Ocean Explorer Offers Help to Gulf Livestock 1 Families

Ocean explorer Rob McCallum has offered to join a mission to find and retrieve the data recorder of the livestock carrier that capsized in the East China Sea in 2020.

Reporting by 7News.com.au indicates that McCallum is confident that his team could find the Gulf Livestock 1, offering fresh hope to the families of the missing crew after some recently voiced disappointment with the investigation report into the catastrophe published by flag state Panama.

The livestock carrier was sailing from New Zealand to China with 43 crew and approximately 6,000 dairy cattle onboard when it capsized in the East China Sea during Typhoon Maysak. 40 crew members remain missing after the capsize.

As vessel flag state, the Panama Maritime Authority produced a report into the incident in 2022, but the families of the two Australians onboard told 7News that the report, which has not been made public “ticked boxes but did nothing to detail what happened to the ship in the storm and did not touch on known problems with the vessel in the lead-up to the sinking.”

An ABC investigation uncovered that in the 18 months prior to the vessel’s sinking, Indonesian and Australian authorities recorded dozens of safety breaches onboard, including critical failures of its propulsion and navigations systems as well as issues relating to vessel stability. During a voyage in July 2019, the livestock carrier drifted for 25 hours whilst undergoing repairs following an engine failure.

McCallum, EYOS Founding Partner, is an expedition leader and consultant. His diverse background ranges from guiding a complete circumnavigation of Antarctica by icebreaker to extensive deep ocean searching. He served as the primary mission planner and expedition leader for the Five Deeps Expedition. He has also spent two decades guiding and leading expeditions in the Arctic and Antarctic. He is an acknowledged expert in deep-water submersible operations and has led multiple expeditions to the RMS Titanic (12,500ft) and battleship Bismarck (15,500ft).