Drinking from the Air Conditioner

The man — call him Bowo — came home at the end of 2025 from his third ship. He is one of 3,469 Indonesian deckhands who, by the government’s own figures read out to Korea’s parliament, crew the country’s distant-water fishing fleet: one of the largest on earth, supplying tuna to tables in Tokyo, Los Angeles and Europe. Eight in ten of the fleet’s foreign crew are Indonesian.

For more than a decade the public here has been angry over what happens to these crew on the open sea, and almost always the anger points one way: Chinese ships, Taiwanese ships. Bodies dumped overboard. Wages that never arrived. The name Longxing 629 once filled the television screens.

Rarely named alongside them is the Korean-flagged ship. Yet on the open sea it is no cleaner. Three strands, set side by side in this report, show as much: the testimony of crew just off the boats; the legal regime that keeps their suffering lawful on paper; and more than 130,000 satellite tracks from Global Fishing Watch that record how these ships move precisely when their crews are certain no one is looking.

Testimony can be denied. A satellite trail is harder.

October 2024, Bowo boards the Oryong 306 in Busan. It is his third Korean ship, after the Chilsung and the Daehwa. On paper he signs on as an ordinary deckhand. Aboard, he becomes the fish cutter — a job that, under a Korean seafarer’s contract, should pay more. The first mate promised an extra hundred dollars a month, by word of mouth, in front of the bosun and the senior crew.

His contract ended in December 2025. The extra never came. “When the contract finished, nothing,” he says.

Not one of those hours broke the law in force aboard Bowo’s ship — and that, in the end, is the catch.

What stayed with him most from those fourteen months was not the exhaustion but the thirst. The Oryong 306’s water distiller had failed at the start of the voyage. Fresh water ran normally only for the first two weeks, while the ship steamed toward the grounds. Once the first line went out, the supply all but stopped. “Fourteen months, and only fourteen days of clean water,” as the interpreter distilled his account.

The crew complained to the captain. The reply was always the same: the machine would be repaired. Until the ship next tied up, it stayed dead. So they caught the runoff from the air conditioner, boiled it, drank it. The bottled water brought from shore sat in the officers’ quarters, and there it remained, for the Korean crew.

“Clean water matters, of course. But there the drinking water was held by the captain and the mate. We couldn’t just ask for it.”

— Bowo, crew, Oryong 306

There is another lever of control seldom heard about on land. As the contract nears its end, the captain grades each crewman — A, B, or C — and the grade sets the catch bonus. Bowo worked at full stretch from the first day, sliced his finger on the cutting knife, then returned to work the moment it healed. His grade fell anyway, he says, over “a little run-in with the mate.” One small quarrel, and a year’s bonus can vanish. At sea, the captain is the sole judge.

And what if a crewman wants to complain? The Korean government does stick hotline numbers on the cabin wall. The trouble is the number can only be reached over the internet, and on the Oryong 306 the Wi-Fi sits with the captain. “The Wi-Fi was turned off,” Bowo says. “There was nothing we could do.” A complaints line that only lights up on a network the captain locks is the same as no line at all.

Bowo’s account is not the story of one ship with one captain who happened to be cruel. Joko — not his real name — from Bulakamba, Brebes, sailed twice on the Dongwon 632, last of all from July 2024 to February 2026. To him, his captain counted as one of the “good” ones: never raised a hand, only cursed. “It was like, ‘watch it, you dog,’ that sort of thing,” he says, imitating him. That being called a dog is enough to qualify as a good captain perhaps says enough about the rest.

The line between the Korean crew and the Southeast Asian deckhands ran neatly down to the smallest things. The single bathroom was for the five Koreans only; the twelve Indonesians and Vietnamese washed on the open deck with seawater, rinsing off as best they could. The bottled drinking water was the Koreans’ too, while the rest caught distilled water. The Wi-Fi ran unbroken for the officers but was rationed to three hours for the crew and cut at midnight. At the table, breakfast was often just leftover fish heads, and the evening dish was recycled into supper. Joko still remembers the packaged vegetables three months past their date and a can of Coca-Cola a year expired.

Joko’s base pay was 600 dollars a month — up from 390 on his first contract in 2019 — for a fifteen-hour working day. What his Korean-passport shipmates took home will come a few screens on, and the gap runs far past anything one would call fair.

One detail from Joko would later prove the key. For the first twelve months, the Dongwon 632 never touched land at all. So where did the tuna go? Transferred at sea. Every three to four months a carrier ship pulled alongside — Joko remembers one name, “Seyu” — and the frozen fish crossed holds far from any port. The practice is called transhipment: lawful when reported and observed, but also the classic route for laundering an illegal catch. It is also what lets a ship, and its crew, stay at sea a whole year without once coming home.

Accounts like Bowo’s and Joko’s always meet the same wall: the crew’s word against the company’s, on a stage thousands of kilometres from any reporter, inspector or union. But there is one thing a ship cannot dispute: it cannot hide from the sky.

Every commercial fishing vessel broadcasts an AIS signal — the Automatic Identification System — announcing its identity, position, speed and heading. Satellites catch the signal, and Global Fishing Watch gathers it into open data. For this report, the full five-year record of South Korean–flagged vessels, from May 2021 to May 2026, was pulled and combed.

Behind the big numbers, going ship by ship turns up findings stranger still.

For the crew’s story, these findings are not a sideshow. Illegal fishing and the abuse of crew grow from the same habit, and the Environmental Justice Foundation has documented it in a report on the Korean fleet: the ship that hides its catch from the inspectors is the ship that hides its crew from the world. The one that kills its transponder in the open ocean and the one that kills its crew’s Wi-Fi move on the same instinct — that whatever goes unrecorded may as well never have happened.

Bowo saw it himself. On one of his ships, he says, illegal fishing “happened for a while, but then the captain banned it” — the moment it looked like being caught.

A satellite can only flag a hull. It cannot name the people inside it. For that you need another document, and one of the clearest comes from the recruiting agent itself.

One of Indonesia’s fifteen licensed crew-supply firms works with a Korean agent called KNI-KIMCO, in Busan, which posts its roster publicly. That list shows 319 placements of Indonesian crew onto 70 Korean ships across 2021 and 2022 — complete with names, ships and boarding dates. When those 70 ships were set against the 212 most suspicious vessels from the satellite analysis, thirteen names lined up; nine of them matched right down to the IMO hull number.

Thirteen ships out of seventy — nearly one in five. And counted by person, the number is sharper: of 319 placements, 125 of them, almost four in ten, landed on a ship later flagged as problematic. A hundred and twenty-two named people. And that is one agent, one two-year window. There is no reason to think the other suppliers are much different.

Four of those names boarded the Blue Ocean in April 2021 — a ship later recorded fishing inside the Ross Sea reserve in Antarctica, and shutting off its transponder twenty-one times. Three names appear on the Green Star, whose track brushed the South Georgia reserve. Two on the Dongwon 622, of the same line as Joko’s ship. Eight on the Oyang 99, of the same line as the Oyang 75 whose crew fled on a New Zealand dock a decade ago.

They are not the culprits. They came to earn a living, then were trapped twice over: victims of the working conditions, and swept onto the decks of ships the satellite marks as suspected illegal fishers. When the algorithm calls a ship “suspicious,” what it is really pointing at is these people’s workplace.

Testimony can be dismissed as the grievance of a handful, and satellite data as the guesswork of an algorithm. But there is one comparison that is hard to wave away: South Korea’s own government files. A stack of documents from the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries and the official seafarer statistics obtained for this report show that Seoul knows exactly what happens on its fleet.

Its own numbers already speak. As of end-2024, Korea’s distant-water fishing fleet employed 4,352 foreign crew on 184 ships, and 3,469 of them — eight in ten — were Indonesian. More telling still: of those thousands, not one held an officer’s rank. Every captain, mate and chief engineer is Korean; every Indonesian is a rating. The tenfold pay gap recorded in the country’s own documents is no accident but a feature of the structure.

Not just the scale. The Ministry’s labour-inspection reports, issued through 2023 and 2024, read almost like Bowo’s and Joko’s testimony rewritten by a bureaucrat.

The first-quarter 2023 inspection of 182 ships carrying 4,344 foreign crew found thirteen cases of assault, seventy-nine of verbal abuse and three of sexual harassment, with a note that almost every company passed the internet bill onto the crew. The third-quarter inspection that year found fifteen ships breaching the minimum-rest limit of seventy-seven hours a week, and several crew paid below the 554-dollar minimum wage — among them eight men on four ships owned by Sajo Industries, the owner of the Oryong fleet, paid only after the government stepped in.

Following up an EJF report in mid-2023, the Ministry’s inspectors caught passports themselves — held in a locked bag in the captain’s cabin. The practice, they wrote, “occurs widely in the field,” enough that 187 ships from 33 companies were told to rework how they store passports. The same inspection logged a hundred crew whose pay, a fifth to two-thirds of it, was “saved” by the recruiting agent until they left the ship — a method that, by the Ministry’s own note, is easily mistaken for a runaway-prevention deposit.

In October 2024, government inspectors, together with EJF and the legal-aid group APIL, boarded a tuna longliner just docked in Busan after nearly two years at sea, carrying sixteen Indonesian crew. The captain held the passports throughout the voyage. The hours logbook was filled in by the officers; the crew merely signed. Some said they worked sixteen to twenty hours a day. Wages were withheld for months. The complaints QR code was pasted up only after the ship berthed. The government’s own report concluded that enforcement on the ground was “generally inadequate.”

And the penalty? The Ministry’s 2024 “managed-vessels” document records ships proven to have withheld Indonesian crew’s passports, along with alleged assault and harassment, fined 1.6 to 2 million won — about 17 to 21 million rupiah, roughly a pair of Jakarta–Seoul plane tickets. On one of those ships, the list of violations includes a line that now sounds familiar: bottled drinking water not provided.

None of this is a back channel that slipped past the state. The firm that sent Joko is officially listed among the fifteen Indonesian recruiting agents partnered with Korea’s distant-water fishing association. The system is official, documented, inspected on a schedule — and still it produces crew who drink the runoff from an air conditioner.

How can a twenty-hour day, a 600-dollar wage, and drinking water rationed by nationality all be lawful?

The answer rests on something rarely understood, even by aspiring crew: a distant-water fisher is not an ordinary migrant worker. Crew who work in Korea’s factories, farms or coastal boats enter on a work visa, under inter-state quotas and the umbrella of Korean labour law. Bowo and Joko did not. They were recruited by an agent in Indonesia, signed a Sea Employment Agreement, then flew to Busan on nothing but a passport and a seafarer’s book. They set foot in Korea for a matter of hours — met by an agent at the airport, driven to the dock, aboard, gone. Joko never even spent a night in Korea.

In the eyes of the law, they never really “worked in Korea.” They worked aboard a Korean-flagged ship, on the open sea — where the only law that sails with them is that of the flag state.

And that flag-state law is left deliberately hollow for fishing vessels. South Korea has a Seafarers Act that governs working hours, rest hours, overtime and paid leave. But the provisions covering all of it are carved out for fishing-vessel crew. Which means no cap on hours, no overtime, and no national minimum wage.

“There’s no such thing as overtime here. What’s regulated is rest hours, not working hours.”

— Ari Purboyo, fishers’ advocate, Jangkar

Even that low standard often goes unmet. In the same survey, 59 percent of the crew interviewed were paid below the foreign-crew minimum. The working-hour figures read like a copy of Bowo’s story.

So when Bowo names seventeen hours a day, he is not describing an unlucky ship. He is naming the median of an industry.

The world has, in fact, already built a tool to close this gap. ILO Convention 188, born in 2007, governs fishing workers specifically: rest hours, drinking water, food, accommodation, even medical care aboard — precisely the things taken from Bowo and Joko. South Korea has not ratified it. Indonesia, the country that supplies the crew, has not either.

It is not that Seoul has done nothing. Under international pressure, in January 2021 the Korean government launched a human-rights improvement plan for migrant crew on distant-water ships, including a minimum wage pegged to the international transport workers’ federation standard, and since November 2023 has banned wage deductions for recruitment costs. But EJF’s review two years on found the plan had failed to stop the abuses at sea. Bowo and Joko both sailed between 2024 and 2026, well after the rules took effect — and their stories are the freshest proof.

The loose regime at sea comes with a snare on land. When he signed up, Joko handed over his original ID card, diploma and family card to the agent. All were held while he was at sea — one of the forced-labour indicators on the ILO’s list — and returned only after his contract ended.

Even his basic safety certificate, he admits, was “handled for him” by the agent without his ever taking the training. He was sent to one of the most dangerous seas on earth with a safety document whose contents he never learned.

What befell Bowo and Joko is no new chapter. It is the continuation of a long history reported again and again, promised a fix again and again, and relapsing again and again. That history shows one thing: on the open sea, the Korean fleet is no cleaner than the Chinese or Taiwanese fleets that have long borne the brunt of public anger.

The two Longxing crew who died, says Ari Purboyo, who helped handle the survivors, are thought to have contracted beri-beri — the body breaking down slowly — after months of drinking only poor-quality distilled water, while the bottled water was kept for the Chinese crew. The very same menu as on Bowo’s ship, four years later, only under a different flag.

All that separates them is the flag, and how many cameras are watching. Even Taiwan, whose distant-water fleet is most often named as a hub of forced labour at sea, has moved sooner: setting a 550-dollar minimum wage for the foreign crew of its distant-water ships and reforming its recruitment system.

The fishers’ advocates concede one difference. Against the Chinese fleet, wages on Korean ships are generally still paid, if often late. But on the unbounded hours, the months of isolation, the segregated facilities, and the crew who come home ahead of their contracts inside a coffin, Korea, China and Taiwan are one big family. The only difference is that the last two names have already been battered by the world’s scrutiny. The first still keeps a clean image.

If conditions are this bad, why do the stories so rarely reach the shore?

Mohamad Kafandi knows the answer from his own experience. A former crewman on Korean ships who now leads the group Pejuang Suara Pelaut Indonesia, he was once beaten bloody by a drunk Korean crew member. He went to the police, underwent a medical examination, and pressed charges — something Indonesian crew almost never do. The ship’s owner offered to settle. The company reminded him of the risk of being sent home.

“If I didn’t dare to stand up myself, there would be many more Kafandis getting beaten. And they wouldn’t dare to report it.”

— Mohamad Kafandi, Pejuang Suara Pelaut Indonesia

To Kafandi, the impression that Korean ships are “perfectly safe” is born precisely of the victims’ silence. “It’s there,” he says of the violence aboard, “but many of the guys don’t dare to speak.” To resist is to invite an early trip home — and an early trip home means coming back a failure, to a family waiting on the remittances.

That silence is thickened by distance. Korean longliners run twelve to nineteen months without touching port, made possible by the carrier fleet whose tracks the satellite caught earlier. No inspector comes aboard, no reporter, no signal. EJF and APIL’s research notes that the Wi-Fi — the only bridge to the outside world — is commonly in the captain’s hands, and both Bowo and Joko lived exactly that. Joko even notes a small irony: an independent observer he had once seen aboard the Chinese ship he worked on before; on the Korean ship, there was none.

Aboard, a mechanism keeps mouths shut. The A, B, C grading that sets the bonus, Bowo says, makes even the smallest protest costly. And even ashore the crew have reason not to make trouble: they want to sail again. Bowo, who drank air-conditioner runoff for more than a year, closed his interview with two words — “Still have targets.” A house. School fees for the children. He needs the next ship, and the company knows it well.

Ari Purboyo, who has spent nearly ten years supporting Indonesian fishers in Korea and has repeatedly arranged the repatriation of bodies, puts it more bitterly. Attention, he says, only arrives after someone has died.

“With Korea, from what I’ve seen, the highest level is when someone dies. That’s what makes everyone scramble.”

— Ari Purboyo, Jangkar

A system that only moves when someone dies is a system that waits for death. Meanwhile, tonight in the Pacific, those ships are still hauling their lines — and the satellite is still recording.