From bungled drug drops to deep-sea mysteries, water policing is getting busier

No one knows why the technician on the rebooted TV series Flipper chose to take his disabled mother out to sea in a boat ill-equipped for a three-day cruise.

One strong theory was he planned to use salt water to purge the elderly woman of a “black magic” spell, but whatever the plan it was a bad one.

On December 11, 2019, Adrian Victor Meneveau, 56, set sail with his mother, Felicity Loveday, 83, from the Olivers Hill boat ramp in Frankston in a leaky outboard, loaded with extra fuel but no bedding.

It was found semi-submerged four days later. The bodies of the mother and son were never found.

According to Meneveau’s sister Christina, their mother practised meditation that incited “black magic” and with her declining health (Loveday suffered from dementia) was unable to reverse the spell. Meneveau, Christina says, took it upon himself to cure her by putting the spell to sleep “out on the salt water”.

Murder-suicide, misadventure or just plain madness – even after a two-year investigation the answer will never be known.

Nor will we ever know what a despondent boat captain was planning in 2018 when he refused to stop in Port Phillip Bay. That is until he was boarded by water police who took control of the cruiser.

Detective Leading Senior Constable Madeleine McDonald, Acting Senior Sergeant Brett Colley, Leading Senior Constable Andrew Allen and Detective Acting Sergeant Chris Obst from the water police.Credit: Darrian Traynor

The Water Police Squad are more than just cops on boats, who catch flathead in their spare time. Attached to the Williamstown Police Station, it is a marine police force dealing with everything from maritime rescues to hoons on jet skis, serious organised crime and acts of terrorism.

It has come a long way from when the main boat was a wooden-hulled pleasure cruiser named after former chief commissioner Reg Jackson. Too slow to get to a rescue by sea and too big to get anywhere via road, it was largely used to provide afternoon tea to visiting guests.

Now the water police has 28 purpose-specific craft from jet skis to the 16-metre, double-hulled, twin-jet-propulsion flagship VP01, with a top speed of 35 knots. It can go to sea for a week, stop on a ten cent piece, and act as a marine command centre. A larger version is now being built in New Zealand.

VicPol’s flagship vessel VP01. Good for the high seas, not high teas.Credit: Darrian Traynor

The squad has boats at Queenscliff and the Gippsland Lakes.

When we went to check out the fleet, the power of the recent gales was evident with a large yacht, secured on land by a metal joist, forced on its side even though there were no sails to catch the wind. There would be no need for patrols on this day.

There are now 200,000 registered recreational boats in Victoria, from luxury gin palaces to tiny runabouts. To gain a boat licence an applicant aged as young as 12 needs to complete a short online course then a flick-and-tick multiple choice test, without any practical assessment. Once successful they can control any craft from a tinnie to a super yacht.

The squad is broken into several specialist groups with most of the members having long love affairs with marine activities.

Acting Senior Sergeant Brett Colley has loved wakeboarding since he was a kid. Detective Leading Senior Constable Madeleine McDonald dives in her spare time, while Detective Acting Sergeant Chris Obst is a keen fisherman.

But on duty they are investigators who work on water (compared to some detectives who believe they walk on water).

Their investigations show the truth that where there is money there is organised crime. The trend is to steal high-performance boats to order that are rebirthed and re-registered.

In one case a boat was re-registered with a new identity a month before it was stolen.

The gangs, Colley says, have spotters who drive around to find highly sought after craft.

Outlaw motorcycle and Middle Eastern syndicates, many with a background in car theft and rebirthing, are moving into the marine world, targeting boat sellers, storage areas and holiday houses in the Peninsula where boats are stored in the open.

Since 2010 more than $46 million in watercraft have been stolen, and since the Marine Investigation Unit targeted the crime, there has been a 25 per cent increase in solving cases.

The trend is to steal high-performance boats to order that are re-birthed and re-registered.

Colley says boats and jetskis are re-registered to be sold locally or placed in containers to be shipped to the Pacific, South-East Asia and South Africa.

Because a marine craft doesn’t have to be sighted to be registered, it opens an area of insurance fraud. “A boat might not exist, then is registered and reported stolen,” says Colley.

While a car needs a roadworthy to be sold, a boat does not. That means an 18-year-old who has a tick-and-flick boat licence can take off to Bermuda in a boat as seaworthy as the SS Minnow from Gilligan’s Island.

Seventeen times coroners have recommended boats require a seaworthy certificate. Seventeen times they have been ignored.

Inexperienced sailors often have difficulty controlling powerful craft, with some not able to get their boats into the water without crashing, often in the ramp carpark.

Colley says for some people leisure marine craft somehow lowers their sense of responsibility, becoming blasé about safety. “Because it is a fun activity they forget that you can be seriously injured or killed.” Between seven and 10 people lose their lives in boating accidents each year. Marine accidents are underreported, with people just turning up at hospital with serious injuries without ever notifying police.

The water police do not concentrate on breaches of marine laws, but all crimes committed on water. This includes murder, family violence, theft, fraud and terrorism.

They work with organised crime police, counter terror, bikie busters, homicide, missing persons and fraud investigators and conduct partner operations with agencies such as Border Force.

The squad has boats for general patrols (the divvy vans of the sea), high-speed rescue craft, boats for counter-terror police to board ships, and heavy weather search and rescue craft.

There are specialists in the Marine Investigation Unit, Underwater Surveillance, Small Boat and Marine Response. They have above-ground and underwater drones plus sophisticated sonar gear.

The sonar was used to find the wreckage of the SIAI Marchetti jet that crashed with an identical plane on November 19, 2023, killing the two occupants. The plane was found at a depth of 24 metres in Port Phillip Bay.

The S-211 Marchetti planes.

The ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle) is often used to check the undersides of commercial ships for parasite attachments. Colley says there is a growing trend for divers in another port to attach by chains a waterproof container containing up to 100 kilos of cocaine to be detached at the target destination. “The captain may be none the wiser,” he says.

Crooks use leisure vessels to pick up floating drug packages equipped with GPS devices dropped off motherships.

It is often successful unless the gang is filled with idiots, such as the mob who had a great plan in 2016 to pick up massive amounts of cocaine valued at $60 million.

The gear was on a worse-for-wear Japanese whaling boat, and the landing crew chose Port Fairy as the ideal secret smuggling spot. Trouble is they dropped the pickup boat off its trailer on the way to the secret smuggling spot.

So off they went to buy a second boat. This time they got as far as the lighthouse, where they ran aground in the shallows, close enough for locals to wade out for a sticky-beak at low tide. So much for the secret smuggling spot.

Nothing shows the need to upgrade equipment as the North Korean ship Pong Su that was involved in attempting to smuggle 150 kilos of heroin onto the shore near Lorne in 2003.

Victoria Police then did not have the capacity to board such a large commercial ship in heavy seas. It does now, with the Marine Response Team regularly training with the Sorrento Ferry.

They train to stop terrorists using boats as weapons and to extract hostages kept on marine vessels.

The squad rescue and tow damaged boats, find people lost at sea, recover bodies, search the seafloor for debris, land searchers on shore to reach remote bush and rescue people trapped on beaches sheltering from bushfires (such as the Mallacoota blaze in 2019).

It will also run the Rescue Coordination Centre that is being re-built at its Williamstown headquarters to control searches on land and sea, the most modern in the country.

Colley says in a marine rescue, it is not a matter of racing to the spot where the boat sank or someone was washed overboard, but using tide, wind and current records. “We use predictive modelling to work out where the object would be.”

Then there are the European wasps of the seas – personal watercraft (PWC) – better known as jet skis. Most operators stick within the law and then there are the others. “We know that the hoon element operating PWCs is causing community concerns,” says Colley.

This summer he says there will be an unprecedented blitz with police boats and jetskis pulling up hoons. “It will be zero tolerance.”

And don’t think you will only get caught by clearly marked police boats. They will have sneaky unmarked units and shore patrols ready to pounce.

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.