was equipped with sufficient safety gear. He said that the ship was carrying 542 passengers, 57 crew members, 29 bus/truck drivers and conductors as well as their respective vehicles during its last journey. Survivors Immediate rescue efforts were made by local fishermen and rescue workers, and the Indonesian Navy sent six warships, one CASA plane, one Bell helicopter, two speedboats, one Nomad plane, one C-130 Hercules, one CN-235 airplane and two Bolco helicopters to assist in the search for survivors. At least 177 survivors were rescued within the first 24 hours, but strong winds and sea currents hampered rescue efforts. Rescue workers in helicopters faced difficulties in distinguishing survivors from the sea foam created by high waves, and the survivors who had made it onto life rafts found it difficult to stay afloat in the stormy waters. The search and rescue team widened the search radius by hundreds of kilometers, but only a few more survivors were found in the following days, some of which were located by chance. On January 3, 2007 (five days after the event), twelve survivors (11 men and a six-year-old boy) were found on an unmanned oil rig away; another six were found on the island of Java. They had been adrift on life rafts for days without food; some did not survive and their bodies had to be thrown into the water. The survivors were taken immediately to a hospital in Surabaya. Other survivors witnessed dozens of bodies floating in the sea. They were first thought to be survivors of Adam Air Flight 574 that crashed two days after in another storm, until it later turned out they were from MV Senopati Nusantara.'' On January 5, 2007, fifteen victims were found stranded on Kangean Island. On January 8, 2007, a group of fifteen survivors were picked up by a passing cargo ship from a life raft near Bali, away; one of them died soon after the group was rescued. The fourteen survivors, who survived for ten days by drinking rainwater and eating food supplies stored in the life raft, were then taken to Makassar, South Sulawesi. See also Adam Air Flight 574, a Boeing 737 aircraft which crashed on January 1, 2007, in the same storm. References 1969 ships Ships built in Japan Ferries of Japan Merchant ships of Japan Ferries of Indonesia Merchant ships of Indonesia Maritime incidents in 2006 Maritime incidents in