A REPORT into the damage caused to undersea cables in the Baltic late last year was not able to determine whether damage was deliberate or not.

The China-flagged, 75,121 dwt bulk carrier Yi Peng 3 (IMO: 9224984) was accused of damaging the cables in November 2024, with some politicians calling the incident an act of sabotage.

Yi Peng 3 anchored in international waters for five weeks before eventually leaving in late December.

In that time, representatives from Sweden, Finland, Germany and Denmark were allowed to board the bulker.

The Swedish Accident Investigation Authority (SHK) said in its report that it was unable to assess whether Yi Peng 3’s anchor was dropped deliberately or not.

The report said there were two possible scenarios for the incident. One is that the anchor was deliberately released, which would have posed significant risk to the vessel and crew operating the anchor windlass.

Alternatively, the anchor became loose because it was poorly secured, though the report notes that a lack of damage to the chain box and windlass “speaks to some extent against this scenario”, as well as the fact the anchor was dragged along the bottom for one and a half days without being discovered.

The bulker did not slow down when the anchor was dropped. If it were dropped intentionally, the report said, “it would have been natural to first reduce speed to reduce the risks to the ship or to prevent the chain from becoming entangled in the anchor”.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence ship tracking manager Richard Smale, who also served as a deck officer with Maersk Line and shipmanager for CMA CGM, said the dragging of an anchor for one and a half days without the crew noticing was ‘highly implausible’, citing the ‘significant friction’ such an event would produce — sufficient to noticeably reduce the vessel’s speed — and the likely noise caused by the anchor chain striking and scraping against the hull.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence ship-tracking data shows the vessel was sailing at 9 knots at 2341 hrs on November 16, 2024 and reducing to just over 6 knots, 19 minutes later at 0000 hrs on November 17, 2024.

The data also shows that at times during the voyage, the ship's speed dropped as low as 3.8 knots at 1816 hrs on November 17, 2024. At such low speeds, maintaining a steady heading would be extremely difficult, as the vessel would be highly susceptible to external forces such as wind and current, Smale said.

To counteract this, frequent and significant rudder commands would be required to keep the ship on course. At low speeds, a vessel’s ability to respond to steering inputs is reduced, making it much harder to maintain precise control without continual adjustments.

Smale said dragging such a heavy weight on the seabed would most likely require overcompensation of steering to maintain course.

“With the port anchor dragging, the vessel would most likely have required increased starboard rudder input to maintain its heading, something that would have been apparent to the bridge team and highly unusual under standard operating conditions,” he said.

The vessel’s port anchor weighed 7,875 kg and was connected to a 78 mm diameter studlink chain, which Smale estimated at about 130 kg per metre using multiple chain manufacturer calculators. With 330 metres of chain reportedly deployed, the chain alone would weigh about 42,900 kg, bringing the total combined weight to just over 50 tonnes.

A raised chain stopper would also likely have been visible from the bridge, as shown in the photographs included in the latest incident report, Smale said. However, the bulker’s crew did not observe the anchor’s chain stopper was in the raised position until an inspection on November 18.

“If it had been properly secured initially and later failed, the extreme forces involved would likely have sheared or deformed the securing bolt. However, this was not the case,” Smale said.

The damaged securing wire bracket could indicate that the securing wire was in place at the time, although the report noted it has not been possible to determine whether this deformation occurred because of the incident. If the securing brake was defective, this wire alone would not be sufficient to keep the anchor secure.

Additionally, Smale said the absence of friction signs on the brake band was unusual, as failure of the brake would likely have left some visible signs of damage.

“Properly securing, verifying and recording the status of the anchor after departure, and again prior to the onset of heavy weather, are procedures that should be clearly defined as standard within the vessel’s Safety Management System, in accordance with the International Safety Management Code. These are critical safety measures, and it is highly improbable that such steps would be inadvertently overlooked multiple times by competent officers and crew.”

Also unusual was the full crew change on Yi Peng 3. All crew, except the technical manager, signed on October 11 at Port Said, Egypt, the report notes. It was the first time this crew had worked on the bulker.

Smale said regular crew rotations would be routine, with individual crew members joining and leaving the vessel on staggered dates according to their contract cycles. A full crew change, however, “would typically occur only in exceptional circumstances, such as in the event of a change in vessel ownership or technical management”, he said.

Neither Lloyd’s List Intelligence data, Equasis, nor the International Maritime Organization’s GISIS platform shows a change of ownership or management around that time.

The report acknowledged that certain parts of the investigation “had to be rushed or omitted altogether” because of bad weather on the day investigators boarded the bulker. Crucially, there was no time to test the anchor windlass.

These limitations meant that “none of the options can be completely ruled out”, the report said, with further investigation needed to establish exactly what happened on board.

But the fact the incident happened in international waters and the bulker was China-flagged meant SHK “does not consider that it is justified for SHK to conduct any further accident investigation”, the authority said.