A ferry carrying 243 people capsized and sank in the Java Sea early Sunday, leaving at least six dead and roughly 140 people still missing as Indonesian search crews battled dangerous swells to reach survivors.

The Virgo Transport 8, an 8,540-gross-ton vessel sailing from Surabaya on the island of Java to Banjarmasin on Borneo, lost contact with its operator around 2 a.m. local time after its captain radioed that the ship was listing badly in waves reported at 2.5 to 3 meters (8 to 10 feet). It went down roughly 81 nautical miles from Banjarmasin.

A Packed Crossing

The manifest told the story of a heavy inter-island freight run: 30 crew, 27 additional personnel, 60 passengers and 126 truck drivers and assistants accompanying 89 vehicles loaded aboard for the crossing. As of Sunday morning, Indonesia's national search-and-rescue agency, Basarnas reported six confirmed deaths and 97 survivors pulled alive from the water, with about 140 people unaccounted for and the search still active by sea and air.

Passing commercial ships did much of the early rescue work before official responders arrived. The tugboat Mauhaw IX recovered 16 people, 15 alive, and diverted to Tuban; the tugboat TCP pulled 38 people from the water, 33 of them survivors; and the vessel MV Haida recovered 49 survivors, all alive, bound for Trisakti Harbor in Banjarmasin.

"EXTREMELY RISKY FOR VESSELS" — LOCAL RESCUE OFFICIAL I PUTU SUDAYANA, WARNING THAT EVEN BASARNAS'S OWN SEARCH SHIP FACES DANGER IN THE SWELLS

The cause remains under investigation, with officials pointing to a mix of possible weather, mechanical failure, human error and the stability risks that come with a heavy vehicle cargo — a familiar profile in Indonesia's long history of ferry disasters. Newsweek reported this is Indonesia's fourth major ferry emergency since July alone, underscoring a pattern of maritime safety failures across the archipelago nation, which depends heavily on ferries to move people and cargo between its thousands of islands.

Indonesia, a nation of more than 17,000 islands, moves millions of passengers a year on interisland ferries, many of them aging vessels operating under inconsistently enforced loading limits. Past disasters — including 2018's Lake Toba ferry sinking, which killed more than 150 people — have repeatedly exposed the same gaps: overloaded manifests, aging hulls and rescue operations hampered by rough seas. For families of the roughly 140 still missing from the Virgo Transport 8, that history offers little comfort as the search enters its most critical hours.

Search-and-rescue teams, backed by additional ships and a helicopter, are racing to find survivors before conditions worsen further. Officials have not given a timeline for when the search might be scaled back, and an investigation into the ferry's loading and seaworthiness — the vessel was built in 1987 — is expected to follow.