The limit may have been exceeded even more frequently than that. In all but one of the other 148 trips, zero cargo was recorded. It is not mandatory for passenger ferries to report cargo to the port operator, which gathers the information to compile statistics and not for safety purposes.
More than 2,000 tons of cargo was reported on 136 of the Seoul's trips, and it topped 3,000 tons 12 times. But the records indicate it never carried as much as it did on its final disastrous voyage: Moon Ki-han, a vice president at Union Transport Co, the company that loaded the ship, has said it was carrying an estimated 3,608 tons of cargo.
The port operator has no record of the cargo from the Seoul's last voyage. Ferry operators submit that information only after trips are completed. In that respect, the rules for domestic passenger ships are looser than those for cargo-only vessels, which must report cargo before they depart.
Details from the port documents were first reported by the South Korean newspaper Kukmin Daily.
In paperwork filed before the Sewol's last voyage, Capt. Lee Joon-seok reported a much smaller final load than the one Moon described, according to a Coast Guard official who had access to the report but refused to provide a copy to the Associated Press. The paperwork said the Sewol was loaded with 150 cars and 657 tons of cargo.
That would fall within the 987-ton limit, but it's clearly inaccurate: The coast guard has found 180 cars in the water.
An official with the Korea Shipping Association's safety team said it is beyond the association's capacity to determine whether a ship is carrying too much cargo. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't allowed to discuss the Seoul case as it is being investigated.
"What we can do is to see the load line is not submerged," he said. The load line, a marking on the outside of a vessel, indicates whether a ship is overloaded, but it does not show whether it has the sort of balance between cargo and ballast that the register report said was necessary.
