The Capsize off Flamborough Head

Before the capsize

A ship almost home

By the morning of 18 October 1961, Arctic Viking was homeward bound from the northern Norway fishing grounds with about 1,500 kits of fish aboard. Hull was no longer an abstraction. The ship was off the Yorkshire coast, running towards Flamborough Head in a North Sea gale.

The surviving accounts describe a vessel still doing the work expected of her, but in violent weather. Seas were coming aboard. Water ran across the deck. Men below felt the ship roll and pause in ways that frightened even experienced fishermen. In the early hours, around four o'clock, she went over hard to port before righting herself.

David Cressey later told the inquiry that the first roll threw him out of his bunk and onto a locker. Someone in the accommodation shouted that she was going over. The ship came back up, and life aboard tried to resume itself, as it often had to at sea. Men went back to bunks, watches changed, and the trawler continued for home.

That ordinary return to routine is part of the horror of the morning. The men were not characters in a set-piece disaster. They were tired working fishermen, close to the end of a trip, moving between bunks, bathroom, engine room, galley, bridge and deck while weather hammered the ship around them.

Survival

The starboard raft

The port raft was under water. The starboard raft was the one the survivors reached. Fourteen men gathered in it while the sea continued to throw the overturned trawler and the raft about. Some had swum from under the ship. Some had scrambled along the casing or deck. Some had jumped or been thrown into the water.

David later remembered the galley boy, John Clare, frightened and asking what to do. In one version of the family account, David told him when to go, and Clare ran forward. The inquiry and newspaper accounts credit David with helping him get clear. On a morning when seconds mattered, that instruction may have been the difference between life and death.

Raymond Dodsworth escaped from the flooding bathroom and swam about twenty yards to the raft. He had seen John Robinson and urged him to kick off his boots and come with him. When Dodsworth turned, Robinson was no longer there. Alan Bailey described men below as frightened and scrambling upward. Charles Kirk cried out that she was going.

The raft was not safety in any comfortable sense. It was survival exposed to a gale. Men were wet, cold, shocked, and sick from seawater and oil. They had seen their ship turn over. They did not yet know who had made it. They did not know whether help would reach them.

They were in the raft for roughly one to two hours before the Polish lugger Derkacz reached them. Skipper Ryszard Sleska later described seeing a yellow object in the waves and then a rocket. The rescue itself was dangerous, with the lugger and raft being thrown together by heavy seas.

After the men were aboard Derkacz

Watching the ship go

After the survivors were taken aboard Derkacz, Arctic Viking was still visible in the sea, bottom-up. The reports differ on exact timings, but they agree on the awful image: the ship remained afloat upside down before finally lifting and sliding beneath the surface.

For the men who had just escaped her, this was not an abstract maritime casualty. It was the place they had slept, worked, eaten, argued, joked, stood watch and tried to survive. Somewhere in or near that wreck were five of their shipmates.

The crew of Derkacz gave the survivors dry clothes, blankets, bunks and medical help, while the Polish fishermen themselves slept where they could. The rescue did not end the storm. Derkacz had to ride it out before she could bring the men back to Hull.

This page stops at what the men lived through that morning: the roll, the wheel, the escape, the raft, the missing, the rescue, and the sight of the Arctic Viking going down. The later questions about stability, hatch covers, course, fuel, ballast, wave formation and judgement belong to the Ministry of Transport inquiry chapter.