Stranded migrants saved by yacht
Greek Coast Guard calls for assistance
SOUDA, Greece — The superyacht Mayan Queen IV was sailing smoothly in clear weather through the dark and calm Mediterranean in the early hours of June 14 when it received a call about a migrant ship in distress 4 nautical miles away.
About 20 minutes later, shortly before 3 a.m., the towering $175-million yacht, owned by the family of a Mexican silver magnate, arrived at the scene. The distressed boat had already sunk. All the four-person crew could see were the lights of a Greek Coast Guard vessel scanning the water’s inky surface. But they could hear the screams of survivors.
“Horrible,” said the Mayan Queen’s captain, Richard Kirkby, who described the sea as “pitch black” on that nearly moonless night.
In a few hours, the 305-foot Mayan Queen, more accustomed to pleasure boating to Monaco and Italy with billionaires aboard, was filled with 100 desperate and dehydrated Pakistani, Syrian, Palestinian, and Egyptian men, as it played an unexpected role in one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks in decades. As many as 650 men, women, and children drowned.
The incongruous image of the devastated survivors disembarking the Mayan Queen on a port in Kalamata, Greece, last week underlined what has become the strange reality of the modern Mediterranean, where the superyachts of the superrich — equipped with Jacuzzis, helipads, and other trappings of luxury — share the seas with the most destitute on smuggler-operated boats perilously crossing from northern Africa to Europe.
Greek authorities had repeatedly decided not to assist a roughly 80- to 100-foot fishing trawler stuffed with as many as 750 people fleeing poverty and the displacement of war and in Greece’s search-and-rescue area. Only when the ship sank in front of the coast guard did authorities spur to action, calling on the Mayan Queen, one of the world’s 100 largest yachts.
“As soon as you are notified and in close proximity and you can do so, you are obligated” to try and rescue, said Aphrodite Papachristodoulou, an expert in the law of the sea and human rights at the Irish Centre for Human Rights.
Why Greek authorities needed to call on a passing yacht to rescue an overcrowded and rickety ship that they had been monitoring for a full day, she said, was unclear.
“The practice of non-assistance, or delay of assistance, and why the Greeks were not proceeding to the rescue is another question mark,” she said.
There was one Greek Coast Guard vessel on the scene when the Mayan Queen arrived, and its seamen were in a raft saving scores of men from the water.
A vivid retelling of events provided under sworn testimony by Kirkby and obtained by The New York Times added that none of those saved was wearing a life vest. Some clutched floating pieces of wood.
Investigators are still seeking to understand what happened as the trawler sank trying to reach Italy — whether smugglers refused assistance, and panic on the ship caused it to capsize, as the coast guard claims, or whether a failed attempt to tow the ship caused it to sink, as some survivors contend. In either case, it fell to the Mayan Queen to shoulder much of the rescue.