MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“Argos Georgia” restarts engine and ready to begin fishing

After successfully airdropping critical engine parts USF C-17 return home

The disabled St. Helena flagged longliner “Argos Georgia” adrift in the Ross Sea off Antarctica's northern coast for fifteen days restarted its engine early Monday and may resume fishing, a crew member said.

The "Argos Georgia" owned by a Argos Holdings based in the Falkland Islands suffered failure in its main engine on 23 December, leaving the vessel and its 25 crew adrift and surrounded by ice. A U.S. Air Force C-17 Loadmaster dropped an engine piston and casing onto Ross Sea ice near the trawler early Sunday during a low-level pass and the ship's engineers have now restarted its main engine. "Argos Georgia" fishing master, New Zealander Shane Jennings, said the ship's engine was being warmed up and then the vessel would begin moving through the ice Monday. The air drop of parts "came down really nicely and landed on a piece of ice and never went in the water," he said, praising the U.S. air lift squadron and the airplane's pilot, Lieut. Col. Jim McGann, New Zealand-based commander of the U.S. Antarctic base supply group, Operation Deep Freeze. The C-17 Globemaster III flew out of Christchurch with the 68 kilograms of parts at the request of the New Zealand Rescue Coordination Center, which said the Argos Georgia was frozen in the ice floes off the Ross Ice Shelf. New Zealand is responsible for coordinating rescue and marine safety missions in the Ross Sea. "We're pretty much in nine-tenths ice now ... and have been most of the time we were moving round with the (ocean) current," Jennings told New Zealand's National Radio. "There was no immediate danger." He said he has been fishing in Antarctic waters for five years and while he is used to sea ice conditions, "I'm not used to being unable to move in the ice, without an engine." The biggest concern was pack ice moving in "to squash the hull of the vessel," but the ocean current had kept "a bit of a pond of (open) water" round the trawler, he said. "We never really looked like getting pinched" by the pack ice. Ocean currents were, however, moving the trawler deep into pack ice toward the Antarctic coast and the vessel would have become trapped if she had remained disabled for much longer officials admitted earlier. Extra parts were being taken to the vessel by a U.S. icebreaker "so we'll be back up to steam and there's no reason we can't carry on fishing," Jennings said.