The Yong Yu Sing 18: The Boat Was Found With the Windows Smashed and All Ten Crew Gone

On January second, 2021, a US Coast Guard aircraft found a Taiwanese tuna longliner drifting six hundred nautical miles northeast of Midway Atoll in the North Pacific. The wheelhouse windows were smashed. One life raft was missing. The boat showed signs of a collision. And all ten crew members — a Taiwanese captain and nine Indonesian fishermen — were gone. The Yong Yu Sing No. 18 had sent her last transponder signal on December twenty-ninth, 2020, as a storm system carrying extreme waves moved into her area. No distress call was ever received. The owner reported her missing on January first. A massive search covering over forty thousand square nautical miles found the boat but never found the crew. No raft, no survivors, no bodies. The boat was too damaged and the seas too rough to board for more than two weeks. When searchers finally got aboard on January nineteenth, they found no bodies, no blood, no sign of violence. The most likely explanation: a rogue wave smashed the wheelhouse, killed the communications, possibly killed the captain, and the surviving crew abandoned a still-floating boat into a single life raft and died in the storm. The investigation found no evidence of any crime. The boat was towed eighteen thousand kilometres back to Taiwan over fifty-seven days, a national record. Then in July 2025, a message in a bottle washed up on Inisheer, an island off the west coast of Ireland. Written mostly in Indonesian, it named the Yong Yu Sing 18 and read: help, hello, SOS. If genuine, it had drifted four and a half years and eight thousand miles across the world. The case remains unsolved.