The MV Ocean Winner rescue effort is underway in the Bay of Bengal after the bulk carrier lost contact with shore control on Saturday, prompting a search that has grown to three Indian Coast Guard ships and a diverted merchant tanker. The Panama flagged vessel, IMO 9145530, had 24 crew onboard, twenty Chinese nationals, three Myanmarese and one Bangladeshi, when the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre at Sri Vijaya Puram lost touch with it at 1148 hours.

The report reached MRCC (SVP) from Victory Star Group Co Ltd, the party linked to the vessel, along with a formal request for search and rescue assistance.

Locating the MV Ocean Winner rescue zone

Ocean Winner's last known position was recorded at roughly 310 nautical miles from East Island light in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, on a bearing of 317 degrees. A search that far from shore rules out a quick coastal response and puts the burden on whichever ship can reach the spot fastest.

That ship turned out to be a tanker already in the area.

MRCC diverts a passing tanker

MRCC (SVP) activated the ISN, the coast guard's standard alert to mariners transiting a search zone, and diverted the merchant tanker MT AISOPOS to search for Ocean Winner and any liferafts in the water, and to render assistance. The diversion is routine practice in the Indian Maritime Search and Rescue Region, where a nearby merchant ship often reaches a distress site well before a naval or coast guard unit can close the distance.

Two survivors, first word since the alert

By about 2000 hours on Saturday, AISOPOS had recovered two survivors from two separate liferafts, the first confirmed word since the MV Ocean Winner rescue operation began nine hours earlier.

Twenty two of the ship's complement remain unaccounted for.

Three Coast Guard ships now committed

Indian Coast Guard ships Varad and Anmol were deployed for the search and rescue effort. ICGS Vijit was deployed separately from Sri Vijaya Puram to augment the operation, taking the Coast Guard's own commitment to three ships alongside the tanker already on scene.

A recurring role for India's Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres

The MRCC network that took the Ocean Winner report runs from Mumbai to Chennai to Port Blair, part of the same setup that coordinated a Navy medevac off Mumbai in July and that the Coast Guard leaned on again during flood rescue work in Gujarat the same month. Search and rescue sits at the centre of the case the Coast Guard made for a new fleet of long endurance drones, meant in part to extend exactly this kind of search over open water. The force keeps a running public record of its search and rescue incidents, coordinated under the national machinery that answers distress calls anywhere in Indian waters.

The search for the ship's other 22 crew continued through the night, with AISOPOS, Varad, Anmol and Vijit all still committed to the area.