Mick Dolman

There's no relief coming.

We're in a terrible state of affairs.

But the universal view was let's keep him on board for a bit longer so we can get him home to his family and he can have a decent funeral.

And...

It got to the point where only about a day or two we come to the conclusion that nobody's looking for us.

If they are, they're looking somewhere else.

They're not looking here.

And we've got to bury him at two, give him a seafarer's send-off.

This is the spot when I get it a bit hard.

And then when we all agree, and we had to have everybody agree, that's the only course of action that we are able to deliver.

And so we moved him closer to the entrance.

The skipper said a few words, something like, we haven't known you for a long time, but we wish you all the best.

And the hard bit for me was getting my hands under his arms as we slowly moved him over towards the rough and we just slipped him over the side.

I've been to funerals, we all do,

But when you're going to do one like that, it knocks you around a bit.

At that time, I did give it thought of those arseholes who sent us to sea.

In a ship that had no security for the hatches, on a ship that had an incompetent idiot as a captain...

And we weren't aware of the lack of communications between the departments and between authorities and what have you.

And when he died, we thought, how much more have we got to take?

And we didn't have a clue.