Captain thought to have gone down with ship

Fishermen rescued from the Oyang 70 board a bus at the Port of Lyttelton. Photo / Simon Baker.

Police piecing together the fatal last minutes of the sunken trawler Oyang 70 are hoping to finish interviews with the surviving crew this week.

The 82m fishing trawler went down in calm seas 800km southeast of Dunedin on Wednesday morning.

It was believed believe the ship was hauling in a fishing net when it capsized and sank in 10 minutes.

The bodies of three Indonesian crew members have been found, while those of three men, including Korean captain Shin Hyeon-gi, 42, are still missing.

Police interviewed most of the 45 surviving Filipino, Indonesian and Korean crew over the weekend and hoped to speak with the rest in the next few days.

Some who had already spoken with police would begin flying home from today.

Detective Senior Sergeant John Rae said police would gather information for at least another week before reporting to the coroner.

They had already begun to build a picture of what happened in the trawler's last minutes.

The Oyang 70 had immersion suits on board, but the ship went down too quickly for the crew to put them on, Mr Rae said.

"The captain was last seen on the bridge, and it appears he has gone down with the ship," he told The Press newspaper.

One of the five Indonesians who drowned had not been able to swim, he said.

"They couldn't manoeuvre the life raft to pick him up, and it would appear he was drowned and then recovered."

The surviving crew were rescued by the New Zealand fishing trawler Amaltal Atlantis.

Its captain, Greg Lyall, said the survivors all gave the same account of the ship's last minutes.

"The vessel lent over to one side. The factory filled up with water and the engine room filled up with water," he told 3 News.

"There were no alarms, no lighting, nothing, and within 10 minutes the boat was gone and most of them had to swim to the life rafts."

The captain stayed at the helm and refused to get off the ship, Mr Lyall said.

The last life raft to be recovered was semi-submerged, and the three crew members aboard were unconscious and suffering from hypothermia.

One survivor, the ship's first engineer, remains in hospital with a hand injury.

The Transport Accident Investigation Commission is investigating the cause of the sinking. Its report is expected to take at least a year to complete.

- NZPA