A six-hour maritime drama played out along the Wild Coast when 16 seamen were airlifted off a freighter in stormy seas in the early hours of Sunday morning, the Marine Rescue Co-ordination Centre (MRCC) said.
Helicopters battled 40-knot winds and three metre swells to airlift 16 crewmen off the freighter BBC China.
The ship had sent out a mayday signal at 8.45pm on Saturday to say it had hit a sandbank about 150-metres off the shore along Grosvenor Point near Mboyti on the Wild Coast.
The 122-metre mini-bulk carrier, with two onboard cranes, was said to be carrying 2 800 tons of ”steel structures”.
The BBC China reported it was taking water in at its ballast tanks and into its engine room, Jacques Smith at the MRCC in Cape Town said.
The engine room, its bulkheads and ballast tanks were flooded and its starboard decks were awash.
A private helicopter from Acher Aviation in Richards Bay, was sent to the scene and the crew were airlifted in batches of two and three at a time.
All the crew were off by 2.30am, Smit said.
Due to the bad weather, communications between the rescue centre, the helicopter and the stricken vessel were bad. The naval vessel, the SAS Protea, was about five nautical miles away from the BBC China but could not get to it due to the high winds and swell.
”The Protea played an important part in the rescue operation as the messages were relayed to the naval ship and then passed on to the China,” Smit said.
A Safmarine freighter, the Helderberg, was also on standby about 50 nautical miles away.
At first light the Pentow Surveyor and coast guard vessel the Kuswag 1 were despatched from Durban to monitor the 1 846 tons of bunker fuel aboard.
”Luckily not a lot of oil was spilled and we hope that it can be safely transferred to other vessels before the ship breaks up,” Eastern Cape Environmental minister Andre de Wet said.
He said a team had been put on alert to be ”available at the shortest possible notice should they be needed to do anything”.
The BBC China was sailing from Port of Spain in the Caribbean to Durban and from there to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, the MRCC said. – Sapa