Trawler skipper’s memory from the deep dredges up intriguing questions

Kit Olver felt his trawling net had snagged something large and unwelcome way in the depths long before he had any physical evidence of it.

The note of his deep-sea trawler’s diesel engine deepened, and its exhaust gas temperature rose as it sought the torque to haul against the sudden load. What Olver’s net eventually brought to the surface off South Australia’s south-east coast that day, nine years ago, has bothered him ever since.

Kit Olver with the trawler he once owned.

He hasn’t spoken about it for years. Now, aged 77, with his seagoing years behind him and a couple of heart attacks reminding him that everything, even the chance to unload old secrets, has an expiry date, he wants to air his story.

“It was a bloody great wing of a big jet airliner,” he says. He takes a breath, as if confronted by the memory.

“I’ve questioned myself; I’ve looked for a way out of this,” he says. “I wish to Christ I’d never seen the thing … but there it is. It was a jet’s wing.”

Olver dismisses any suggestion the object was the wing of a small plane. He held a pilot’s licence when he was a young man and flew several small planes such as Cessnas.

“This thing was much bigger than anything in the private plane category,” he says.

I contact George Currie, the only person still living among the three crew members who were on Olver’s 24-metre trawler, the Vivienne Jane, on that day in September or October of 2014.

Currie has spent 42 of his 69 years at sea and was the engineer and first mate on several of Olver’s boats over two decades. The two men haven’t been in contact for several years. But when I phone Currie, he knows exactly what I’m asking about.

“You’ve got no idea what trouble we had when we dragged up that wing,” he says.

“It was incredibly heavy and awkward. It stretched out the net and ripped it. It was too big to get up on the deck.

No trace of MH370’s final resting place has been found.Credit: Shutterstock

“As soon as I saw it I knew what it was. It was obviously a wing, or a big part of it, from a commercial plane. It was white, and obviously not from a military jet or a little plane.

“It took us all day to get rid of it.”

And there is one of the reasons the story has remained beyond knowing ever since. Having spent a day struggling to free the object from the trawler’s net, Olver ordered his crew to cut the net free.

With evening well advanced, the $20,000 net and whatever it held was cast off and sank into the dark of the Southern Ocean.

It came to rest at a relatively shallow depth on the floor of a sea bank some hundreds of metres beyond the northern lip of a deep underwater volcanic crater.

The area is about 55 kilometres west of the South Australian town of Robe, and about the same distance from shore.

Olver has good reason to remember the spot.

It was his secret trawling area for a fish species called alfonsino – an attractive red fish as prized for its aesthetic value in a fishmonger’s display as for its firm white flesh. He had discovered the fish, among other species, were plentiful in the depths of the volcanic bowl.

The first question that came to the minds of both Olver and Currie – and they say, the other two crew members – was whether the wing could have come from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared on March 8, 2014, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members aboard.

The disappearance was among the world’s greatest mysteries when Olver and his crew were fishing off south-east South Australia.

All these years later, the fate of the MH370 and those aboard remains a ghastly conundrum.

Most authorities have since concluded that MH370 came down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. But despite the most expensive sea search in history, no trace of the plane’s final resting place has been found.

In 2015 and 2016, several pieces of flotsam identified as pieces of the plane were found washed up on beaches of Reunion, an island off the east coast of Africa, and on the coast of the African nation of Mozambique.

All of this leaves Olver worrying that sceptics might classify him as a conspiracy theorist or a “tinfoil hat wearer” for talking about a mysterious jet wing many hundreds of kilometres to the east of the area MH370 is presumed to have crashed.

Anyone who knows him, however – and that’s just about everyone in Australia’s southern trawling industry – recognise him as a hard-nosed, determinedly independent man who has lost and made fortunes on the sea. He does not suffer fools.

He was so long in the fishing game – he ran trawlers until he was 75 – he has probably forgotten more about the sea than many others will learn.

He does not treat the sea or its depths lightly. Or its stories.

A mural for the missing MH370 in Kuala Lumpur.Credit: AP

No one who has taken a fishing trawler out of Olver’s home port of Portland, in south-west Victoria, could afford to treat the sea lightly. Along the continental shelf and across Bass Strait and around Tasmania are some of the most treacherous waters and wildest weather systems in the world.

Indeed, about 9pm on March 12, 1990, 150 kilometres south of Hobart, Olver was at the helm of his big Soviet-built trawler, the Aqua Enterprise. He was chasing the huge and lucrative schools of orange roughie when the Southern Ocean almost claimed his life.

No one quite knows what happened, though Olver suspects his vessel hit one of the thousands of shipping containers that go overboard every year, littering the world’s oceans and sometimes lurking just below the surface.

The Aqua Enterprise started taking on water, and within 90 minutes, the boat was in such peril its three crew members were taken off by another trawler, the Southern Voyager, that battled its way through big seas to the rescue.

Olver wasn’t prepared to abandon his trawler, however. He had fitted her with a new engine and was in deep hock to the bank. Eventually, he had no choice and made the leap to the rescue ship’s deck. By 11 o’clock that night, the Aqua Enterprise went to the bottom.

When he reached mobile phone range, he discovered to his great fury that a news reporter had already phoned his wife, Stephanie, to inform her he was missing at sea.

It gave him a lasting aversion to journalists which deepened when, still traumatised, he arrived at Hobart to find himself surrounded by reporters demanding to know how he felt.

All of which lends context to his decision now to confide to a journalist his recollection of fishing up what he believes was a jet’s wing.

Olver knows precisely where the old secret lies. He traces it for me on the electronic chart plotter of a trawler operated by a friend who still fishes these waters.

Olver can pinpoint where he says he found the jet wing.

The chart plotter uses satellite Global Positioning System co-ordinates overlaid on a map, together with depth and other critical information. Such plotters effectively map the floor of fishing grounds all around Australia’s coast and beyond.

Olver points to the spot on the plotter where he says he put down the mysterious wing. It is at 37 degrees, 16 minutes south and 139 degrees, 12 minutes east.

He says he tried to alert authorities of his find soon after returning to port, phoning the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

Within hours, he received a return call from an official. The message was that a shipping container had fallen from a Russian ship in the area off Robe. The implication, he says, was that he’d probably fished up a shipping container, or part of it.

The families of those lost on MH370 have never been provided closure.Credit: Reuters

AMSA said this week it had no record of corresponding with Olver during that period.

Unimpressed, he chose not to pursue the matter. Three years later, he tried again.

Olver wrote an email dated Monday, November 27, 2017, to Ocean Infinity, the company undertaking a new – and ultimately fruitless – search for MH370.

“My name is Christopher Olver … 3 years ago I was operating my deep sea trawler off Robe in South Australia and was fouled for a day trying to recover my net,” he wrote. “Because of the publicity involving MH370 I reported the incident and the authorities informed me that a container had been recently lost in the area. Being so far from the search area, no further interest was shown.

“On hooking this object and straining every winch we managed to get most of the net aboard and tow the object away from our fishing drag and cut the net free in 55 fathoms [about 100 metres].

“A couple of comments. I have trawled for 35 years and this was not a shipping container. Having over the years trawled up all sorts of objects, including aircraft, I am convinced this was an aircraft wing. Please feel free to contact me. Christopher (Kit) Olver.”

He says he received no reply.

And now, with the grief of the families of those on MH370 playing on his inner voice, Kit Olver is trying to tell his story from the deep just once more.

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