Indonesia extends Sunda Strait search for five journalists after Anak Krakatau trip

Indonesian rescuers on Monday extended by three days the search for eight people whose speedboat vanished in the Sunda Strait on the way to cover eruptions at Anak Krakatau. Five of the missing are journalists. Two are crew. One is a guide. Al Amrad, head of the Banten search and rescue office, told reporters that results were still zero.

The boat left Pagedongan Pier at Carita, on the west Java coast, on the afternoon of 7 September. Banten police spokesman Grand Commissioner Maruli Ahiles Hutapea named the captain as Warta, 55, the crewman as Surakman, 60, and the guide as Heriyanto, 49. The journalists were M. Bagus Khoirunnas of the state agency Antara, Ari Basuki of Merdeka.com, Yudhis of iNews, Daus of Turkey's Anadolu Agency, and Donal, a freelancer.

The last points on the map

Hutapea said the last location ping went out at 14:42 Western Indonesia Time, and that contact was lost by 15:04. The last known position was in Pandeglang waters, about 9.98 nautical miles from a recorded reference point, a run of roughly 40 minutes from the pier. Relatives of one journalist later described a message at 18:13 saying the group had reached waters around the volcano. The two times have both entered the public file. Neither has been followed by another message.

Basarnas, the national search agency, was alerted the next afternoon by Bayu, another Antara journalist. Ships and 54 personnel from SAR, police, the military, fishermen and residents swept a radius around Rakata and Panjang islands, close to Anak Krakatau. A body of a man later washed up on Enggano Island, more than 350 kilometres from the volcano. Police are waiting on tests before saying whether he was on the boat.

Why they were on the water

Anak Krakatau, the child of the 1883 Krakatau eruption, has been throwing ash and lava again. The plume closed airports and coated towns. Photographers went out because that is the job, and because a growing island in a busy strait is both a picture and a hazard. The 2018 collapse of the volcano's flank generated a tsunami that killed more than 400 people on the same coasts. The memory is local. So is the traffic. The Sunda Strait is a working channel between Java and Sumatra, not a closed zone.

Marine accidents are common in the archipelago. Officials usually point to weather and to boats that are too small for the sea they attempt. This craft was a motor speedboat running toward an active vent. Ash, swell and a sudden engine failure are all plausible. None of them has been shown. A week of searching has produced one unidentified body a long way from the last ping.

What three more days can do

Amrad's extension keeps ships on a piece of water that has already been combed. Families of the Antara, Anadolu and local-news reporters are now in the second week of no news. Identification of the Enggano body is the only pending laboratory fact. If the tests are negative, the search remains a sea search. If they are positive, the question shifts from where the boat is to how one man drifted hundreds of kilometres and where the other seven went.

Anak Krakatau is still erupting at intervals. That fact put the reporters on the boat. It also puts ash and unstable water into the search grid. The professional risk was visible on 7 September. The official result on 14 September is the same sentence Amrad used: still zero.