY IN THE NET

When the phone rang inside Coast Guard headquarters in Cape May at 10:35 a.m., Wednesday, May 20, 2009, it was Richard Gibbs, captain of the scalloper John & Nicholas, on the line. He had a grim message. Under a tarp on the back of his boat lay a body.

The John & Nicholas had been fishing in the Elephant Trunk, a few miles from where the Lady Mary sank. When they lifted the dredge after a run they found tangled in the net, among the fish and shells, the partially decomposed body of an African-American male.

Gibbs was pretty sure he knew who it was: Frankie Credle.

At age 56, Credle had been fishing for more than 40 years. The 13th of 14 children from Mesic, N.C., he was Fuzzy’s cousin and the two grew up just a couple miles from one another. When he was in his 20s, Frankie helped Elwood Jennett build the Sea Pal, a 50-foot fishing boat, behind the Mesic service station. One day when they were out shrimping in Pamlico Sound in rough weather, the Sea Pal capsized. Credle saved Jennett’s life by helping him swim out from under the boat, and if Frankie hadn’t been such a strong swimmer, both would have died.

With the confirmation the body in the net was Frankie Credle, two men from the Lady Mary remain missing: Frank Reyes, so panicked he could not get into an immersion suit before the boat went under, and Jorge Ramos, the youngest fisherman, whom Arias never saw in those last, desperate minutes before the Lady Mary disappeared into the black Atlantic.

In July, however, the John & Nicholas, the same boat that scooped up Frankie Credle’s body from the chilly depths, plucked Reyes’ driver’s license from the sea.

The men of the Lady Mary were not the only New Jersey fishermen who died last year. On Nov. 11, 2009, just days after the Coast Guard announced it was stepping up inspections of safety equipment aboard commercial fishing vessels, the 44-foot scalloper Sea Tractor sank in a storm off Cape May. Three men, including a father and son, were lost.

Six weeks later, the 38-foot Alisha Marie went down with two of its three crew.

When 2009 finally came to a close, 11 commercial fishermen had lost their lives in the waters off New Jersey. Within months, changes in safety practices in the fishing industry were being considered.

This past March, the NTSB issued a recommendation to the Federal Communications Commission regarding EPIRBs. Although the Lady Mary’s device was incorrectly registered, it also lacked a $100 GPS transmitter, which could have been attached to the EPIRB and would have identified the location of the boat, if not its identity. Currently, the GPS transmitter is not required, but the NTSB cited the Lady Mary as a reason why the law should be changed.

“If a rescue helicopter could have been launched after the first EPIRB signal was received,” the NTSB’s letter reads, “(it) is possible that the two victims found in the water wearing immersion suits would have still been alive when the rescuers arrived.”

NOAA also has instructed its contractors when recording EPIRB registration forms to now read the printed code on the manufacturer’s label — if it is provided — not just the handwritten code copied onto the form by the owner of the vessel.

Recently, a bill mandating safety inspections of all commercial fishing boats, and safety training for all vessel operators, passed both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Last month, President Obama signed the legislation and it became law.

COPING

In the meantime, many of the families of the men who died continue to struggle with their grief. The day before the Smith brothers were buried in North Carolina, Stacy Greene, Bobo’s longtime girlfriend, answered a call from Adele’s Jeweled Treasures in Cape May. The consignment shop wanted her to know it was the last day to reclaim Bobo’s gold chain. Stacy raced down and paid the bill.

Ten-year-old Jonathan, one of Stacy and Bobo’s sons, believes he’s seen his father.

“I was walking around the yard and I looked up above the house and saw my Dad. His arms were spread out and he flew down and hugged me.”

Carinna Smith, Tim’s wife, still keeps her husband’s truck parked in the driveway and every now and then sneaks out of the house just to sit in the driver’s seat. Tim’s Bible is still there, and the little sea horse he once caught still hangs from the rearview mirror.

Before Bernie’s body was found, Edith Jones would lie in bed every night and call his cell phone just to listen to his voice-mail message from somewhere out in the ether.

Jos Arias, the only survivor of the wreck of the Lady Mary, has lost weight since the accident and still needs medication to sleep. The TV at the foot of his bed is always turned to a Spanish-language station, a kind of white noise to distract him from his thoughts.

His eyes pool with sadness when he speaks. Through an interpreter, he says he has worked a bit on the docks since the accident, but not on a fishing boat, and that he won’t, not ever again.

A NEED TO KEEP MOVING

Fuzzy brought his sons home to Bayboro to be buried in his backyard, and that’s where he finally buried Bernie’s ashes, too. Hazel, his wife, says she’s out there “from sunup to sundown.” She puts fresh flowers on the graves every week and keeps an eye on Bobo and Tim when she’s on her exercise bicycle in the shed next to the graves.

“There’s my babies,” she’ll say. “I love you, babies.”

Sometimes she even hums to them.

For Fuzzy, who lost his only children as well as a brother and a cousin, nothing gives him comfort.

“It’s like somebody punched a hole through me,” he said. “I get up and get ready to go, but instead I look out the window. My energy is like seeping through a crack.”

A descendant of slaves, his ancestry can be traced to Elizabeth Jennett who survived the shipwreck of the English bark Good Intent off Cape Hatteras in 1767. Most of the 300 Africans being brought to America to be sold into slavery perished that day, but Jennett survived.

The sea gives and the sea takes.

Fuzzy says he has to keep moving. He drives mile after mile, hour after hour, back and forth between Bayboro, N.C., and Cape May, though none of his remaining fishing boats goes out anymore. On one of those trips home to North Carolina, right after the accident, he pulled off the highway into a Burlington Coat Factory to buy a suit and pair of shoes to bury Bobo in — the socks came two in a pack, he said. The other pair remain in the back seat of the truck.

He doesn’t have the heart to fish anymore, Fuzzy says, but every couple of weeks he still hits the road in his Ford pickup anyway, just to check in on his other rusting boats.

“It feels like someone pushing at me,” he said. “Doesn’t matter how many trips I take on the ferry and come back, it’s going to be the same. It took me awhile to figure that out. … Now I get to where I don’t want to be neither place.”

Fuzzy has always known what to do on the sea. “You work on the boat with the motion of the boat,” he likes to say. It’s how to be on land that’s hard for him to figure out.’

Last summer he bought a new lawn mower and to fill the time spends warm weather weekends cutting his lawn in Bayboro. When he first bought the machine he not only trimmed his own grass, but also the empty lot across the street, then his neighbor’s lawn, then the town square. A few days later he received a letter from the mayor who wanted to thank him for making the town look so much better.

For the most part, though, Fuzzy avoids friends and acquaintances.

“When I go places where I don’t know people, I feel better,” he says. “I quit going to the place where I get my oil changed because he was too nice. … It’s not so much what they say, it’s what they’re thinking.”

For Fuzzy, life now is entwined by the vocabulary of loss. So on many days, in the quiet before dawn, he gets in his truck and heads north again, past Credle’s Salvage, past the Play Boy Barbershop, past the Original Free Will Baptist Church, until all that he’s left behind is swallowed by darkness.

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Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.

It was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early-retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii, at the helm of a 50ft catamaran that he had built himself.

For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.

‘It took us a week to get across and there was always some plastic thing bobbing by,’ says Moore, who speaks in a jaded, sardonic drawl that occasionally flares up into heartfelt oratory. ‘Bottle caps, toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn’t identify. It wasn’t a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here. Two years later I went back with a fine-mesh net, and that was the real mind-boggling discovery.’

Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 metres, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, in many colours, swirling like snowflakes or fish food. An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. Plastic won, and it wasn’t even close. ‘We found six times more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal,’ he says. ‘No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from.’

So ended Moore’s retirement. He turned his small volunteer environmental monitoring group into the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, enlisted scientists, launched public awareness campaigns and devoted all his considerable energies to exploring what would become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and studying the broader problem of marine plastic pollution, which is accumulating in all the world’s oceans.

The world’s navies and commercial shipping fleets make a significant contribution, he discovered, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day, along with their other litter. But after a few more years of sampling ocean water in
the gyre and near the mouths of Los Angeles streams, and comparing notes with scientists in Japan and Britain, Moore concluded that 80 per cent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land, and the United Nations Environmental Programme agrees.

The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and landfills, and lorries and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Litter dropped by people at the beach is also a major source.

Plastic does not biodegrade; no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by physical friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous plastic soup at the becalmed heart of the Pacific, but Moore also found a fantastic profusion of uniformly shaped pellets about 2mm across.

Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 100 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging.

During their loadings and unloadings, however, nurdles have a knack for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in a good wind. They float wonderfully and can now be found in every ocean in the world, hence their new nickname: mermaids’ tears. You can find nurdles in abundance on almost any seashore in Britain, where litter has increased by 90 per cent in the past 10 years, or on the remotest uninhabited Pacific islands, along with all kinds of other plastic confetti.

‘There’s no such thing as a pristine sandy beach any more,’ Charles Moore says. ‘The ones that look pristine are usually groomed, and if you look closely you can always find plastic particles. On Kamilo Beach in Hawaii there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until you dig a foot down. On Pagan Island [between Hawaii and the Philippines] they have what they call the “shopping beach”. If the islanders need a cigarette lighter, or some flip-flops, or a toy, or a ball for their kids, they go down to the shopping beach and pick it out of all the plastic trash that’s washed up there from thousands of miles away.’

On Midway Island, 2,800 miles west of California and 2,200 miles east of Japan, the British wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking found that many thousands of Laysan albatross chicks are dying every year from eating pieces of plastic that their parents mistake for food and bring back for them.
Worldwide, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, plastic is killing a million seabirds a year, and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles. It kills by entanglement, most commonly in discarded synthetic fishing lines and nets. It kills by choking throats and gullets and clogging up digestive tracts, leading to fatal constipation. Bottle caps, pocket combs, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, cottonbud shafts, toothbrushes, toys, syringes and plastic shopping bags are routinely found in the stomachs of dead seabirds and turtles.
A study of fulmar carcases that washed up on North Sea coastlines found that 95 per cent had plastic in their stomachs – an average of 45 pieces per bird.

Plastic particles are not thought to be toxic themselves but they attract and accumulate chemical poisons already in the water such as DDT and PCBs – nurdles have a special knack for this. Plastic has been found inside zooplankton and filter-feeders such as mussels and barnacles; the worry is that these plastic pellets and associated toxins are travelling through the marine food chains into the fish on our plates. Scientists don’t know because they are only just beginning to study it.

We do know that whales are ingesting plenty of plastic along with their plankton, and that whales have high concentrations of DDT, PCBs and mercury in their flesh, but that’s not proof. The whales could be getting their toxins directly from the water or by other vectors.

Research on marine plastic debris is still in its infancy and woefully underfunded, but we know that there are six major subtropical gyres in the world’s oceans – their combined area amounts to a quarter of the earth’s surface – and that they are all accumulating plastic soup.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has now been tentatively mapped into an east and west section and the combined weight of plastic there is estimated at three million tons and increasing steadily. It appears to be the big daddy of them all, but we do not know for sure.

Dr Pearn Niiler of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, the world’s leading authority on ocean currents, thinks that there is an even bigger garbage patch in the South Pacific, in the vicinity of Easter Island, but no scientists have yet gone to look.

The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio observed that every new technology opens the possibility for a new form of accident. By inventing the locomotive, you also invent derailments. By inventing the aeroplane, you create plane crashes and mid-air collisions.
When Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist, started tinkering around in his garage in Yonkers, New York, working on the first synthetic polymer, who could have foreseen that a hundred years later plastic would outweigh plankton six-to-one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?

Baekeland was trying to mimic shellac, a natural polymer secreted by the Asian scale beetle and used at the time to coat electrical wires. In 1909 he patented a mouldable hard plastic that he called Bakelite, and which made him very rich indeed.

Chemists were soon experimenting with variations, breaking down the long hydrocarbon chains in crude petroleum into smaller ones and mixing them together, adding chlorine to get PVC, introducing gas to get polystyrene. Nylon was invented in 1935 and found its first application in stockings, and then after the Second World War came acrylics, foam rubber, polythene, polyurethane, Plexiglass and more: an incredible outpouring of new plastic products and the revolution of clear plastic food wraps and containers, which preserved food longer and allowed people to live much further away from where it was produced.

Single-use plastic bags first appeared in the US in 1957 and in British supermarkets in the late 1960s; worldwide there are more than a trillion manufactured every year, although the upward trend is now levelling off and falling in many countries, including Britain. We reduced our plastic bag use by 26 per cent last year, to 9.9 billion. Bottled water entered the mass market in the mid-1980s. Global consumption is now 200 billion litres a year and only one in five of those plastic bottles is recycled. The total global production of plastic, which was five million tons in the 1950s, is expected to hit 260 million tons this year.

Look around you. Start counting things made of plastic and don’t forget your buttons, the stretch in your underwear, the little caps on the end of your shoelaces. The stuff is absolutely ubiquitous, forming the most basic infrastructure of modern consumer society. We are scarely out of the womb when we meet our first plastic: wristband, aspirator, thermometer, disposable nappy. We gnaw on plastic teething rings and for the rest of our lives scarcely pass a moment away from plastics.

The benefits of plastic, most of which relate to convenience, consumer choice and profit, have been phenomenal. But except for the small percentage that has been incinerated, every single molecule of plastic that has ever been manufactured is still somewhere in the environment, and some 100 million tons of it are floating in the oceans.

A dead albatross was found recently with a piece of plastic from the 1940s in its stomach. Even if plastic production halted tomorrow, the planet would be dealing with its environmental consequences for thousands of years, and on the bottom of the oceans, where an estimated 70 per cent of marine plastic debris ends up – water bottles sink fairly quickly – for tens of thousands of years. It may form a layer in the geological record of the planet, or some microbe may evolve that can digest plastic and find itself supplied with a vast food resource. In the meantime, what can we do?

What we cannot do is clean up the plastic in the oceans. ‘It’s the biggest misunderstanding people have on this issue,’ Moore says. ‘They think the ocean is like a lake and we can go out with nets and just clean it up. People find it difficult to grasp the true size of the oceans and the fact that most of this plastic is in tiny pieces and it’s everywhere. All we can do is stop putting more of it in, and that means redesigning our relationship with plastic.’

At the far end of a huge loading warehouse on the San Francisco docks dub reggae is pulsing and two young women are shooting dry ice into two-litre plastic bottles. David de Rothschild, the tall, bearded, long-haired, environmentalist son of the Rothschild banking family, wearing hemp Nikes and a skull-and-bones belt buckle, strides in past a display of nurdles, an aquarium full of plastic soup and various rejected prototypes of the catamaran he intends to build and sail across the Pacific to Australia, visiting the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and various rubbish-strewn islands along the way.

He wants the boat to be made entirely out of recycled plastics and float on recycled plastic bottles, and this has presented a daunting challenge to his team of designers, consultants and naval architects. Human ingenuity has devised many fine applications for recycled plastic, but boat-building has not so far been one of them. The design team has had to start from scratch, over and over again. Furthermore, because the point of this voyage is to galvanise media and public attention on the issue of plastic waste, the boat needs to look dramatic and iconic, and it must produce all its own energy, generate no emissions and compost its waste.

‘The message of this project is that plastic’s not the enemy,’ de Rothschild says, speaking rapidly and unstoppably in a mid-Atlantic accent. He is full of bright energy, good humour, marketing slogans and an almost childlike enthusiasm. ‘It’s about rethinking waste as a resource. It’s about doing smart things with plastic and showcasing solutions. It’s about using adventure to engage people and start a conversation that creates change in society. You’re always going to get people who say, “Oh, he’s a bloody Rothschild, sitting on a boat made of, what’s that? Champagne bottles?” And that’s fine because it gets people talking about it and thinking about where their rubbish goes.’

The idea took hold of him in July 2006. He had just got back from the North Pole, where he led an expedition designed to heighten awareness about global warming. On the internet he came across a UN report describing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and estimating that there was now an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world’s oceans. ‘I thought, this is nuts that we don’t know about this! Six-to-one plastic-to-plankton ratio? This has got to be my next expedition.’

Born in London, de Rothschild, 31, was a reckless, hyperactive child and teenager who found an outlet for energies in competitive showjumping and triathlons. His school career was erratic but he manage to buckle himself down, pass his A-levels and get into Oxford Brookes University to study computing. Afterwards he got a job with a music licensing and merchandising company, designing websites for Britney Spears and U2, and absorbing lasting lessons on the power and strategies of marketing.

Then, with the encouragement of a girlfriend, he got deeply involved in alternative medicine, which led him to organic farming in New Zealand and the subsequent realisation that it was all for naught if the air, the water and the natural environment continued to be poisoned.

In 2004 a friend’s brother invited him on a 1,150-mile traverse of Antarctica by foot and ski, and on a whim he invited schoolteachers and children in New Zealand to follow the expedition’s progress and learn about Antarctica.

On his return he founded an organisation, Adventure Ecology, intended to use expeditions to get schoolchildren interested and actively involved in environmental issues. The Arctic global warming expedition was the first. Crossing the Pacific in a recycled-plastic boat will be the second.

He decided to name the boat Plastiki, in homage to Kon-Tiki, the raft of balsa logs and hemp ropes in which Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific in 1947. He recruited designers, a public relations team and corporate sponsors, including Hewlett-Packard and the International Watch Company. He won’t say how much it is costing or how much of his own money is going into it, only that it is more than he would like and less than it could be.

Jo Royle, the renowed British yachtswoman, has signed on as skipper, and two of Thor Heyerdahl’s grandchildren have agreed to join the crew. And through Adventure Ecology, de Rothschild has launched a competition called SMART, inviting individuals and organisations from science, marketing, art and industrial design research and technology to present tangible solutions to the problems of plastic waste, and offering grants and publicity to the winners.

In general terms, it is already clear what we need to do about plastic. Since it is made from oil, which will run out in our lifetimes and get more expensive as it does, we have to start re-using plastic and designing it for re-use. At present only a few of our many hundred plastics can simply be melted down and moulded into something else; the rest are cross-contaminated with other chemicals and types of plastic. But the billion- dollar plastic industry is tooled for virgin plastic and resistant to change.

Charles Moore gives talks to plastic industry executives whenever he can and finds very little interest in recycling, because it’s the least profitable sector of the industry. ‘A lot of companies and product designers and marketing people don’t like recycled plastic either,’ de Rothschild says, ‘You can’t dye it with those bright, attention-grabbing colours.’

For consumers, the easiest way to make a difference is to give up plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles, which contribute more to plastic pollution than any other products. Then comes plastic packaging, which is a little more complicated. It is easy to point out examples of excessive packaging, but plastic does have the virtue of being lighter than paper, cardboard and glass, which gives it a smaller carbon footprint. For food especially, recyclable plastic packaging is probably the best option.

For the hull and cabin of the Plastiki, the team was enthused about recycled plastic lumber until they discovered that it sags badly unless reinforced with glass rods. Now they are excited about self-reinforcing PET, a new product manufactured in Denmark, similar to fibreglass but fully recycled and recyclable. When heat-fused to boards of PET foam, it appears to be capable of withstanding the battering of Pacific waves for a hundred days, although the effect of salt water on the material is still unknown. Dry ice in the two-litre bottles hardens them without losing any flotation, although some of the bottle caps have managed to work themselves loose and are now being resealed with what de Rothschild calls ‘a very cool bio-glue’ made from cashew nuts and sugar.

Sitting now with a pint of beer and an artichoke in a restaurant opposite the waterfront, he is confident that the Plastiki will be built and on its way to Australia some time this summer. ‘We do need to get from A to B but what this project is really about is remarketing and rebranding the message about recycling, about sustainability, about interconnectedness,’ he says. What he sees as the failure of the environmental movement, as measured by ever-increasing carbon emissions, rainforest destruction, species extinctions and marine plastic debris, he understands as a failure of marketing and communication, rather than insurmountable forces working in the opposite direction.

‘The environmental message has been very exclusive, very guilt-mongering, very fear-mongering, and is that the right way to engage with people? We’re bombarded by 2,500 images a day. How are you going to stop someone watching Lost and make them watch someone saying, “You’re a bad person because you don’t drive a hybrid”? To effect change, you’ve got to inspire people, not moan at them.’

After another pint, he admits to serious doubts – not that the Plastiki will get built and complete its voyage, but that it is still possible to save the oceans from ecological collapse. Overfishing is the most urgent problem, but what really scares him and the marine scientists is acidification caused by global warming. The oceans are absorbing more and more of the carbon dioxide that we are putting into the air and it is changing the pH of the water, turning the seas more acid, with potentially catastrophic effects on marine organisms and ecosystems.

‘A lot of scientists think we’re basically screwed, but what are you going to do?’ he asks. ‘Enjoy your beer, enjoy your family, make the most of it while it lasts? I think there’s a real big movement for that at the moment and part of me understands that. But there’s a bigger part of me that says we’ve got to find a solution, collectively. I mean, come on. We spent $265 billion preparing for the Y2K bug and we didn’t even know if it was going to happen or not. We know for an absolute fact that if we continue on our current rate of consumption, we’re going to run out of resources. But the annual budget for the United National Environmental Programme last year was $190 million. And the budget for the latest James Bond movie was $205 million.’

He chuckles at that, checks his watch and calls for the bill. It is time to walk the dogs and then work the second half of his standard 17-hour day. Outside, he points to San Francisco bay, looking pristine and lovely in the late afternoon sunshine. ‘Maybe that’s the trouble,’ he says. ‘You’d never guess what’s under the surface if you didn’t know, would you?’

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Human societies, at all times and places, have organised themselves around the will to live with others, not alone. But not any more. During the past half-century, our species has embarked on a remarkable social experiment. For the first time in human history, great numbers of people – at all ages, in all places, of every political persuasion – have begun settling down as singletons. Until the second half of the last century, most of us married young and parted only at death. If death came early, we remarried quickly; if late, we moved in with family, or they with us. Now we marry later. We divorce, and stay single for years or decades. We survive our spouses, and do everything we can to avoid moving in with others – including our children. We cycle in and out of different living arrangements: alone, together, together, alone.

Numbers never tell the whole story, but in this case the statistics are startling. According to the market research firm Euromonitor International, the number of people living alone globally is skyrocketing, rising from about 153 million in 1996 to 277 million in 2011 – a 55% increase in 15 years. In the UK, 34% of households have one person living in them and in the US it’s 27% – roughly one in every seven adults.

Contemporary solo dwellers in the US are primarily women: about 18 million, compared with 14 million men. The majority, more than 16 million, are middle-aged adults between the ages of 35 and 64. The elderly account for about 11 million of the total. Young adults between 18 and 34 number more than 5 million, compared with 500,000 in 1950, making them the fastest-growing segment of the solo-dwelling population. Unlike their predecessors, people who live alone today cluster together in metropolitan areas.

Sweden has more solo dwellers than anywhere else in the world, with 47% of households having one resident; followed by Norway at 40%. In Scandinavian countries their welfare states protect most citizens from the more difficult aspects of living alone. In Japan, where social life has historically been organised around the family, about 30% of all households have a single dweller, and the rate is far higher in urban areas. The Netherlands and Germany share a greater proportion of one-person households than the UK. And the nations with the fastest growth in one-person households? China, India and Brazil.

But despite the worldwide prevalence, living alone isn’t really discussed, or understood. We aspire to get our own places as young adults, but fret about whether it’s all right to stay that way, even if we enjoy it. We worry about friends and family members who haven’t found the right match, even if they insist that they’re OK on their own. We struggle to support elderly parents and grandparents who find themselves living alone after losing a spouse, but we are puzzled if they tell us they prefer to remain alone.

In all of these situations, living alone is something that each person, or family, experiences as the most private of matters, when in fact it is an increasingly common condition.

When there is a public debate about the rise of living alone, commentators present it as a sign of fragmentation. In fact, the reality of this great social experiment is far more interesting – and far less isolating – than these conversations would have us believe. The rise of living alone has been a transformative social experience. It changes the way we understand ourselves and our most intimate relationships. It shapes the way we build our cities and develop our economies.

So what is driving it? The wealth generated by economic development and the social security provided by modern welfare states have enabled the spike. One reason that more people live alone than ever before is that they can afford to. Yet there are a great many things that we can afford to do but choose not to, which means the economic explanation is just one piece of the puzzle.

In addition to economic prosperity, the rise stems from the cultural change that mile Durkheim, a founding figure in sociology in the late 19th century, called the cult of the individual. According to Durkheim, this cult grew out of the transition from traditional rural communities to modern industrial cities. Now the cult of the individual has intensified far beyond what Durkheim envisioned. Not long ago, someone who was dissatisfied with their spouse and wanted a divorce had to justify that decision. Today if someone is not fulfilled by their marriage, they have to justify staying in it, because there is cultural pressure to be good to one’s self.

Another driving force is the communications revolution, which has allowed people to experience the pleasures of social life even when they’re living alone. And people are living longer than ever before – or, more specifically, because women often outlive their spouses by decades, rather than years – and so ageing alone has become an increasingly common experience.

Although each person who develops the capacity to live alone finds it an intensely personal experience, my research suggests that some elements are widely shared. Today, young solitaires actively reframe living alone as a mark of distinction and success. They use it as a way to invest time in their personal and professional growth. Such investments in the self are necessary, they say, because contemporary families are fragile, as are most jobs, and in the end each of us must be able to depend on ourselves. On the one hand, strengthening the self means undertaking solitary projects and learning to enjoy one’s own company. But on the other it means making great efforts to be social: building up a strong network of friends and work contacts.

Living alone and being alone are hardly the same, yet the two are routinely conflated. In fact, there’s little evidence that the rise of living alone is responsible for making us lonely. Research shows that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interactions that best predicts loneliness. What matters is not whether we live alone, but whether we feel alone. There’s ample support for this conclusion outside the laboratory. As divorced or separated people often say, there’s nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person.

There is also good evidence that people who never marry are no less content than those who do. According to research, they are significantly happier and less lonely than people who are widowed or divorced.

In theory, the rise of living alone could lead to any number of outcomes, from the decline of community to a more socially active citizenry, from rampant isolation to a more robust public life. I began my exploration of singleton societies with an eye for their most dangerous and disturbing features, including selfishness, loneliness and the horrors of getting sick or dying alone. I found some measure of all of these things. On balance, however, I came away convinced that the problems related to living alone should not define the condition, because the great majority of those who go solo have a more rich and varied experience.

Sometimes they feel lonely, anxious and uncertain about whether they would be happier in another arrangement. But so do those who are married or live with others. The rise of living alone has produced significant social benefits, too. Young and middle-aged solos have helped to revitalise cities, because they are more likely to spend money, socialise and participate in public life.

Despite fears that living alone may be environmentally unsustainable, solos tend to live in apartments rather than in big houses, and in relatively green cities rather than in car-dependent suburbs. There’s good reason to believe that people who live alone in cities consume less energy than if they coupled up and decamped to pursue a single-family home.

Ultimately, it’s too early to say how any particular society will respond to either the problems or the opportunities generated by this extraordinary social transformation. After all, our experiment with living alone is still in its earliest stages, and we are just beginning to understand how it affects our own lives, as well as those of our families, communities and cities.

————-
Colm Toibin, Author, 56

No one told me when I was small that I could live like this. No one told me that by the age of 56 I would know all of the gay bars in New York city, most of the Irish ones and a good number of other bars, such as they are, in between. And that I would be content on a Friday and Saturday night at around 10 o’clock merely to feel that those bars were all still there, still full of people calling for more, while all I wanted was to be alone in bed with a book.

No one ever told me that I would be most happy in my life when I modelled myself on a nun who runs her own cloister and is alone in it, not bothered by the chatter of other nuns, or by the demands of reverend mother.

On Saturday I wake at six and relishing the day ahead. I teach on Mondays and Tuesdays; I have to reread a novel for each class and take notes on it. Nothing makes me happier than the thought of this. I often lie there until the seven o’clock news comes on, grinning at the thought of the day ahead.

All day I will read and take notes. The worst-case scenario is that I might need another book, and this involves lot of decision-making and self-consultation. It might end in a five-minute walk to the university library. But normally I go nowhere except to the fridge if I am hungry to see what’s there, or to the sofa to lie down if my back is tired, or to the rocking chair if I feel a need to rock.

Normally there’s not much in the fridge. In the kitchen there is an oven I have never opened. And there are pots and pans whose purpose may be decorative for all I know. But I know where all my notebooks are. They are all over the apartment. That is the best part. I can leave them where I like and no one touches them or wants to put them away anywhere. No one sighs about books and notebooks piled up. All of the notebooks have stories half-written in them, or stray sentences in search of a home, or musings that are none of anyone’s business. If I like, I can go to one of them and add some paragraphs. I don’t have to excuse myself, explain myself, or put on a distracted writer’s look in order to get down to work. Or worry that someone has, in my absence, opened one of my notebooks and found that they don’t like the tone of what is written there.

No one told me when I was small that there would come a time in my life where people would be judged by the quantity and quality of take-out menus for local restaurants. And that I could, without consulting anyone, at any time, make a phone call, order some food, and it would soon arrive at my door.

And then there is music when night falls. I can put on whatever I like, follow dark obsessions without worrying about depressing anyone else, or cheering them up for that matter. There is no one to question my sanity, my taste in music, or say: “That again? Not that again. Did we not hear that yesterday?”

And then there is the small question of alcohol. No one told me when I was a teenager that there would come a time when I would not bother drinking. No one told me that when Saturday night came, I would long to talk to no one and wish to go to bed early, and that my only moment of pure and capricious pleasure would be taking a book to bed that was not for class the next week. Otherwise, my life as a nun is a lesson to others, a pure example of good example. It has its rewards in the morning when I wake in silence with a clear head, ready for more.

——-
Carmen Callil, Publisher, 73

I have never given much thought to living alone, because it wasn’t something I decided upon, it happened to me naturally. What with a childhood amid a vast family, then the convent, I was rarely alone. I shared a bedroom with my sister, life with my brothers and mother. One set of grandparents lived next door, the others across the road. Many aunts, uncles and cousins were only a yell away. The convent was black with nuns, its dormitories and classrooms packed with other girls. I left home when I was 21.

Almost immediately, I fell in love with a man who was, vaguely, married. An open marriage, it would be called today. For a decade or so, I wanted to be available for him, so I moved into a bedsit above a salt beef bar in St John’s Wood. That was 1964. I was 26, and I have lived alone since.

I very much liked being in love and repeated it all too frequently. But I also hated it. I have a photograph of myself aged two, in a pram outside Melbourne zoo. My chubby legs are battling to get out: the look of struggle on my baby face is tremendous. That is how I felt each time I fell in love and spent extended periods with the beloved object. Often it was boredom: hours spent doing what the beloved object wanted, rather than pursuing the thousand things juggling in my own head. When I was in love and thought of marriage, I always came to feel like that child in the pram.

Tussling with this incapacity came to an abrupt end once I started to work. I had been raised to think of work as a prelude to husband, children, home. Once I started Virago, in 1972, and then, from 1982, working at Chatto, too, boredom vanished, and the days and years fled by.

What do I like about living alone? The greatest blessing is the number of friendships you can indulge in, the number of people you can love. I love to hear their stories, follow their lives. This can become frenetic but you can always cross through a night in the diary with BED in capital letters and there is no one to say nay to that. I wouldn’t have minded having the children I could have had, but I have insufficient self-esteem to need any duplication of myself in the world. In truth, I have fretted more about my friends, my work and about understanding what is going on in the world than I ever have about failing to “wax fat and multiply”, as the Catholic marriage service instructs.

Living alone means freedom, never being bored, going to bed at eight if I feel like it, feeding myself as I like, thinking, pottering and yelling at the radio without feeling a fool. I am never lonely as long as I am at home. I can decorate my house to suit my eccentricities – not everyone wants to live with 200 jugs and thousands of books. Every object in my home reminds me of one loved person or another. Knowing all my friends are dotted around, going about their business but available at the end of a phone is enough.

There are, and have been, great tediums. Men – Auberon Waugh and Lord Longford spring to mind – have occasionally insisted to my face that I was lesbian. I felt this to be an insult to women who are lesbians as well as to myself. I hate getting invitations addressed to “Carmen Callil & Friend” and am often tempted to bring my dog.

But there is so much to do, and to think about, and so many friends to love. They are my rock. If I am in trouble, they help me, and I don’t – and never have – worried about dying alone, because everyone does.

——–
Alex Zane, TV Presenter, 33

Having lived alone for the past six years, sharing my home with anything bigger than a cat is not something I enjoy.

This doesn’t make me an oddball. I’m not Norman Bates, wandering around my flat dressed as my mother – I just like the fact that if I wanted to, I could.

Living alone provides me with the time I need to recharge, and to let loose the aspects of my personality best labelled “Not For Public Consumption”. When Superman needs a break from saving the planet, some time to himself, where does he go? His Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic Circle. I have what I like to call my Flat of Solitude in north London. I’m not comparing my average day to the conquests of the last son of Krypton, but he has a public image to keep up, and that I can relate to.

“Me” is the very best part of living alone. It’s not about selfishness, just knowing what you like and doing what you want without having to take another person into account. OK, that sounds selfish, but if you’re going to be selfish, it’s probably best to do it on your own, so no one knows.

My solitude is not total. I have a girlfriend, and we’ve been together for a length of time that makes people wonder why we don’t share a home. The truth is, she stays with me often. She has a drawer. She knows where I keep the sugar. I know to put the toilet seat down. She knows which of the three remotes actually turns on the TV. I know she checks my internet history.

It’s a well-oiled machine. And although it has yet to be spoken out loud, I’m aware eventually a change will come. A change that will involve me no longer eating packets of microwavable rice and soy sauce for every meal. The spectre of co-habitation is looming on the horizon.

There are, of course, some things that I won’t miss about solo living. There are moments of melancholy, the silence can be quite over-powering, and if I’ve spent three days holed up in my flat, when I finally emerge the first conversation I have with another human can be an awkward affair, like learning to speak all over again: “I… OK… you, yourself, well?”

But there’s one thing that dwarfs all the other downsides to living by myself, one thing I’ll be happy to leave behind. It’s to do with my Wii. I try to shake the feeling, but I can’t. Ultimately, there is no more tragic image than a man standing in the middle of his living room, alone, in his boxer shorts, pretending to ski jump.

——-
Esther Rantzen, Planning on starting a care line for the elderly, 71

I am living alone for the first time at the age of 71. Until now, most of the changes that arrived with age were mercifully gradual – the need to turn the television volume a bit higher, say, and the first few grey hairs – but this change has been huge, sudden and, for me, cataclysmic.

All my life I have been surrounded by people. As a child, I grew up in an extended family. At college, I lived and worked in a lively and energetic community. Moving into a flat with a flatmate, starting a family, having a bath or going to bed at night, I had company and conversation. Now, for the first time, I come home to an empty, silent flat, nobody to shout a cheerful hello to, no one to listen to the stories of my day. It’s been nine months on my own and a difficult adjustment. But I’m getting there.

My life has followed a pattern familiar to most of us as we grow older. You lose a partner; in my case my beloved husband Desmond Wilcox died. Children leave home and create their own lives; my older daughter, Emily is taking a mature student’s degree; Joshua, the doctor, works in the West Country; Rebecca, the TV reporter, lives with her husband and they are expecting their first baby.

I mustn’t nag them to spend more time with me. So instead I have found ways of making aloneness feel less lonely. Downsizing from my family home to a flat was a help. Not only are there no more empty bedrooms, but given far less space, the pictures and ornaments that mean the most to me are always in my eyeline. The print my mother gave me is on my bedroom wall, instead of downstairs in my old study, so it greets me as soon as I wake. The vase my best friend gave me is on my table instead of being stashed away in a cupboard.

Getting to sleep by yourself is a problem, but I decided not to have a bedroom television. I tried it for a while and although Newsnight was the perfect cure for insomnia, I loathed waking up at dawn with the screen blaring at me. So I fall asleep to Classic radio, which accompanies my dreams with decent music.

I understand why an American survey of more than 300,000 old people found that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking. You may have spent a lifetime looking after your family; now that they don’t need you, it seems pointless to look after yourself. Cooking for one seems too much effort – I can’t muster the energy or enthusiasm to make hot food for myself. Cheese and biscuits and fruit fill the gaps.

Although I am getting used to living on my own, I still think it’s not natural. We humans are herd animals. If it were left to me, I’d make us all live in longhouses, like the ones in Nepal, with all the generations packed in together. We’ve evolved to depend upon each other, we need each other, especially the old. If I were a stone age woman aged 70, I’d never survive on my own. Without the warmth and protection of the tribe around me, the first cold winter would finish me off. But then, if I were a stone age woman, I’d be without the flu jabs and dental bridgework that enable me to boast that 70 is the new 50.

There are mornings when I potter around contentedly at my own pace, watching the sunrise as I sip my orange juice, happy not to have anyone else cluttering up the flat, using up the last tea bag or loo roll without replacing it. Pretty soon there’ll be another cataclysm in my life, the arrival of a grandchild. Some claim that then I’ll look back on these days alone with nostalgia. Rubbish. I can’t wait.

——-
Sloane Crosley, Author, 33

Good friends, a couple, are being kicked out of their apartment this month. Decent apartments can be hard to come by in Manhattan, so it’s all hands on deck, trying to help with the search.

“I might know of something,” I emailed the male contingent of the pair. “What’s your budget?”

“We’re paying $4,400 now,” he shot back.

What a pad one could get for that price!

I sat back from my computer and bristled. Ah, the power of two. There’s nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons? Even the word “singleton”, to the American ear at least, reads as particularly insulting. We never use it and thus it sticks out in conversation. Perhaps it’s bothersome due to its resemblance to the word “simpleton”, which we do use.

I live alone. I have also lived with significant (and sometimes not-so-significant) others for brief periods of time. Truth be told, I was fine either way. There are profound perks and drawbacks to both, too numerous on both sides to list in earnest.

I hope to one day co-sign a lease with another person but, well, it doesn’t plague me that I have yet to do so. Put it this way: I’ve never had to violently tug at my own pillow at 2am to get myself to stop snoring.

In the past, I have not seen the state of my habitation and the state of my love life as connected. This is the nature of being relatively young and living in an urban environment where expensive rental fees can make or break relationships. Cohabitation seems a greater leap in cities because it’s all the harder to extract oneself if things turn sour. It’s what keeps otherwise functional adults living with their mothers.

The thing is, I am newly single this. For this week (and several more after it, I suspect), living alone feels freshly related to being alone. On top of which, I own a cat. On top of which, I like to eat spoonfuls of almond butter over my sink, put this gross Swedish hair balm in my hair before bed and sleep in old cocktail dresses. None of this was any different when I was romantically teamed with another human, yet suddenly these micro-activities bode poorly as an advertisement for my life.

When I was coupled socially, no one seemed to notice that I was unattached residentially. Two people go out to dinner together, meet each other at shows, take vacations, and suddenly living across town from each other isn’t such a big deal. But the building blocks of our daily existence were always separate. He never paid my rent and I never paid his. He was never subject to awkward conversations with my superintendent regarding clogged drains. I was never subject to the etiquette question of tipping his doorman around the holidays. Though most of my friends, attached and not, are in the exact same living situation, society still quietly damns the single-household dweller to one of two diagnoses:

1) Hyper control: I live alone because I am inflexible, intolerant, likely a mysophobic glove-wearer and so stringent about my own schedule that I leave no room for a roommate, lover or a mysterious Italian boarder who happens to moonlight as a DJ.

2) Complete lack of control: with no one to bounce off, my weird behaviours have gone unchecked and my body unshowered. I am socially awkward out in the world while my home is infested with vermin and the crackling sound of broken dreams.

Who among us has not experienced elements of both states? And what does that mean for the future? I wouldn’t mind if things were different, but they’re not and, truly, I have always enjoyed my space. I love turning the key in the door at the end of the day, being able to decompress, knowing where I left the remote control to the television. I am partial to hot water. I like being able to come home late and collapse into bed without worrying about waking anyone with my drunken shoe removal.

This is not a matter of statistics or trends; it’s my life. There is no advertisement for it. Funnily, that’s one of the better selling points imaginable: once you realise you’re not obligated to persuade others about your existence, it becomes a lot easier to exist.

———
Peter Hobbs, 38

Even when I’ve lived with others, I have always been protective of my solitude. I have always needed time to retreat to my own company, and to be alone with my thoughts. It takes me a long while to adjust to sharing living space, to become accustomed to different patterns of noise and movement and sleep.

My first prolonged experience of living alone came in my 20s, when I was suffering from a long illness. As soon as I was able to cope, I moved to live by myself. It was terribly isolating in many ways – I was unable to work or go out – but I wasn’t comfortable with company. Illness is a foreign land, and you go always alone. Sometimes I’d go for days or weeks without speaking to anyone, except for brief interactions at supermarket checkouts (in recent years, of course, I would even have been able to find automated checkouts).

It’s not an accident that it was during this time I began to write. Gradually, the emptiness of the afternoons began to fill with ideas, and the most pleasurable part of those unhappy days was when I sat down with my thoughts and formed stories, giving myself over to my imagination. Since then, I’ve always written better when I’ve lived alone. The mind roams more freely in empty rooms, and the days can spill into evening, and then night, without interruption. Even now I find it hard to write if I know there’s someone else in the same building, no matter if they’re sitting quietly behind a distant closed door, minding their own business.

Of course the solitude of those years was largely enforced, rather than having been chosen, and though it may have suited my nature, it was a devastatingly lonely time. Something of the pattern of those days has stayed with me, but I try now to monitor my tendencies towards solitude. I’m careful to protect a degree of isolation in my life, but I do not think I will always want to live alone.

I have friends who will live alone for the rest of their lives. They live alone because of choice, or because a partner has died, or because they’re so accustomed to solitary living that they’re no longer willing to make the compromises necessary for sharing with others. Most of them are content, or at least reconciled to it, but it’s clear to me that the happiest of them are those who have arranged their lives so they can spend a great deal of time with as many people as possible.

We’re social animals. I think of the way families and friends gather round at times of grief. The way many of us live today can cause the threaded connections of kith and kin to separate and thin, almost to disappear. Yet they reassert themselves in crises. For those who desire it, living alone is a tremendous luxury. But it is a luxury enabled by an existence within technologically advanced, relatively wealthy societies, which insulate us even from the need for others.

Eric Klinenberg is convincing about the hows and whys of the rise in solitary living. The set of circumstances he describes has provided many of us with an extraordinary freedom. I just wonder how fragile they are, and what it might take for us to rediscover how much we need other people.

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Angelholm is a pretty southern Swedish town, famed for its clay cuckoo manufacturing, a clay cuckoo being a kind of ocarina, which is a kind of flute. The crime rate here is practically zero. Except one of its residents was last year arrested for trying to split the atom in his kitchen. His name is Richard Handl and he buzzes me into his first-floor flat.

I wanted to meet Richard because I keep seeing reports of home science experimenters clashing with the authorities. There’s been a spate of them this past year or two.

I glance into Richard’s kitchen and recognise his cooker from the news. It was horrendously, alarmingly blackened then, but it’s clean now.

“So, you aren’t currently doing any experiments?” I ask him.

“I’m banned,” he says.

“By whom?” I ask.

“My landlord,” he says. “And the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority.”

Then we sit on the sofa and he tells me his story.

When Richard was a teenager, everything, he says, was fine. “I had friends. We’d go partying. I have Asperger’s, so I was a bit of a nerd, a geek. My interests were chemical experiments. I’d make solutions that changed colour. When I was 13, I made some explosives in the garden, using gunpowder, stuff I got from a paint store and from my father’s pharmacy. He had sulphuric acid, nitric acid. Visiting my father in his pharmacy was very exciting.”

His father assumed Richard would grow up to be a pharmacist, too. He was, Richard says, happy and proud of his son, as it was his dream to raise a boy to follow in his footsteps. But something unexpected happened to Richard 14 years ago, when he was 17: “I became very aggressive to people,” he says.

“In what way?” I ask.

“It was towards my father,” Richard says. “Sometimes I hit him.”

“In response to what?”

“Very small things. Like if he was late and didn’t call.”

“Was he worried about you?”

“Yes, he was quite worried about me. He took me to the hospital, so I could talk to psychiatrists. They said I was depressed. And I had some paranoid disorder.”

“And all this just came from nowhere?”

“It just happened,” he shrugs.

Richard worked in a factory for four years, but his disorder meant he spent most of his time in his flat. His love of chemistry continued undimmed, but the possibility of him becoming a pharmacist had practically gone. So, instead, he decided one day to start a collection – he would scour the internet and buy an ampoule of every chemical element. He quickly realised he had to downgrade his ambition. “There are some very unstable radioactive elements, like polonium and francium, that last just a couple of minutes and then decay. They’re impossible to get.”

But he persevered with the others.

“Do you have any of them still here?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says. “Would you like to see them?”

He disappears into his bedroom and returns holding a basket filled with ampoules of gold and silver and platinum and thallium and beryllium. Some are solid blocks, some glittering shards, others shining slivers. The basket looks like a treasure chest.

“This is the most amazing one,” Richard says, picking up an ampoule marked “Cesium”. It looks like solid gold. “Watch,” he says. “If you warm it up…”

He closes his fist around it for 30 seconds. Then he shows it to me again. It has melted. We both look at it, amazed, as if we’ve just witnessed a magic trick.

“And then,” Richard says, “I began to collect radioactive elements like radium and uranium and americium.”

Richard was Googling “americium” one day when he found a story, in Harper’s magazine, chronicling the life of a Michigan boy named David Hahn who grew up in the 1990s. There was something about Hahn with which Richard identified. Both boys spent their childhoods blowing things up in the garden. Hahn once turned up at a Boy Scouts meeting in Golf Manor, Michigan, with a bright orange face due to an accidental overdose of canthaxanthin. Hahn got expelled from camp for dismantling a smoke detector (he was trying to extract the americium – pretty much everything you need to split the atom you can find on eBay or in smoke detectors and antique luminous dial clocks).

Those were the days before the internet, so getting hold of information about how to build a nuclear reactor was more complicated for Hahn than it would turn out to be for Richard. He learned how to do it by writing to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and pretending to be a physics teacher. Did they have any pamphlets on how to split the atom?

“Nothing produces neutrons as well as beryllium, Professor Hahn,” they wrote back.

And that’s how David Hahn managed to turn his potting shed into a nuclear reactor.

It wasn’t long before the Michigan police cottoned on, and in June 1995, 11 men in protective suits descended on the dangerously irradiated shed. He was shut down.

Sixteen years later, in ngelholm, Richard read the Hahn story and felt inspired to try it out himself. This is how Richard went about trying to split the atom. First, he got a saucepan. Into it he put his radioactive elements – the americium and radium. He mixed them up with sulphuric acid and beryllium, and turned on the stove. The mixture bubbled up crazily, splashing all over the cooker and the floor. He quickly turned off the hob and posted a picture of the carnage on his blog, with the caption “The Meltdown!”.

His plan, he says, was to repeat the experiment, but this time collect into a test tube the neutrons that were emanating from the concoction. Then he’d have fired the “neutron ray” at a chunk of uranium sealed in a glass marble.

“What does the neutron ray look like?” I ask.

“It doesn’t look like anything,” Richard says. “You can’t see it.”

“How do you know it’s there?”

“You have to measure it with a Geiger counter,” he says.

“So what you’re saying is, you’d point the test tube filled with neutrons at the uranium marble, and that’s what would split the atom?”

“Yes,” Richard says.

Richard never did collect the neutrons into a test tube. After the meltdown, he decided to email the Swedish Radiation Authority to double-check that what he was doing was above board.

“Hello!” read his email of 18 July 2011. “I’m very interested in nuclear physics and radiation. I have planned a project to build a primitive nuclear reactor. Now I’m wondering if I’m violating any laws doing so?”

They emailed him back on 11 August: “Hi. The short answer to your question is that if you build a nuclear reactor without permission, you are violating strict laws. It is a criminal offence and can lead to fines or imprisonment for up to two years.”

Richard was surprised. “The amount I had was very small,” he says, “so far away from the amount needed to make a dirty bomb or something like that. To get it to explode, you must have something called a critical mass, which is 50kg of radium or 6kg of plutonium. I had 5g. The worst that could have happened was I might have got radiation in me.”

“And got cancer years later?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Yes.”

Even though it took the radiation authority three weeks to respond to Richard’s email, everything moved very quickly after that. Within days, they’d turned up at his flat with the police.

“They told me to get out with my hands up. They scanned me with Geiger counters. There was nothing. They measured the whole apartment. They said I was arrested for a crime against the radiation safety law.”

And that’s it, so far. Sixteen weeks have passed and nothing has happened to him, besides making headlines all over the world.

“I don’t regret it,” he says, “because it was exciting. I’m sad I can’t do it any more.”

We glance at his basket of elements. “There are no other experiments you could do with these?” I ask.

“I can,” he says, “but I don’t want to.”

“What could you do?” I ask.

“I could…” Richard pauses. “This thallium is very, very poisonous. If you break the ampoule, it would start to react with the air and oxidise. Thallium oxide. Very poisonous. If you get it on your fingers, you can die.”

“But you would never consider…”

“No, no,” Richard says. He pauses. “Actually, I’m thinking of trying again to become a pharmacist. I’m going to read up some courses from the high school and begin to study in the university.”

Back home, I remember the moment Richard shrugged, unconcerned, at the possibility of developing cancer from his experiments. This happens a lot with home experimenters. Something clicks in them and their science becomes more important to them than their safety. It happened to the Brazilian priest Father Adelir de Carli, who in April 2008 strapped 1,000 helium party balloons to a chair and lifted off from the port city of Paranagua.

He’d been inspired by a truck driver named Larry Walters who in 1982 had attached 45 weather balloons to a chair and soared to 16,000ft, waving at passing Delta and TWA pilots before landing 20 miles away in Long Beach. “The more I look at it, the more I’m glad I did it,” Walters told the New York Times at the time. “It’s something for when I’m an old man. So many people have dreams and they never follow through on them.”

Twenty-six years later, Father de Carli was so captivated by the experiment, he reportedly forgot to check the weather forecast, and to learn how his GPS worked. He was blown off course and drowned.

Then there were the two racing car drivers who, in the summer of 2010, poured four gallons of methanol into a barrel in a parking lot in Washington State, sat on top and lit the fuse. They were envisaging a “barrel ride”. It was supposed to slide across the parking lot. Instead it exploded. One of them, a former American Sprint Car Series national champion called Travis Rilet, suffered 70% burns. The other, an Australian crew member called Tyson Perez, died.

In Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, a man named Paul Moran was jailed for three months last October for accidentally setting fire to his block of flats while trying to turn his faeces into gold. He had left the stuff on an electric heater and it caught light.

“It was an interesting experiment to fulfil the alchemist’s dream, but wasn’t going to succeed,” the judge said when sentencing him.

But no home experiment has gone wrong quite so heartbreakingly as that of the Pambakian family. The Pambakians live in a cottage very close to my own house, so one day I stop on my way home to have a look. There’s a Volvo parked in the driveway. In the boot is a bag filled with medical supplies, bandages, some Brasso, some old wellies, a duvet, all jumbled up. The wing mirror is stuck together with tape. There’s stuff here that would save your life if administered by a medical professional, but it’s all quite haphazard.

Dr Yvonne Pambakian won’t talk to me about the tragedy that occurred inside the cottage. So instead I sit on the press bench of her General Medical Council fitness to practice hearing and listen to her testimony and cross-examination.

Five years ago, on 20 June 2007, she made an emergency call from the cottage. Her 22-year-old sister, Yolanda Cox, had gone into anaphylactic shock. When the paramedics arrived, they asked Pambakian what had happened.

“I gave her a drug for her asthma,” she told them.

Yolanda was rushed to the Royal Free hospital where a doctor, Alexander Mackay, asked her and her mother to explain exactly what they’d injected into her.

“They wouldn’t say,” he later told the coroner. “They said I didn’t need to know anything and the drug was extremely safe.” It seemed they were trying to protect some secret ingredient they’d been developing. “Some time later,” Mackay told the coroner, “they brought in paper information in two files.” The family were, in fact, injecting each other in their kitchen with an experimental drug of their invention, which they’d called B71.

Yolanda died a week later, on 27 June 2007.

Pambakian and her mother, she tells the hearing, began their experiments back in the mid-90s, pooling their areas of expertise (she’s a GP, her mother an immunologist). One day, they had a kind of eureka moment. To summarise it: some diabetes sufferers have an autoantibody that’s responsible for their resistance to insulin, and the Pambakians supposed that, as insulin resistance is so uniquely destructive, if they could derive a peptide from the autoantibody, it would be uniquely curative. So they did, and they called it B71. They began posting patent applications. B71 would treat – and this is just a small sample – asthma, diabetes, psoriasis, eczema, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, depression, Parkinson’s, migraines, multiple sclerosis, premature baldness in men, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, cystic fibrosis, insomnia, cancer and HIV.

They managed to persuade some Dutch money people to bankroll the business and embarked on two clinical trials in the Netherlands. That was in 2005. For two years after that, nothing happened. The whole thing seemed stuck in limbo.

And then one day in April 2007, they got an email. A woman called Caroline, a friend of one of the Dutch backers, had just been told she was dying of cancer. She was 33, with four children and – according to doctors at the Royal Marsden hospital – had only three months to live. “If there’s the remotest chance the drug might prove beneficial…” the backer emailed.

So on Good Friday 2007, Pambakian travelled to Caroline’s home, with a vial of B71 in her bag.

“You wanted to try out a theory,” GMC prosecutor Stephen Brassington says at the hearing.

“I wanted to offer her a treatment,” Pambakian snaps back.

So she prayed, and then she injected Caroline with a mammoth 6mg of the drug – a dose four times higher than they had given the Dutch trial volunteers. Caroline survived the injection, but later died of her cancer.

Brassington is incredulous. This is not how science works, he says. Science is all about assiduously gathering data, about treading gently, about conducting delicate clinical trials.

“I didn’t have safety data in thousands of people, that is true,” Pambakian admits. The way she says “thousands” is fierce, irritated, superior, as if the GMC panel live so far inside the box, they can never understand the kind of maverick thinking that changes the medical world.

When Pambakian arrived back at the cottage, they decided to make themselves test subjects. Of course, they were far from the first doctors to self-inject at home. For centuries, scientists have been deliberately infecting themselves with gonorrhoea and yellow fever; they’ve become morphine addicts and cocaine addicts in their hunt for new anaesthetics. The doctor who discovered in 2003 that stomach ulcers came from a bug and not from stress did so by drinking a potion containing the bug. So the Pambakians mixed up some more gigantic 6mg doses. And they injected themselves. And that’s when Yolanda said she didn’t feel well, and she slumped on the sofa.

“When the ambulance crew arrived, you told them that it was a treatment for asthma,” Brassington says.

“When the ambulance crew came, there was no time to sit and discuss the workings of the drug,” Pambakian replies. “I just wanted them to concentrate on getting the tube down her lungs. On giving her a chance to live. I’d have told them anything.” She pauses. “Anaphylactic shock is extremely rare. We’re talking about a few people a year in the whole country. It was not in my mind. Perhaps it should have been, but it wasn’t.” She falls silent for a moment. “Now it’s on my mind all the time. Now I don’t take a Nurofen without thinking about it. Now it’s on my mind all the time.”

And at that she seems to diminish, like a balloon losing its air.

“Your judgment entirely deserted you,” the prosecutor says.

“I think ‘entirely’ is a bit…” She trails off.

“Doctors who ignore the proper, ethical process of clinical research expose their patients to unnecessary risk,” he says.

“I suppose so, yes,” she says, quietly.

“You fell seriously short of the standards expected from a registered medical practitioner,” the prosecutor says.

There’s a short silence. “Yes,” she says.

A few days later, the GMC gives its judgment: “Your name will be erased from the Medical Register.” And she leaves the hearing, no longer Dr Yvonne Pambakian, but Yvonne Pambakian.

Soon after I watch her hearing and meet Richard Handl, I receive a slightly alarmed email from Jason Bobe, who runs DIYbio.org, an online community for home science experimenters. I’d emailed him as part of my research. He says he’s worried my article may discourage home science. Maybe, he suggests, I should talk to Victor Deeb, whose experiments in his basement went disastrously wrong in a very different way and whose story might offer a counterbalance.

Deeb lives in a small Massachusetts town called Marlborough. He’s retired, in his mid-70s, and although he’s lived in the US almost all his life, he still has a strong Syrian accent, which gets stronger as he becomes more incensed down the phone.

Three years ago, on 5 August 2008, a policeman happened to be driving past Deeb’s house. “He saw smoke billowing from the air conditioner in an upstairs room, so he called the fire department.” Deeb speaks in short, exact phrases, as if he considers our conversation to be like a chemical experiment, requiring complete precision.

A plug had shorted in the bedroom. The fire department put out the fire, glanced into the basement and immediately called for emergency reinforcements.

“The whole fire department came,” Victor says. “The FBI. Even the CIA was here. It couldn’t have been any more crazy. They went into the sewer system to see if I was dumping anything down the toilet.”

What they had found in the basement was 100 bottles of chemicals. None was hazardous. There was nothing poisonous. “I was working on a coating for the inside of beverage cans containing no Bisphenol A,” Deeb says.

BPA, he explains, is standard in beverage can coatings. The problem is that it can seep into the drink and play havoc with our hormones, causing men to grow breasts and girls as young as seven to have periods. Back in 2008, he says, “there were few references in the media to the negative effect of BPA. Currently, there is a deluge of articles. So my desire to eliminate BPA was ahead of its time.” He pauses. “I spent an enormous amount of time with the authorities, trying to explain what I was working on, but they had no perception. No concept.”

And so he watched as they hauled away all the chemicals and test tubes in a truck. “I had a box full of files and notes and comments,” he says. “Twenty years’ work. They hired two PhD chemists to go through the box, looking for confirmation that there were hazardous materials in the basement. When they couldn’t find anything, they left the box out in the rain. It destroyed all my notes. Twenty years of my life and work and efforts to help others down the drain.”

“When they realised their mistake, I presume they apologised and paid you a settlement,” I say.

“The opposite!” he says. “They’re suing me for the cost of emptying my basement.”

For America’s online community of home science experimenters, the most outrageous moment of all came when the enforcement officer, Pamela Wilderman, explained her decision-making process to the local paper: “I think Mr Deeb has crossed a line somewhere,” she said. “This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation.”

“Allow me to translate Ms Wilderman’s words into plain English,” wrote Robert Bruce Thompson, the author of Illustrated Guide To Home Chemistry Experiments. “‘Mr Deeb hasn’t actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don’t like what he’s doing because I’m ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals, so I’ll abuse my power to steal his property and shut him down.’ There’s a word for what just happened in Massachusetts. Tyranny.”

Before I hang up, Victor Deeb says he wants to remind me of something. He says that for every David Hahn and Richard Handl, there’s a Steve Jobs and a Charles Goodyear. “They started at home. Goodyear developed the vulcanisation process by mixing sulphur with virgin rubber on his wife’s stove in their kitchen.”

And then he is gone, to do – he says – what he spends every day doing. He’s going to try to remember what he’d written on the pages in the box that was left out in the rain.

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Top five regrets of the dying

A nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying, and among the top ones is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?

There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’.

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. “When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently,” she says, “common themes surfaced again and again.”

Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

“This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

“This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.”

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

“Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

“This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”

What’s your greatest regret so far, and what will you set out to achieve or change before you die?

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He inhabits a wasteland of snow, mountain cabins and churches. A wild empty space of silence on the Vucevo mountain range, where icicles two metres long hang like spiky white beards at the entrance to the mountain tunnels. It was here that the White Eagles, the last bitter fighters against Tito, survived for almost 15 years. “Radovan,” says his mother, Yovanka Karadzic, “Has gone back to his own people – the people he protected.”
Dr Karadzic, 53, Serbian nationalist, psychiatrist and poet is the man the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague describes as number one on its list. “There’s not a day goes by when when his name doesn’t come up,” says Graham Blewitt, the deputy prosecutor. In the last six years 40 indicted war criminals have arrived at the international court in the Hague.

Today 35 of them, mostly Bosnian Serbs, are detained at Schveningen prison facing trial or awaiting sentence, but there is still no sign of Karadzic. Without him, the Hague is Nuremburg without Rudolf Hess or Albert Speer. When it comes to the architects of Bosnia’s destruction, those still alive are Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, their general, Karadzic is the only one within Nato’s reach in Bosnia.

Karadzic’s Kingdom is an area between the villages and towns of Rudo, Cajnice, Visegrad and Foca. Most of the time he is in the mountains – where the Serbian Orthodox church gives shelter to their own – just as the Catholics did with the Nazi fugitives in South America.

He is watched the old fashioned way. Spies recruited by the Allied Military Intelligence Bureau run by a US intelligence colonel at the international base at Butmir camp in Sarajevo. The American-led intelligence operation is code-named Amber Star. Two years ago the hunters went as far as sending US special operations to Germany in preparation for a swoop on Karadzic, but it was abandoned when senior US military officials found the operation too perilous.

In his home town of Pale, his wife and daughter Sonja have moved out of the family house where a lonely, friendly doberman wanders up and down inside the gates. They are watched round the clock by Nato spies, doing their best to avoid the cameras by moving from flat to flat in the town. Radio St John and TV Astra, once owned by his daughter Sonja, are up for sale and there are rumours that they are running out of money; that the old supporters who benefit from dirty dealings in black market cigarettes, whisky and petrol won’t keep the old man fed and protected in the mountains forever.

Nature protects him. In winter, the few cars that make it up the mountains skid along the roads, perilously close to ravines. The only traffic is the trucks of the illegal loggers stripping the mountain forests. Karadzic does not have to try too hard to evade Nato soldiers: just 300 troops out of a force of 21,324 are in the area where he is hiding. “Round here you get the impression that picking up these guys isn’t the first priority,” says Lieutenant Andreas Kerl, at the German base near Foca. “Nobody really mentions him.”

The US ambassador to Sarajevo, Thomas Miller, uses the phrase “that’s operational” a lot when asked about Karadzic and says this could be a “very short interview”. But he looks genuinely frustrated at the accusation that the Americans are doing nothing to catch him. “We’re working on this … we’re doing a lot. I hope sometime I can sit down over a coffee with you and explain just what we’re doing.”

The problem is that Miller’s coffee-drinking days in Sarajevo are coming to an end and his successor, a George W Bush appointee, is not expected to be hot on war criminals.

“We’re worried about the way things are going,” says one of Sarajevo’s most experienced diplomats. “This is going to be a good year for Radovan. I think we missed the chance to lift him and now there is no longer the political will.”

It is mostly former policemen from the old Bosnian police force who are paid to watch and photograph Karadzic skimming across the mountain tops. At times, they say, he has used an old orange Zastava, occasionally a military Jeep. They have watched him set up camp in a 19th-century granite church in the village of Rudo; identified his bodyguards from black-and-white photos as the same men who have looked after him since 1992 (he has 80 and at any one time there are no more than 20 men around him); seen him call briefly on the good monks of the Pivski Manasteri or the church at Cajnice where the village merges across the Montenegrin border.

At home in Niksic, in Montenegro, his 78-year-old mother is chain-smoking through a thin, brown plastic cigarette holder, her compromise following three strokes and angina. She is not keen on compromise: “I’d rather Radovan put a bullet in his own head than handed himself over to the Hague,” she says. “God will judge him, not the Hague, and what I know of my son is that he wouldn’t squash an ant.” She smooths out the folds of her lace tablecloth as she talks. The mother of one of the world’s most wanted men twinkles gruffly through the interview teasing, prodding.

“I never went to school a day in my life, but God was good to me and gave me four sons and a daughter. Of them all, he was the most talented. We recognised that in him early and worked hard to get him to university. He didn’t want to be a politician but the people needed him and he couldn’t refuse them. Handsome isn’t he?”

On her mantlepiece is a framed photograph of Karadzic. The same Karadzic who established the Omarska detention camp as part of his masterplan to “ethnically cleanse” the Muslims of Bosnia. In his book, the Tenth Circle of Hell, one survivor of Omarska, Rezak Hukanovic, recalls: “Thirst, hunger, gang rapes, exhaustion, skulls shattered, sexual organs torn out, stomachs ripped open by the soldier assassins of Radovan Karadzic. The torturers who ordered an old man to make love to a young woman in public. And the father forced to witness the torture of his son.”

Karadzic’s defence is that it all spiralled out of his control. Such brutality was never authorised by him. “Radovan knew about rights and conventions and those things. He spent all his money on books,” says his mother, lighting yet another cigarette. “That is why they choose him to be leader.”

Two years ago a Serbian film director was granted an audience with the man feared by the world’s strongest army. He wrote of the encounter in the Belgrade magazine, Profile: “The visitors always come at night to see him. He sits and drinks red wine. He’s pretty relaxed, like he was sitting in some restaurant. When he got up to embrace me I felt the holster under his shirt. At his hand are the TV controls, a table full of books, including the Bible and there’s also a computer. He kept flicking from one channel to another.”

So will he spend his life running in the mountains? Why not, his mother shrugs: “His people will protect him. Would you like coffee – we have espresso? He is well, you know. Mentally he is absolutely fine.” Three hours drive from his mother’s home is the town of Rudo and the tiny Orthodox church which was one of Karadzic’s lodgings last year according to those who watch him.

In these townspeople smile knowingly at the foreign visitor and ask why it is only the Serbs that are hunted for the Hague. They tell you that their problems as Serbs are part of an international plot against them that has to do with oil. And they ask a more troubling question: “Why, if all the stuff about the camps and Srebrenica is true, has nobody arrested Karadzic?” The lack of an arrest is being interpreted as a lack of a case to answer. As the time passes history is already been rewritten, memory lost.

When I went looking for Karadzic I stopped off at the Partizan Hall in Foca, at the top of a steep street called Smaoborska. Eight years ago, in the July 1992, I remember the door of the hall opening briefly on a hot afternoon and a glimpse of dozens of women held inside. Later that summer we heard how they had been systematically raped by Karadzic’s men. Last year three men from their town were convicted in the Hague of using rape as a weapon of war, but Foca is still in denial.

Now, the international forces, the international police, the outside world is like Zoran Mandic, the police chief in Foca, pretending that life is getting back to normal. “Of the town’s 20,000 Muslims who fled, 680 have come back and things are getting back to normal,” he tells me. A German officer laughs at the claim: “We have had only 15 Muslims return out of 20,000, and all of them are over 50,” he says. The Muslims of Foca are not ready to come home.

In 1996, Britain and the SAS began to get serious and swooped on alleged war criminals in their zones of control. But the indicted war criminals escaped from the British zone to the French zone, where the French troops ignored them until 1998 when Chirac also decided to get serious. The American body-bag phobia had meant that, while the US will pay bounty hunters and provide intelligence, they won’t send troops to snatch criminals themselves.

Now some of those seized by bounty hunters are challenging their arrests in the Hague and even these techniques are being put on hold. These days the new US administration is backing off, the French are relieved and a British government preparing for an election is wary of high-profile cock-ups. “Let’s just say everyone is getting the impression that the gears are being shifted down,” says one Hague investigator working in Bosnia.

In Omarska they are also in denial. Stojanke Plavsic, 69, leans on her gate, and looks across at the mineshaft, past the white house where the worst of the torture took place: “Here, nothing happened here. Didn’t hear anything. It was a couple of kilometres down the road you’re looking for. Go and ask the police.”

In the police station, they offer flat Fanta and brandy. “We weren’t here then,”says one. “Anyway it was just a refugee camp – a transit camp.”

Outside, an ice-cream van twinkles by, making delivers of La Barchetta to the local cafes, and just beyond them are the rusting railway carriages that brought in the Muslims. Women and children for transit – the men for beating and sometimes death. The memory is barely a whisper now.

Karadzic’s continued freedom and the collective memory loss may suit international politics now. President Bush has made no secret that he wants out of Bosnia as quickly as possible. Ambassador Thomas Miller, the keenest hunter of war criminals will be replaced in June with someone more in keeping with the new administration. Later this month the Polish/American colonel who has headed up the intelligence operation to find him for two years is leaving Sarajevo. The French, never very enthusiastic about picking up war criminals in their zone, can relax. And Karadzic can relax.

Ambassador Miller in Sarajevo likes to wave his hands in the air like the good attorney in Olive Stone’s movie, JFK: “Let justice be done though the heavans might fall.” But in Bosnia Karadzic is free, history is disappearing, memories are stolen. And it has only been nine years.