Soviet Ship, 700 Aboard, Sinks Off New Zealand

A Soviet cruise ship carrying more than 700 passengers and crew struck rocks and sank in stormy seas Sunday, but only one person, a Soviet sailor, is missing and presumed drowned, officials reported.

Chief Police Inspector Owen Dowse, in a mid-morning announcement today on Radio New Zealand, said that all aboard the 20,000-ton Mikhail Lermontov, with the exception of the single crewman, have been rescued. Initial reports had said 34 people were not accounted for.

The passengers, many of them elderly Australians and New Zealanders, were taken from lifeboats by rescue craft and brought to Wellington, 35 miles across Cook Strait from Port Gore, where the liner sank.

Ten people were hospitalized with minor injuries, Dowse said.

Search coordinator Barry James said the Mikhail Lermontov had about 400 passengers and about 300 Soviet crew members.

However, the chairman of the Marlborough Harbor Board, Bruno Deliessi, said the ship carried a total of 841 passengers and crew.

Deliessi also said there had been 25 children aboard, but Les Goss, the cruise manager, said there were none.

Survivors said in Wellington that passengers and crew members began fleeing the liner in lifeboats about 1 1/2 hours after it started taking on water and hours before it sank just before 11 p.m. Sunday.

Efforts to rescue the people from the lifeboats were hampered by darkness, driving rain and 15 m.p.h. winds. A New Zealand air force reconnaissance plane and helicopter and police and navy patrol boats resumed the search for survivors today.

Dowse said the evacuation was orderly and that he was told by a Soviet crew member that no one was left on aboard after the order to abandon ship was given.

Musician Ken Tweddle, one of 10 Australians in the crew, said on arrival in Wellington: “We got everybody off. When I left there was hardly anybody left. There was no one in the sea. Everyone got into lifeboats or tenders.”

About two dozen small boats searched for survivors after dawn, and an aerial search was conducted by a New Zealand air force reconnaissance aircraft, two helicopters and a light plane equipped with floats. Rescue teams recovered 11 empty life rafts, Radio New Zealand said.