Mick Dolman

Yeah, well, I was on the roster, which was the employment area for seafarers, and there were a number of rules in that process.

If you were on the roster, you were a particular category, and that category was being sought, in my case, ordinary seaman, and there was nobody else that wanted the job.

You've got to go.

It's called Shanghai.

And I had everything organised for her birthday.

And I got Shanghai'd by the shipping master to join the ship.

It was a very small ship, only, you know, I'd been on smaller and I'd been on bigger.

So it looked OK.

My task as an ordinary seaman was to steer the ship, navigate the ship as a seafarer, do maintenance on board the ship, lash cargo if it needs to be lashed, general maintenance and what have you, and monitoring and making sure that everything's OK.

Not just me, we all did that.

We all had those functions to do.

And what was the voyage that was being planned?

It was from Hobart around to King Island with beer, phosphate for the farmers up there.

I got on board.

There was no internal lights, there was no external lights, there was nothing.

And I thought, what the hell's going on here?

So I walked into the mess room, which is the tiniest little room where 10 men were supposed to eat and sit down and have coffees or whatever.

And I said, where's the light?

What's going on?

One of the crew said, somebody took the shore connection and threw it over the side into the bay.