Monday, August 2, 2010

Other Shores - August 2010

by Hugh Ware

Arrivals of containers at Vancouver, BC hit a 20-month high. Container traffic at Long Beach went up 14 percent over a year ago while arrivals at Los Angles rose nearly 27 percent. Shipping giant Maersk reported a shortage of both space and containers for outbound Far East shipments (“It is a very exceptional year”) although the company owns 1.3 million containers and recently added another 50,000 FEU.

Asian demand for oil drove VLCC rates to a five-month high, from $41,800 to $78,900 a day for the Arabian Gulf-Far East run.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
At Le Havre, the vehicle carrier Grande Buenos Aires was caught by wind gusts while entering the lock and was pushed against the lock head. It was damaged and the ship suffered a gash several meters long at the waterline. About 42 miles east of Gibraltar, the product tanker Torm Marina collided with the container ship MSC Camille. Luckily, the tanker was in ballast so no ”boom.” At Durress in Albania, the 3,000-ton freighter Ruby approached a pier at six knots but its engine failed to reverse. It struck the cargo vessel Storman Asia near the bow. Alerted by frantic radio calls, crewmen on the nearby San Gwann took some spectacular photos. 

The coaster Uno and its cargo of soy beans ran aground underneath Valdemar’s Castle in Denmark’s Svenborg Sound. The master explained he had been avoiding a yacht race involving about forty boats. (The castle was built by King Christian IV for his son but he was killed in a battle in Poland during 1656 before he could move in.) In Hong Kong waters, the containership Kota Kado struck a submerged object and was beached. On the St Lawrence Seaway, the 740-foot laker Algobay ran aground and was freed by two tugs and her own power three days later. In New Zealand at Tauranga, the outbound log carrier Hanjin Bombay ran aground but was freed by two tugs two hours later. (The following may not apply to the last item but some years ago, I was told that a Tauranga pilot might pilot ships one week, run a tug propelled by Voith’s cycloidal propellers the next week, and in the third week operate the other port authority’s tug, one fitted with the radically different azimuthing drives. I queried whether they ever got confused but the confident answer was “no.”)

In the Malacca Strait, a fire that started in a container on the foredeck of the 8,195-TEU container ship Charlotte Maersk raged for two days before being put under control (but not out). In Scotland at Lochaber, a conveyor belt loading large stones from a quarry onto the 100,000-ton bulker Yeoman Bontrup caught fire and that set the ship on fire. A tug, ironically named Boulder, was sent to tow the badly damaged ship elsewhere for repairs. At Tampa, a conveyor belt unloading granite rocks from the 742-foot, self-unloading bulker Sophie Oldendorff caught fire and that proved a challenge for local firemen. 

A Turkish worker died under tons of material in a forklift accident at one of Tuzla’s many shipyards. He was the area’s 135th shipyard fatality since the Eighties. Off the Croatian coast, a cadet fell off the container ship Safmarine Kariba and his body was found two hours later. A Texas crabber was killed when struck by lightning on the ICW and his companion was airlifted to a hospital. 

An Australian helicopter removed a badly burned man whose clothing had caught fire while welding on a coal ship 220 miles off the north Queensland coast. He jumped overboard to extinguish the flames and was rescued by one of the ship’s lifeboats. Off South Africa, two South African Air Force helicopters cooperated in getting an injured mariner off the bulker Proud some 100 miles off Cape Town. One helicopter transferred its extra fuel to the other while both were in flight. 

Shortly after the bulker Medi Lausanne was moored at Charleston, South Carolina, along came a strong gust of wind and a stern line parted, followed by the rest of the mooring lines. The ship sailed across the channel and came to a soft grounding with its running gear entangled with a channel marker. 

Gray Fleets
The US Navy removed the commander of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard from command due to loss of confidence in his ability to command. 

The new Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers HMS Daring and HMS Dauntless finally have missiles for their main weapons systems now that their French-built “Aster” missiles have started passing test-firings.

Indian Navy personnel will train for a year on the former Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov before it is finally delivered late next year. Meanwhile Indian aviators flying MIG 29K jets will train on the Russian’s Admiral Kuznetsov, a similar jump-jet carrier. And two Indian submarines suffered minor damage when one tried to parallel-park against the other at a Mumbai naval jetty. 

The Russians announced that they would continue testing the new sea based intercontinental ballistic missile Bulava until it works. Seven out of 13 tests have failed, the last test missile spinning and failing in a spectacular explosion visible in Northern Norway. Three Borey-class submarines to carry the missiles are under construction. And the first attack sub of the Graney class was launched. Construction started in 1993, the launch was deferred for a month, and the news item stated that it would be delivered next year. It will carry 24 cruise missiles. 

Smaller services, worldwide, range widely in size. The US Coast Guard has about 39,000 active members (and is heading toward 45,000 personnel) plus 29,000 Auxiliary members; Camp Lejeune, one of the US Marine’s two main training bases, is home to about 47,000 Marines and sailors; the entire Royal Navy has about 38,000 tars and Royal Marines; and the Royal New Zealand Navy has 2,034 regulars plus another 237 Naval reservists. 

White Fleets
Hurricane Alex delayed the docking of the cruise-ship Ecstasy at Galveston by a day. The prime cause wasn’t wind but a strong crosscurrent in the channel. The inaugural departure of the newbuild Norwegian Epic from Rotterdam for Southampton was delayed for more than seven hours because of “technical problems.” Compounding the resulting irritation for 2,000 passengers was a breakdown of the security card system and all 2,000 cards had to be signed by hand. Alaskan-based US Coast Guard helicopters serviced two medical emergencies on cruise ships. One chopper took off a man who had suffered lack of consciousness and may have had a stroke. The cruise ship was the Norwegian Pearl and the location was 23 miles southwest of Juneau. The other was an Indonesian crewman on the Ryndam, 110 miles southeast of Cordova. He suffered from weakness and unconsciousness. (Readers may have noted that I report many Alaskan-based Coast Guard helicopter exploits. That is because the 17th Coast Guard District PA office does a superb job of publicizing the District’s valiant work in an extraordinarily taxing region.) 

Want to visit the North Pole on a nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker? This year it cost $22,690 for a two-weeks tour on the 2007-built 50 Let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory) and a suite cost $33, 390. But you’ll have to book for next year’s cruises; this year’s two remaining tours are already sold out. 

Under “cruise ships,” I occasionally include the smaller excursion boats and the like. They had a hard time last month. In Boston, the 87-foot whale-watch boat Massachusetts deviated from the well-marked South Channel and hit a well-known object, the Devil’s Back Ledge, at 18 knots. Nearly 170 passengers were quickly evacuated from the badly damaged vessel and serious salvage pumping started. In Alaska, the 75-foot whale-watch boat Catalyst ran aground near Port Houghton but freed itself on the next high ride. In the meanwhile, the nine passengers were taken by skiff to Robert Island. Near the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, something caused a small boat to jump a wave and land atop another small boat, and one man died. Contributing to the accident may have been the wake from the fast-moving tour boat Shark. At Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the two-man crew of an amphibious truck (DUKW) with 37 tourists on board, mostly a church group of young Hungarians, smelled smoke and stopped the engine to investigate, leaving the boat to drift for several minutes. The operator gave a warning call or calls on Channel 13, the ship-to-ship frequency, but not on channel 16, which is used for emergency calls. The crew of the approaching tugboat Caribbean Sea with the empty city-owned sewerage-sludge barge Resource on its hip didn’t hear the calls or see the drifting DUKW hidden behind the high bow of the empty barge, and the barge ran over the DUKW. Most people escaped due to life vests they had just donned but two Hungarian youngsters didn’t make it. 

Those That Go Back and Forth
Competition rowing is big in Brisbane harbor so City Cat ferry boats will be equipped with infra-red cameras to help spot oared shells and their crews. And waterline lighting on the ferries is being investigated so rowers can recognize that a City Cat ferry is nearby. 

At Hingham, Massachusetts, the commuter ferry Nora Victoria collided with the sailboat Cygnuc. Minimal sailboat damage and no injuries among the 150+ people involved. At Arkhangelsk, the Russian passenger vessels Nikolai Gogol and Peter Zavarnin managed to collide, fortunately without much damage to each other. (Arkhangelsk, near the Dvina River’s entrance to the White Sea, was medieval Russia’s chief seaport.) 

French authorities congratulated the crew of the ro/pax ferry Norman Voyager for going to the rescue of survivors of the French crabber Etoile des Ondes, struck and sunk last December by the bulker Alam Pinter. That vessel did not stop and other vessels ignored radio calls for help. (The Norman Voyager has since gone to the rescue of the two-masted yacht Zeewind, which had a suspected heart-attack victim on board.)

Things were buzzing on a British Columbia ferry when several thousand angry bees escaped from their hives. The bee owner had arranged with the ferry company that his truck was loaded first, the ferry’s rear doors would be opened for air flow, and all lights would be turned off except emergency lighting. It was, they weren’t, they weren’t, the bees got warm and excited by the lights and so out they buzzed. 

The People’s National Movement Government of Trinidad bought a used high-speed, 450-passenger catamaran ferry in Turkey for $3.29 million, had it transported to Trinidad and then towed to CuraƧao for repairs (another three-quarter million) in 2008. The ferry is back in Trinidad and lies in a shipyard at Chaguaramas, still unused and very definitely for sale. 

An overcrowded ferry carrying sixty pilgrims capsized on the Ganges in India’s northernmost province of Uttar Pradesh and only twenty were rescued. In Bangladesh an overloaded ferry (80 on board) collided with a sand barge and sank, killing at least two-dozen passengers.
In the UK at Plymouth, smoke kept 62 passengers on the Commodore Clipper for several hours although the ferry was docked and the fire in a refrigerator truck on the vehicle deck had been extinguished while en route from Jersey. The ferry also had some steering problems, perhaps because of the fire. 

Legal Matters
Edison Chouest Offshore, a supplier and operator of specialized vessels for the US Government and operator of a sizable fleet of other specialized vessels, was implicated in “magic pipe” incidents on the ice-breaking Antarctic research vessel Laurence M. Gould in 2004-2005. And the US government dismissed an investigation of a possible ”magic pipe” episode on the Margit Gorthon (now the Forest Trader), and both the company and chief engineer walked free. This was the second instance in the month that a case triggered by whistle-blowers was withdrawn. 

The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (reputed to be a liberal bunch of judges) ruled that a mariner who had not been physically injured but was endangered due to an event in which a third party was severely injured or killed could file suit. In the specific instance, a fisherman didn’t even witness a collision but felt the circumstances of the event had put him in grave and imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and had emotionally impacted him so he could not work. 

Illegal Imports
For some time, South American narcotic-smugglers have been building and using, with considerable success, semi-submersible ”submarines” to import drugs into the US, and now Ecuadorian authorities, with help from the US DEA, have seized a true submarine, a submersible capable of operating at a depth of 65 feet. The 30-metre fiberglass vessel was built in a remote jungle area, has a conning tower with periscope, two diesels to electric motors to two screws, and air scrubbers to purify the air, and was to be crewed by up to six smugglers. 

US agents found illegal immigrants who had taken unpaid passage on the container ship MSC Debra from the Dominican Republic to Charleston, South Carolina. Crewmen detained one, another jumped overboard and was later captured, and a third was found dead in a shipping container. And seventeen illegals, all badly dehydrated, were discovered in the back of an articulated lorry (semi-trailer truck) at Dover. 

Metal-Bashing
Shipbuilding prices are low and bargains seem to be available even though the price of steel rose $40-50 a ton in the last quarter over the prevailing $750/ton. For example, one small company ordered ten tankers from South Korean builders for delivery in 2011 and 2012. And fears of a surplus of bulkers were expressed after owners signed contracts for more than 74 bulkers in June alone. This was in addition to the 93 ordered in May. But deliveries of newbuild bulkers meant that some older bulkers were idled. 

After months of shilly-shallying, Canada decided it will build six corvette-sized Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships after all. Construction will start after two (more) years of planning. (Interestingly, several sources agree that the lightly armed, icebreaking ships will be remarkably big 6,000-tonners, which is in the destroyer size-range for many nations.) 

Almost 4,000 feet of steel piping will be replaced on each of two Swedish icebreakers. Used in the replacements on the Atle and Frej will be glassfiber-reinforced epoxy piping. 

Nature
Where are the Earth’s magnetic poles? Not diametrically opposite each other and each roams around a bit. The North MP is relatively stable when compared with the SMP, which has moved an average of 11 km a year over the last 100 years. But it can move faster, sometimes moving several hundred km a day. A swift Australian scientist managed to get within 1.6 km of the South MP when it paused for several hours one day back in 2000. That was the closest anyone has gotten close to the SMP for a measurement and it is also probably the closest anyone will ever get.

In spite of an international law eight years ago forbidding use of asbestos in new ships, some are still being delivered with asbestos in thousands of gaskets and other seals. Replacement of illegal parts on one ship, the 8,400-dwt Caroline Essberger, may have cost 10 percent of the original cost of building since the ship was in service. The process was not easy (“shut down everything, drain systems of their rapidly cooling heavy fuel oil, drain the black sticky residue into the bilges, clean out the bilges, ….”).

Building extensive wind-turbine farms offshore (the UK alone will install 6,000 such turbines in the next ten years) may be delayed by a lack of suitable installation and transportation vessels. There are only a dozen or so of suitable vessels worldwide and many of these can find work in the better-paying oil/gas industry.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
German law states that piracy is purely a police matter so German warships cannot escort German ships in pirate-infested waters. Some German shipowners temporarily reflag their ships so onboard security contractors can do their thing. The Liberian flag is a favorite.
A Dutch submarine will provide realtime intelligence in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean by sophisticated eavesdropping of pirate activity. 

Pirates often shoot-up their intended victims. How extensive the damage can be was indicated by repairs made to the small German container ship Taipan. Almost 300 bullet holes were welded over and ground flush on both sides. Cabling was repaired in 80 places while many tempered-glass panes were replaced including 18 in the wheelhouse. Then there were the interior bulkheads and ceilings, doors, and cabinetry, etc.

As the Somali pirates’ success rates reflected the increasingly effective opposition, the pirates shifted to using six to ten skiffs in an attack. And some mother vessels are still at large in open waters and are running short of supplies so the primary focus of attacks may shift from ransom money to food and water, and yachts and tourist yachts and the like may be attacked. Violence may also increase. 

Many pirates moved to the Bab al Mendeb and Red Sea areas—there were six attacks in the month as opposed to three attacks for the year’s first five months. Unfavorable monsoon conditions and the increased effectiveness of naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden were probable reasons for the shift.

In west Africa, Nigerian gunmen attacked two cargo vessels, killing one and seizing twelve sailors Two days later, special security forces stormed the BBC Polonia, and also (the details are very confused, something not unusual in that area) somehow freed the twelve mariners plus three other hostages taken in May. 

Odd Bits and Headshakers
The director of Tampa’s aquarium was nervous about tests of seawater brought in by a barge owned by the Mosaic Fertilizer Company – after all, there had been a massive oil spill in the Gulf…. (The water tested just fine.) For some years, water in the aquarium tanks has been periodically replaced by seawater donated by various barge companies whose empty barges load up in offshore Gulf of Mexico waters while returning to Tampa. The donations save the aquarium about $300,000 a year.

A memento of the world’s largest ship, a 36-ton anchor, was shipped to Hong Kong to be an exhibit in the new Hong Kong Maritime Museum. The Knock Nevis/Jahre Viking/Seawise Giant was scrapped earlier this year in India at Gujarat. The biggest moving object ever built by man, the tanker was 1,503 feet long, displaced 564,763 tons, and had a draft such that she couldn’t pass through the English Channel (or enter many ports) when fully loaded. As Seawise Giant, she was sunk by an Iraqi jet in 1986 during the Iran-Iraq war. She was raised, repaired, and renamed. 

A retired Coast Guard officer was hired in April to head up North Carolina’s ferry operations. He found “nepotism, payroll padding, and questionable spending” and reported this to his superiors and the inspector general. They fired him for not being a team builder.