It was already the darkness of the early morning when the crew of the Arrecife tuna boat Cima de Oro were resting from a day's work in the Atlantic. As every time they embark, they explored the coasts of Lanzarote and La Graciosa in search of tuna with which to carry out a family business with decades of history, but which is becoming less and less profitable every day.
The skipper of the fishing boat, José Luis Guadalupe, was on board with his sailors, guarding a spot of fish under the boat, when he came across 43 people in the middle of the night asking for help from a dinghy.
"They were shouting at us to pick them up," the sailor recalls the moments of tension that morning of September 24. The crew had deviated from their course due to the lack of a navigation system and, guided by a compass, at the moment they came across the tuna boat, they were "39 miles further north" than they should have been to reach Arrecife, "it would be more or less the distance between Papagayo and La Graciosa".
"We didn't find them, they found us," explains the Lanzarote native, who has spent more than 43 years on the boards of the Cima de Oro, a boat that his father and uncles bought when in Lanzarote "a lot of money was made" with tuna. Now he only earns enough to live and pay his eight sailors. "Nobody wants to embark anymore and only these guys sign up for the job," says the skipper, who employs four Senegalese and two Moroccan sailors, most of whom arrived in Spain by boat, as well as two Spaniards.
In the middle of the night, a light in the darkness of the ocean alerted the crew to the presence of a 26-meter-long dinghy. "It wasn't a zodiac like the one you can see here in the port, it was an inflatable one, which they make right there on the beach and the floor of the boat is not reinforced, it looks like a snake," exemplifies José Luis Guadalupe about the precarious conditions of the boat.
The occupants had left two and a half days earlier, along with two other barges, from the Alawi city of Tan Tan, the other dinghies continued on their way, but the one that came across the Cima de Oro had run out of gasoline. For many of them, the journey had not started in Morocco. "There were people from Pakistan, Senegal and the countries around Senegal," such as Gambia and Mali. There were also four people from Morocco.
When they sighted it, the initial idea of the skipper of the Cima de Oro was not to take the survivors on board, but to wait for Salvamento, as he had done on two previous occasions during his four decades at sea. "We notified the Spanish Salvamar to come and rescue them. A colleague from another ship told us that days before he had seen another boat and the Moroccan gendarmerie went to pick them up and, as we know that they pay so much money to get on, we told them to continue because from that location they might end up taking them to Morocco."
A Pakistani man was the first who, taking advantage of the movements of the skipper of the dinghy to approach the tuna boat, jumped onto the side of the boat and grabbed onto some ropes. Then he was followed by other traveling companions. "They were able to jump because this boat is not as high as others," he says.
Despite the sailors insisting that they wait in the barge, driven by desperation and fearful of ending up, like many others, shipwrecked and disappearing at the bottom of the sea, some of them began to stand up in the dinghy to try to get on the fishing boat.
The rescue ended with four people in the water in the middle of the night on a waning moon night. Among them, a Senegalese woman who was traveling with her son, a baby of just over a year and a half, fell into the cold of the Atlantic Ocean. The baby, luckily, remained standing in the boat and was rescued by the sailors. "We had to use some long rods that we have on the boat to get them out of the water. They grabbed on and we pulled until we managed to get them out," recalls the fisherman. Then, they put the woman in the engine room of the boat to warm up.
"Nobody disappeared because there is God in this world, because the problem is that when they see a boat they all jump, they all go to one side and the boat capsizes. It has already happened to colleagues," explains the skipper.
This time it went well and after the rescue of the Cima de Oro there were no deaths to regret. However, José Luis Guadalupe is aware that luck played in his favor that day and that if nobody died when they fell into the sea it was because that day it was not their turn. In a similar situation, just four days later, a rescue carried out by the expert crew of Salvamento Marítimo in El Hierro ended with the disappearance of 54 migrants and with only nine bodies recovered, including that of a minor.
"We took off all our clothes to give them to them, we also dressed the baby with the shirts we had on board. After a while they asked us if they could fish, they said they wanted to help and work. We told them to rest until Salvamento arrived," says Guadalupe.
After hours of waiting and a scuffle with the coordination of Salvamento de Las Palmas, the crew of the Cima de Oro and the survivors of the dinghy awaited the arrival of the Salvamar Urania. Once on the scene, those responsible for emergencies could not carry out the maneuver due to the wind and ended up needing a dinghy to transfer the survivors from the tuna boat to the Salvamar.
Initially, the base ordered the tuna boat to take the survivors to port, but Guadalupe assured them that if he returned to port that day he would lose the spot of tuna he was guarding under his boat and with it the work of those days. "We are four boats [tuna boats on the island], everyone's food depends on this, also the food of these people who are here in the factory. If people were in danger I would understand, but the people were already recharged. They told me from Las Palmas to write in the navigation log that I had refused, but I did not refuse, I just explained the situation to them."
Regarding the far-right parties that promote the idea of leaving the boats or dinghies abandoned at sea, the conejero defends that "that cannot be done to people, they have to pick them up. That is our maxim, because if it happens to me, pick me up," Guadalupe emphasizes, who defends that any person in his situation, even those who maintain anti-immigration speeches, would not be able to not help someone who needs it: "When it has happened to them, it has broken their hearts."
