and drill took twelve hours. Other Zim divisions provided the Dan, a Ro-Ro ship sister of MV Nili, which would provide fuel near Lampedusa. The captain of MV Dan was Yosef Dror, a retired navy commander and Shayetet 13 commando frogman. In this case, tanker trailers were loaded in the ship's garage. These Zim ships sailed with additional crew made up of members of the Israeli Navy. Escape The boats were to escape on Christmas Eve. On the eve of the escape, the skeleton crews continued to maintain the boats, while the 80 crews who came to reinforce them hid belowdecks. The Israelis feared that the boats could sink while sailing through the Bay of Biscay in severe winter conditions. The group had a meteorologist assigned to them, who monitored all British, French and Spanish weather forecasts. Despite a forecast predicting rain from the south-west, the crews were ordered to sail out at 20:30. By 19:30, all crews were aboard. There was a force 9 storm on the night of the escape, and after the weather worsened, the departure time was extended to 22:30, but the escape was again delayed by worsening weather. Captain Hadar Kimhi received urgent coded messages from Israel ordering him to set sail despite the weather, but he decided to wait. At midnight, the meteorologist picked up a BBC report indicating that the storm would die down in two hours. At 02:30, the boats left Cherbourg and headed slowly out to sea. The French were initially unaware that the Israeli boats had left port, and their absence was noticed by a reporter who visited the port and saw that all the boats were missing. He immediately reported it to the BBC almost 12 hours after the escape, and so the French authorities learned of the boats' disappearance from the BBC. The empty berths and an absence of any announcement of the embargo's termination caused speculation that Israel had taken the boats. A television news team flew out over the North Sea to see if the boats were heading towards Norway, to where they had ostensibly been sold, while other news crews headed out over the Mediterranean. The boats crossed the Bay of Biscay before turning south and crossing into the Mediterranean, meeting Israeli support ships along the way. During fuelling by MV Lea at Gibraltar, one of the Israeli Navy crew members mistakenly allowed water into