Lifeboat crews recall a day ‘that will go down in folklore’

IT WAS the image that flashed around the world — a lifeboat crew fishing bales of cocaine from mountainous seas in a remote west Cork bay.

As they responded to their pagers that morning last summer little did two of the country’s busiest lifeboat crews realise that they were about to be thrust into the centre of the biggest drugs seizure in the history of the state.

Some would go on to give crucial evidence in the state’s biggest ever drugs trial.

The alarm was raised just after 8am on July 2, 2007. Gerard Hagan, one of the men pitched into Dunlough bay along with €440 million worth of cocaine, swam ashore and ran to a local farmhouse.

Castletownbere’s Severn-class lifeboat, under coxwain Brian O’Driscoll, was tasked to the scene.

They recovered a second man, Martin Wanden, found unconscious in the bay at 9.15am, near an overturned rib.

Several large white bales were spotted floating in the water close by.

Eddie O’Connor, a member of the Castletownbere lifeboat, told the trial: “There was a lot of stuff floating in the water, bags of stuff within 20 feet of the casualty, white packs. Most of the stuff was in a cluster together.”

Fellow crewman Adrian Sparrow described seeing bits of a boat, debris in the form of white packages and a casualty in the water, all within an area of 80 metres.

The crew retrieved some of the bales but were soon ordered to stop because one of the men convicted yesterday was on board their vessel.

The Baltimore crew, on board their relief Tyne-class all-weather boat then took over.

Coxwain Kieran Cotter and his six crew had been tasked at about 11.30am to conduct a search operation for a third man reported missing at sea.

They carried out a parallel search pattern westwards from Barleycove along the Mizen peninsula in difficult conditions for about an hour before reaching Dunlough bay.

Cotter said it was at this point that they saw several bales in the water. Some were floating in clumps of up to a dozen. Others had drifted close to the steep rocky cliffs.

The Garda helicopter was overhead and a coastguard winch man was struggling to retrieve a bale from the water.

Cotter said it soon became obvious there was no missing person and this was no ordinary search.

“We went out knowing nothing about these drugs, looking for the third person,” he said. “But it became fairly clear that they weren’t bales of cotton.”

In consultation with the coastguard, Cotter volunteered his crew to retrieve the packages.

“We had an experienced crew with the right training and the right equipment. We thought it was cannabis. But not in our wildest dreams could we imagine it was cocaine, or the amount of it,” he said.

Eoin Ryan was among four lifeboat men who stood at the front of the boat, fishing dozens of bales from the water.

“There was still no mention of drugs when we got into the bay but the full picture began to emerge,” he said.

“We saw a winch man from a the coastguard helicopter struggling to retrieve a bale from the sea, so we decided to help him by recovering some. We assumed at this stage it was cannabis and just kept recovering the bales.”

Using the lifeboat’s two powerful engines, they positioned the vessel stern to sea and, helped by an onshore wind, inched close to the cliffs as a huge swell rolled in.

Dressed in full body dry suits and lifejackets, Cotter, Ryan and two other crewmen stood against the railings surrounding the lifeboat’s heaving deck and used boat poles to retrieve bale after bale from the water.

Press photographers captured this remarkable image. “We just kept fishing bales over the side and stowing them inside our aft cabin,” said Ryan.

“We got as many as we could but had to back off eventually because some were just too close to the rocks. If we lost an engine, we were on the cliff face. We were right on the limits.”

They spent between 45 minutes and an hour recovering bales, stowing them in the cabin, filling it to the roof hatch.

Each 25 kilo bale was wrapped in a white mesh with woven handles. Inside was a neoprene-type floatation material.

Each had 25 one-kilo slabs of cocaine inside, wrapped in different kinds of plastic. Every slab had a logo with three stars above two arrows pointing in opposite directions.

Each bale was worth between €3 million and €4 million.

The entire consignment weighed close to a tonne and a half and weighed the lifeboat down considerably in the water.

The Baltimore crew recovered 52 of the 60 bales found that day.

It was only when they returned to base to be greeted by customs officers and gardaí armed with submachineguns that Cotter said the sheer scale of events dawned on them.

“It’s a day that will go down in folklore,” he said.