COURTESY OF U.S. NAVY
The eight crewmen await their turn for a
haircut aboard the Navy vessel.

Rescued Taiwanese
boat crew arrives
safely at Pearl Harbor

The Navy ship Boxer braved a
storm to aid the hapless fishermen

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By Leila Fujimori
lfujimori@starbulletin.com

Eight Chinese and Taiwanese fishermen rescued last month from a sinking fishing boat off Guam arrived safe and sound in Pearl Harbor yesterday aboard the USS Boxer, a Navy ship that braved storm conditions to rescue them.

The 50-foot Taiwanese vessel Ji Moon Chun 21 was 640 miles off Guam when an electrical fire began in the engine room.

"The engine room was flooding, and it looked like it was going to sink," said Kui Ching Huang, the owner and captain of the Ji Moon Chun 21. A Chinese-American U.S. Navy sailor served as interpreter.

COURTESY OF U.S. NAVY
The rescued fishermen were brought aboard the
Navy ship Boxer, top, late last month in the western
Pacific. The Boxer had received an international
distress call after leaving Guam.

Huang said he "was really scared at that moment because it was raining really hard and the waves are really big and the typhoon looks like it's coming."

The fishermen, dressed in green flight suits, USS Boxer caps and shoes donated by sailors on the Navy ship, thanked their rescuers and described their plight at sea.

Huang and a crewman were in the engine room when electrical wiring caught fire. The crewman choked a bit from the smoke, but no one was injured.

The Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, picked up the distress call and was dispatched to the scene. Two helicopters took off from the deck with rescue swimmers aboard.

"The response was really quick," Huang said. "They really did a really good job."

However, though the fire broke out at about noon on Aug. 25, it was not until early the following morning that the crewmen were finally rescued.

"It was frustrating because you wanted to get them off the ship, and things didn't seem to want to work right," said Lt. Troy Tinkham, one of the helicopter pilots.

Two helicopters arrived on the scene in the early morning darkness to find typhoonlike conditions. "There was lightning coming, rain, plenty of thunderstorm, with 20- to 25-foot seas and winds gusting up to 50 knots," Tinkham said.

Intending to abandon ship, the fishermen had begun to put together a makeshift raft from fishing buoys and nets when the rescue teams arrived.

Navy rescue teams threw a life raft in but could not understand why the survivors refused to get in. They later learned that the fishermen did not know how to swim. A second life raft was deployed, and the survivors looked as if they were going to get in, but the helicopters had to return to the ship to refuel.

When they returned, the Ji Moon Chun 21 was flooding and sitting much lower in the water, and the fishermen were putting their float into the water, Tinkham said.

At that point another raft was dropped, and rescue swimmers were lowered into the water to help get fishermen onto the raft. Navy officials said the rescue took about three hours.

Once aboard the Boxer, five Chinese-American sailors served as interpreters for the men and made them feel at home. One of the interpreters said the men enjoyed watching the movie "The Perfect Storm" aboard the ship.

Although the boat's home port is Taiwan, Huang hired his entire crew from China, which he says is not unusual for Taiwanese fishing boats.

The captain and crew of the fishing boat stayed at the Pagoda Hotel last night and were scheduled to fly to Taipei this morning.