Almost a year and a half after the tragic sinking of the Galician fishing boat Pitanxo Villa in the waters of Newfoundland, where he was fishing in the middle of a storm, and which only 3 of the 24 sailors of his crew survived, the judicial expedition aboard the ship artabro confirmed this Saturday the discovery of the wreck at 750 meters deep. The location of the ship comes two days after a metal structure was spotted on the seabed, 400 kilometers from the Canadian island of Newfoundland.

The Rov submarine (remotely operated unmanned vehicle) to which the search mission is attached went down this Saturday to try to identify the remains of the wreckage and was able to verify that it is indeed the Galician fishing boat which sank on February 15, 2022 in Newfoundland waters with 21 victims, 12 of whom are still missing. The Rov’s cameras allowed us to record certain structural details that identify the fishing vessel, including its name.

“This is very positive news for us after so many months of waiting, and we hope it will be a definitive step forward for the investigation into the causes of the accident,” said spokesperson María José De Pazo. relatives. De Pazo clarified that at present there is no indication that there may be a body inside the ship, although they hope to find a loophole once the robot can access it, this for which he regretted that “the expedition had not left much sooner”. . .

It is expected that in the next few hours the robot will dive again to register the fishing boat more closely and start collecting precise data so that the three forensic experts, appointed by the National Court, who are on board expedition, can carry out their respective reports and a reconstruction of the accident which occurred at dawn, 250 miles from Newfoundland, when the capture campaign was over and they were preparing to return to Galicia. Pushed by 10 meter waves, with a wind of 30 knots and a temperature of around seven degrees below zero, the ship was left at the mercy of the sea. Within minutes the freezer trawler, with its holds almost full of fish, list and capsize.

The accident of the fishing boat belonging to Pesquerías Nores, based in Marín (Pontevedra), is the most tragic in the history of the Galician fleet due to the number of victims. Aparentemente, un violento golpe de mar y la parada repentina del motor fueron los principal factors que desencadenaron el subito naufragio, según la version que dio la compañía armadora, hasta que uno de los tres survivors, el marinero Samuel Kwesi, cuestionó la actuación del patron of Pitanxo Villa, Juan Padin. With Kwesi’s contradictory version, the captain found himself charged with 21 alleged crimes of reckless homicide in a case being investigated by the National Court and which ordered this expedition to clarify his responsibility in the incident and that of the company owning the vessel.

Moreover, the report of the Maritime Accidents and Incidents Commission (CIAIM), under the Ministry of Transport, contradicts the version of the captain, his nephew and Pesquerías Nores. He maintains that the refrigerated ship was sailing at 2.6 knots and excludes that the engines stopped suddenly. Separately, the report states that the trawler breached the certificate of airworthiness by carrying 24 crew members at the time of the sinking, two more than those listed. And he concludes that the ship only carried survival suits for the 22 officially registered sailors.

The commission’s report, which is more in line with the version of sailor Samuel Kwesi, a prosecution witness in this court case, indicates that that day there was a strong storm and waves, when “the fishing gear , which had not yet tacked and which contained the catches of the last hours, exerted a strong blow on the blocks [bloques por los que corren los cabos] trawling”, leaving the vessel unable to manoeuvre.

Waiting for data that can be obtained by shipping the ship artabro, and whether or not they serve as evidence of accusation against Juan Padín, the investigating judge Ismael Moreno adopted precautionary measures against the boss, who was banned from leaving Spain and withdrew his passport . In addition, the magistrate imposed the obligation to appear every 15 days before the court.

judicial expedition

He artabro, owned by Galician firm ACSM Shipping, set sail on May 17 amid controversy. The departure of the expedition for Canada without the authorization of Judge Moreno causes a clash with the Ministry of Transport. Judge Moreno was forced to specify in an order that the judicial delegation had set sail without informing the court and in the absence of two party experts who were to board, one of them representing relatives victims who exercise the private prosecution .

The ship made a stopover in San Juan de Terranova for the two members of the expedition that the judge had ordered to embark and who complete the judicial procession with another expert appointed by the CIAIM and an observer representing the Maritime Security Agency (EMSA). .

Also the submarine services company ACS, based in Vigo, awarded the contract of almost three million euros, summoned by the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, threatened to suspend the expedition, barely a week before departure, because they had not formalized the paperwork with the administration, about to run out of time to do so. The company demanded an explanation for the delay and criticized the fact that it had been planning the trip for 10 days without having received an official response or confirmation.

After 18 days of travel, this epic immersion in the depths of the North Atlantic has achieved the first results, with the two robots to record duplicate images that are on board. Before leaving the expedition, the company had already announced that the most difficult part of the mission would be to find the ship, and they estimated that it would take them about ten days to complete the work. Now it will also try to record inside the sunken fishing boat; an important step in the field of these judicial investigations in Spain.

ACS Shipping has 20 years of experience, and with operational bases in the Canary Islands, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates, as a company specializing in subsea services to the oil and gas markets, as well as in the submarine cabling and renewable energies. So far, the company has inspected over 250 offshore structures, pipelines and cables in over 60 countries.

After its location on radar, specialists carried out a visual inspection using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) equipped with cameras to examine various aspects of the vessel, such as its equipment, fishing gear and seabed likely to be interest in the forensic investigation.

In order to analyze all the parameters of the incident, the first simulation tests were also carried out with the model of the ship in the marine dynamics laboratory of INTA-CEHIPAR, in Madrid. This work will make it possible to detail the navigation of the vessel in the swell conditions existing at the time of the accident, to verify its behavior in different conditions of loading and towing fishing gear, in accordance with the main hypotheses on the circumstances of the accident which are supported by CIAIM experts.