Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE).- The people of Lanzarote, especially those who earn their bread at sea, are still very aware of the tragedy of Los Cocoteros, that section of the coast of Haría dotted with submerged rocks that claimed the lives of 25 immigrants just a few meters from land. It was in 2009, but the sailors of the Blue Sea weighed this Tuesday that history was about to repeat itself.
“They are going to send it to you! Chacho, they are going straight to the same area where all those people died, they are going to drown!” It was the first thought of Francisco Hernández, the skipper of the small fishing boat that managed to stop the inflatable boat that was dangerously approaching the Los Cocoteros cove with 53 people on board, including two boys and a girl, less than a kilometer from land.
Actually, it was not he who saw the zódiac, they had just left Arrecife loaded with live bait to start a day of fishing in the La Graciosa Marine Reserve and he was keeping an eye on the course. It was his companion on board who alerted him, the sailor Tomás Hernández.
Francisco and Tomás managed to reassure the occupants, asking them, as best they could, between French and Spanish, if they were okay and distributed the few provisions they had on board: a few packets of biscuits, four loaves of bread and a few jugs of water.
The skipper of the Mar Azul told EFE that, at that time, the inflatable was still sailing, but the engine stopped and it did not start again, so they had to tow it out to sea with a rope, because the current was taking it without remedy to Los Cocoteros.
Francisco Hernández knows very well that if you enter this area of the northern coast of Lanzarote, you not only run aground among submerged rocks that end up cracking your hull, but you probably won’t be able to get out, because the coastline is “like a wall, like the front of a port”. “You can’t climb it”, he emphasizes, and even less if you reach that weak and stiff place after many hours of boating.
Avoiding that danger, Francisco and Tomás asked the occupants of the pneumatics again if they were all okay. It took a few minutes for the group, squeezed into the cramped space of the zodiac, to open up and let him see a woman lying lifeless at the bottom.
Finding that woman “thrown over the bottom of the zodiac” was tremendous for the two fishermen, because they also immediately realized that she was pregnant. Her belly was evident, they say.
It was the third time that the skipper of the Mar Azul attended a boat with immigrants, but he had never had an experience like this.
“My soul broke,” confesses this fisherman, who “thanked God” for being born in Europe. “Here you live well. These people don’t come to steal, they just want to live better”, remarks Francisco Hernández, who throughout his more than 25 years at sea has fished in Sierra Leone and the Gambia and knows well the situation of poverty, violence and insecurity in many countries in Africa.
The other image that remained of the pneumatics until the Maritime Rescue ship arrived was how “those people came”.
“Do you know that attraction at the fairs, the bulls (the one that simulates a rodeo bull)? shake it up That’s how they came, one foot inside and the other outside the boat. Sailing all night with one foot on the outside, wet in salty water and cold,” she explains.
The two Mar Azul sailors lost fuel and work time in the rescue, but the day made up for them: in the afternoon they returned to land from the Alegranza area with 2,000 kilos of tuna in the hold. This morning they went out to capture bait and started again. EFE