A group of seafarers were left to almost starve on board a cramped and ill-equipped vessel off the Bahrain coast while the vessel’s owner and charterer were engaged in a dispute. For many months, throughout the hot summer months, they lived, unpaid, in oven-like conditions with only enough fuel for a few lights at night. Although only 2kms offshore and in sight of land, they might as well have been in prison. One seafarer told Bahrain chaplain Victor Salve that they were afraid they had been forgotten and would be left there to die. In fact, one of their fellow crew members did unfortunately die after suffering a heart attack.

As soon as the Mission to Seafarers was alerted to the seafarers’ plight, the chaplain went out to the vessel with food, water, toiletries, reading matter, clothes and a mobile phone so they could contact home. He also worked to get the vessel brought back alongside and the men repatriated.

For one seafarer, it meant that he would see his second child, who was born after he left home two years previously, for the first time. His wife had not even been able to send him a photograph because she didn’t know where he was.

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