This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Just on the horizon, you probably can't quite make it out in Shasha.

This is Andy Baharman, recording himself with his phone as he stands on a cargo ship off the coast of Shasha, a city in the United Arab Emirates.

It's in some ways an idyllic setting. It's 40 odd degrees, sea is calm, the sky is blue.

Andy is the regional director at an organization called Mission to Sea Affairs.

In part of his job is to deliver things like rice, blankets, water and sim cards to workers who are trapped on abandoned cargo ships.

It is literally me and typically one other member of our team on a small speedboat and pulling up alongside and climbing up a 15 foot rope ladder to get to the ship.

In some cases, the people that Andy tries to help have been stuck on these abandoned vessels without enough supplies for months or even years.

We're loading provisions yet again onto this vessel that's been here now for more than two years.

We've all been unlocked down around different parts of the world. Just multiply that by 10 and you'll get a sense of what these guys are facing all the time.

I would sometimes say it's like prison but you don't know how long the sentence is.

Right now there are about 50 of these situations on the International Transport Federation's official database.

But a lot of these cases go unreported and so the real number is probably much higher.

There's producer Alex Etaq who brought us this story from the podcast, Croning Cultures.

Andy works mostly in the United Arab Emirates but there are abandon ships all over the world, particularly in the Middle East.

And the people on them do describe feeling like they're in prison, surrounded on all sides by water and unable to leave because of the strange legal no-mans land that exists for workers on these ships.

In 1910, I was in the ship and I was in the ship and I was in the ship.

This is Mehmet Galshin. He spoke to us in Turkish and we had an actor voice his lines in English.

On December 17th, 2019, I joined the ship. The ship that I stayed on as prisoner.

When Mehmet first boarded a cargo ship called the Keenan Meta in 2019, he thought he was signing up for a pretty standard seven-month contract.

Then he'd be back home with his four-year-old daughter and his dog.

The Keenan Meta employed 24 other seafarers. That's the industry term for these cargo ship workers.

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