Ghost ship to be scrapped

PERTH - The mystery of what happened on board a Taiwanese ship found floating abandoned with tonnes of rotting fish aboard may never be known, with the vessel destined for a West Australian scrap heap.

Little is known about the High Aim 6, which has been compared to the ill-fated ship Mary Celeste, which was found drifting without its crew in the Atlantic in 1872.

The owners of High Aim 6 reported it missing in mid-December 2002, several days after the last contact with the captain.

The United States Coast Guard searched for the 24m fishing vessel but failed to find it. The closest they got was a brief sighting of one liferaft.

The whereabouts of the so-called ghost ship was a mystery until it was spotted steaming, crewless, towards the WA coast on January 4, 2003.

The vessel has been docked in Broome since January 10 last year but international efforts to solve the mystery of what happened to its vanished crew have failed. Nothing has been heard from the High Aim 6's Taiwanese captain, engineer and 10 Indonesian crew since December 2002, when the vessel was near the Marshall Islands, halfway between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii.

Locals in Broome favour the story that the ship was targeted by pirates who killed the crew and set the boat's engines running to cover their tracks.

Others believe a mutiny aboard High Aim 6 led to the untimely death of the captain, with the crew escaping in liferafts. But while speculation has flourished, facts have been few and far between, and the only thing that is now certain is that the High Aim 6 will be junked and taken to Broome tip.

Broome Port Authority chief executive officer Stefan Frodsham said he would not be shedding any tears when a hydraulic excavator was called in to break up the ship later this month.

"We'll be very happy to see her go. As far as we're concerned she has overstayed her welcome," Frodsham said.

"She's been a worry for us because of the environmental risks she poses ... We've got a cyclone season coming up and if she did break away from her moorings, she could cause havoc."

Hopes that the ghost ship would live on as an underwater tourist attraction for divers, or a fish habitat, were scuppered when authorities concluded that they could not guarantee that once sunk, High Aim 6 would stay sunk because of its buoyant hull.

- AAP

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