"It was very shocking and hard." These are the words of Lorenzo Duarte, one of the crew members of the sport fishing boat that found one of the bodies of the boat that sank in the early hours of Wednesday in waters near Arrecife, from which there would still be eight people missing.
In the morning, this 21-year-old went fishing with his companions without even knowing that hours before a boat with about forty immigrants on board had capsized in the waters of the island. "I usually watch the news, but we left so early that I didn't know absolutely anything," he says.
Thus, he was unaware that Maritime Rescue had managed to rescue 28 occupants of the boat but that they were looking for another 11 people since, according to the testimony of the immigrants themselves, 39 were traveling on the boat. "In addition, the boat capsized about six miles from Arrecife and we found it about 20 or 25 miles away," he points out.
The way they found the lifeless body, which belonged to a woman, was also "very unpleasant". "We were fishing, because we are dedicated to sport fishing, and suddenly it was like a fish had bitten. The feeling was that a marlin had bitten," he indicates. And the corpse had gotten caught on the hook. "At 200 meters we realized that it was something floating, but we didn't know if it was a piece of wood, a life ring... We kept picking up and, when it was 30 or 30 meters from the stern, we saw that it was a corpse," says Lorenzo, who says that then he was "in shock."
"At first, I didn't know what was happening. A person in the middle of nowhere didn't make much sense. When I saw her, who was close, it looked like she had a jacket, and I thought about whether she was a diver, but then I reasoned and it was impossible to find a diver 25 miles from Arrecife," adds this young man.
After that they gave notice to Salvamento, but while they waited for their arrival, they began "to see flip-flops, tupperware, clothes..." and they found "another corpse". "When I saw the second one, I looked at a colleague who was with me and asked him if I was hallucinating or if he had seen the same thing as me, says Lorenzo. "When we saw the other person and gave the notice, they told us the situation that there was and that they were carrying out the search and all that, because 20 minutes before everything happened, we saw the rescue helicopter circling and we were surprised, but we had no idea what was happening," he adds.
Finally, there were three lifeless bodies that Maritime Rescue managed to rescue. And it is that, while he was on his way to where the sport fishing boat was, he found two more corpses, also of women. "I am 21 years old and the people they rescued are 20 and 21 years old just like me. People who come from wherever and in those conditions to make a living and end up in tragedy, it's very hard. It could be my friend, my brother, anyone and right now he's floating here," concludes Lorenzo Duarte.
As confirmed by the Security and Emergency Consortium, this Thursday afternoon the "active" search for the rest of the missing immigrants was terminated after the shipwreck of this boat, although the search will continue but in a "passive" way.
