Missing Yacht's Mysterious Last Words Still Puzzle Investigators 35 Years Later

In 1988 a famous sailing yacht went missing, leaving behind a strange final message, a mangled investigation and questions of suicide, piracy, mutiny and drug trafficking. I’ve long been fascinated by ship wrecks and disappearances and this one is one of my favorites, not only because it’s such a mysterious story, but because the ship itself was so beautiful.

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The Patanela was a 75-foot-long, twin-masted, steel-hulled schooner built in Tasmania, according to Nine News. It lived an eventful life, traveling around the world as an explorer’s vessel and making headlines wherever it went. Eventually the schooner would be purchased by a businessman named in Perth named Alan Nicol, who had the intention of turning it into a charter vessel. First, Nicol, his daughter, his Skipper Ken Jones, Jones’ wife, and two crew members would take the Patanela around the southern coast of Australia to its new home at Airlie Beach in the Whitsunday Region of Queensland.

The Case

On October 16, 1988 the Patanela set out from Freemantle, Western Australia on a month-long voyage with six souls aboard. By October 29, however, Nicol and his daughter left the boat, and the crew of four continued on to Sydney where they’d meet back up with Jones and continue on to Airlie Beach.

From here, things get weird. Jones was an experienced sailor, yet spent the majority of the voyage using the diesel engines to motor along the Australian coast. First, it seems Jones was behaving erratically. He requested funds from Nicol for fuel, and then didn’t buy any fuel. On November 9, the ship arrived off the coast of Botany Bay. And that’s when the voyage takes a strange turn for the worse, according to Nine:

At two and a half minutes to one, OTC (Overseas Telecommunication Commission), which managed all messages and radio calls from ships, received a message from skipper Ken Jones.

Recorded tapes reveal these messages:

KEN JONES: SYDNEY RADIO – SYDNEY RADIO SYDNEY RADIO THIS IS PATANELA PATANELA PATANELA ON CHANNEL 16 DO YOU READ?

OTC: PATANELA, SYDNEY GOOD MORNING LOUD AND CLEAR OVER.

KEN JONES: PATANELA – I BELIEVE WE’VE RUN OUT OF FUEL, WE’RE APPROXIMATELY 10 MILES EAST OF BOTANY BAY.

KEN JONES: WE’VE HOISTED OUR SAILS AND WE’RE TACKING OUT TO THE EAST – SO TRACKING ABOUT 080

As experts involved in a reinvestigation of the ship’s appearance point out, this is a very strange message, especially from an experienced seaman like Jones. For one, he wouldn’t say “I believe we’ve run out of fuel,” as he’d very much know what the indicators for that situation would be. And if he was so low on fuel, why were his sails hoisted? The next message is even stranger:

KEN JONES: How far South is Moruya ?

We’re unfamiliar with that position.

How far South is it in miles from us ?

“I have no explanation. I have no idea why you would make that first call to say I’m east of Botany Bay and then asking for directions to Moruya. He’d know where he is,” John Dikkenberg said.

“That is very strange, that is probably the strangest thing of everything,” Adrienne Cahalan added.

A third short message then static .

KEN: 300 KS SOUTH……IS IT SOUTH? …. STATIC

The ship is never heard from again. Nicol reports the Patanela missing 11 days later. A lackluster investigation revealed nothing, which almost seems as to have been by design. Eventually, investigators come up with the idea that the Patanela was hit by a larger cargo vessel and sank – without any of the ships in the harbor showing damage, without any wreckage of the yacht, without the automatic distress beacon being tripped, and despite the latest sonar equipment onboard with an experienced sailor at the helm keeping them far from danger.

There’s also the problem of the sightings: the Patanela was easily identifiable with its brilliant yellow hull, and it was spotted several times up and down the coast of Australia and even in the waters off of Thailand and Southeast Asia.

And then there’s the life buoy, which turned up six months later in Sydney with the letters Patanela written across it and marine life that seemed to indicate it came from the Coral Sea – about a thousand miles or more north from Sydney and the last known location of the Patanela.

Theories

There are a lot of possible theories on what happened to the Patanela, and every journalist or armchair investigator out there has their favorite. During the first leg of the journey, Jones was in an emotional state due to his own yacht being seized and his personal company was in distress. The fact that such an experienced sailor spent most of the journey under motor could indicate his state of mind. Nicol also suspected the previous owner of trying to reclaim the Patanela after he complained about being swindled in the deal to sell it to Nicol.

But it doesn’t explain the strange broadcast. Jones’ son told reporters that he believed it was a coded cry for help. It just so happens that the two young crew members aboard – John Blissett and Michael Calvin – had just finished work on the Australian film “Dead Calm,” which is a thriller about a yacht being hijacked.

Did life imitate art? Or did the danger Jones tried to warn the OTC of come in the form of more professional hijackers? After the ship’s disappearance, Nicol spent $30,000 of his own funds to investigate every sighting of the Patanela. The big yellow ship was a rare make and style, easily spotted from shore by even landlubbers. When seen the was Patanela always at a distance in open waters and rarely came to shore; when it did come to shore it was always spotted in way out of the way areas. These are signs, Nicol believed, that indicate the Patanela was being used for drug smuggling. And worse yet, certain members of the police may have been in on the caper, as the YouTube channel Barely Sociable explains:

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Once Nicol reported the ship missing a search was refused on the basis that, after 11 days, the search area would be an impossible 200,000-square-kilometer area. Then a federal detective working with a judicial coroner declared the Patanela had been hit and sank that same day, just ten miles off the coast of Botany Bay, but no search was ever done to track down the wreck.

As Nicol noted in his investigation, police are often paid off by drug smugglers, and indeed, the coroner assigned to the case made previous questionable judgements in cases involving potential drug smuggling activities. Sightings of the Patanela near the Golden Triangle of heroin production in Southeast Asia could also point to the Patanela being hijacked and pressed into drug smuggling. If that’s the case the Patanela has long ago been modified and registered under a different name and flag by crooked politicians on the other side of the sea.