Quite true.
If picking up migrants/refugees in distress means turning your boat into a Flying Dutchman than can never get into port again though there is a significant incentive to ignore them.
This movie deals with the issue, a German woman single-handed sailor finds a refugee boat with about 200-300 people aboard in desperate need of help. No one wants anything to do with them and she is advised to just keep going. Various things happen and she finally makes a fake distress call that SHE is sinking and everyone comes running. I guess the point was 300 dead Africans was not a concern but one German in difficulty results in a full-on rescue.
I have never had to help anyone where putting myself into Flying Dutchman status was involved, so I can only guess at the pressures to ignore the distressed boat.
The issue of rescue at sea sounds simple but is complicated when it comes to vessels deliberately creating distress in order to be rescued and taken somewhere nice. Probably warrants a new thread.
I don’t have an issue with rescuing yachtsmen in distress regardless of whether they were culpable in their situation. I do have an issue with ‘rescuing’ asylum seekers attempting to illegally enter desirable countries. In this they play upon the innate mariner sense of duty to render assistance to those in peril on the sea (words from the naval hymn).
UK has essentially set up a ferry service for anyone in a boat heading there from Europe and thus encourages more and more. They should be turned around and sent back. Same for the Mediterranean.
At the height of Australia’s boat people influx, the new government stopped them by removing the incentive. None of them would step ashore in Australia and none would ever live there. The boats would create the distress by scuttling, setting fire, threatening to throw their children overboard etc. The obligation was still to rescue. But we rescued in a different way.
To comply with international customs, we provided a new boat, a commercial lifeboat which was loaded with the people, towed close to the Indonesian coast and (with just enough fuel) told their options; go back or we do it again. It’s hard to sink a lifeboat.
Nowadays the ‘asylum seekers’ are given an all expenses paid lifetime holiday in Nauru, with the option to return whence they came anytime. No option to settle in Australia. As another scam they get themselves sufficiently sick to be transferred to Australian hospitals where the Lefty, lawyerly caste can commence endless legal tricks to keep them in country.
I fully understand the mariner’s incentive to do a Sergeant Schultz; ‘I zee nothink’.
I was in a port office one day and a bridge crew came in to tell the office they rescued the crew from a sinking ship ( which was all over the satcom) port office said no, take them away…
After I asked the office, wow a bit tough but they said we know the ship owner so no way.
You may, but have you ever been in the situation of looking at a sinking boat with 2-300 people on board and having to take the decision to let them drown or pick them up?
I have, several times. I can tell you that you don’t ask whether they were refugees, asylum seekers, migrant or anything else.
No matter what problems you put yourself in, or what pressure the owner/operator apply, you just do what any seafarer is obliged to do, rescue them.
PS> It has nothing to do with politics, left or right.
