Ana Santana |
Santa Cruz de Tenerife (EFE).- When three Canarian sailors set sail from La Gomera to El Hierro on January 22, 1983, after buying a new boat the day before in Tenerife, they were unaware that they had eight days of extreme survival ahead of them that They would take them to the United States. 40 years later, Mara Cavallé rescues her story in “From La Restinga to Baltimore, the shipwreck of Moncho II”.
The journalist and writer Mara Cavallé will present her tribute to the particular odyssey of the skipper of the “Moncho II”, Manuel Álvarez, now deceased, and the sailors José Benito Morales and Inoel Machín on March 24 at the “Luis Martín Arvelo” cultural center in El Pinar, a municipality in El Hierro where the fishing village of La Restinga is located, which is also the protagonist of this story.
The author found out about the adventures that these three fishermen went through when she was writing her book “El hombre y la isla”, a document about the historic president of the Cabildo de El Hierro Tomás Padrón, and this discovery prompted her to learn the details of the case “ and listen to their own experience out loud,” he explained to EFE.
“From La Restinga to Baltimore”, published by Editorial Kinnamon, is a journalistic story that recreates the events that led these three sailors to the limit of their strength and to be “miraculously” saved by an Algerian ship when they no longer had hope of being found alive.
It all started when two of them flew from El Hierro to Tenerife to buy a fishing boat and asked a third party, the skipper Manuel Álvarez, for help to navigate the boat to the island, after a stopover in La Gomera.
The engine stops
When setting sail from the coast of La Gomera and when they were approaching El Hierro, the engine of the “Moncho II” stopped, which coincided with the entry of an episode of intense winds and haze “that made them invisible” to any other vessel and the led adrift, until entering the waters of the Atlantic.
The three hoped to be seen. They came to see how three planes were flying over them and launched flares without being located, because they were “like a walnut shell among the waves”, details Mara Cavallé.
At that time, the search operation for “Moncho II” had already begun with a deployment of the Navy and the Air Rescue Service, but their attempts were unsuccessful due to the thick haze and the force of the winds.
When they stopped seeing planes overhead, the crew of the “Moncho II” began to lose hope. They only had food for about seven hours of voyage and they huddled in the bottom of the fishing boat, to let themselves die.
In fact, the skipper went so far as to throw the knives that were on the ship into the sea, as he remembered what had happened shortly before in the Los Andes air tragedy and that in such a situation, everyone could “lose their minds”.
And to all these, the families of the three fishermen suffered a “fateful” situation, without news of them or hope, with the psychological unease of a future in which, between all of them, there would be nine orphaned children. A mass was even offered for his soul.
The salvation of the “Nedroma”
When they only expected death by starvation, the crew of the “Moncho II” heard a very loud noise: the engine of the Algerian ship “Nedroma”, 172 meters long, which located them thanks to the radar and which, in an unusual gesture because supposed a detour from their route to the United States, they approached the small fishing boat from the Canary Islands.
In this way, the three sailors were rescued, who traveled aboard the “Nedroma” to the destination of their rescue ship: Baltimore.
There they were lucky to have a very heavy snowfall, which kept them locked up in a hotel and delayed their return to Spain until diplomatic efforts facilitated their trip to Madrid, where Tomás Padrón was waiting for them, and from there to Tenerife South.
Finally, from the Tenerife airport they returned in a rented plane to the El Hierro aerodrome, where practically the entire island had gathered to receive them.
Mara Cavallé has reconstructed the events chronologically with testimonies from the three protagonists, since she had the opportunity to interview Manuel Álvarez shortly before his death, as well as authorities, neighbors, doctors and relatives.
“My intention was to get the reader into ‘Moncho II’ and to feel how they were supported, in these extreme circumstances, in love for the family and in their faith, mainly the Virgen de los Reyes by the patron, Manuel Álvarez , who was from La Gomera”, explains the writer.
And 40 years later, the protagonists and their families “still shed tears” when they remember what happened, a traumatic episode for them and for the residents of La Restinga, which then had about 300 inhabitants.
The drama of “Moncho II” affected the entire town, until then submerged in the typical quarrels and rivalry over fishing, and suddenly experienced a catharsis, a radical change that unleashed solidarity. Everyone turned to the families of the “Moncho II” fishermen, immersed in despair and to whom the neighbors helped them with the daily food.
As a result of these events, fishing in La Restinga was changed and telephone networks were incorporated into the boats, which until then had sailed without any type of instrument of contact with the outside world.
In addition, on the La Restinga dock, a plaque commemorates the people’s eternal gratitude to the “Nedroma”, the Algerian ship that saved three of their children. EFE