Photos in daily shipping news publications show many container ships filled to capacity. But sometimes, a fully loaded ship is high out of the water. Is this due to a low level of bunkers at the end of a long voyage or are many of the containers empties? One wonders.
Due to the world’s economic situation and declining sea trade, orders for new ships declined last year but ship deliveries grew to 75.7 million gross tons compared to 64.2 million gross tons on 2008.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
At Constanza, the container ship Medy loaded scrap (in containers?) and sailed for Turkey. Shortly afterwards, it called for help and a Romanian rescue vessel took the crew of 17 off the badly listing vessel. Soon afterward, the Medy sank. Off Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan, the dredger Anabar ran onto rocks while outside a port and one of a crew of twenty went missing. In Russia’s Laptev Sea in the Arctic region, the tugboat Alexel Kulakovsky sank and a nearby tanker could find only the captain and two sailors. A prolonged search failed to find any bodies but did spot an empty liferaft. Off the west coast of South Korea, the South Korean cargo ship Ocean Ace No. 6 ran down an anonymous Chinese fishing boat and all its crew died.
In China in an area east of Changbai, the product tanker Jin He ran aground near the harbor entrance. The next high tide straightened up the listing vessel and local tugs managed to free it. At Kavaratti Island in Lakshadweep, the cement-carrying freighter Nand Aparajita ended up perched on a coral reef. The reef is among the finest in India. In American Samoa, the tourist submarine Atlantis V went aground in Apra Harbor. No tourists were on board and a tug freed the sub later that day. The fishing boat-refueling tanker Hai Soon 5 ran aground on the western reef off Bipi Island, Manus Province, and Papua New Guinea officials said it was fully loaded. The combined chemical and oil tanker Clipper Tobago ran aground off Guatemala. The ship was on passa ge from Houston to Santo Tomas di Castilla with a cargo of tallow and catering greases. (Extensive research failed to find a definition for the last but it may be the greases that accumulate in restaurant grease traps or used deep-fat frying oils.)
The in-ballast Belgian VLCC Flandre collided with the far-smaller coastal bulker Hua Chi 8 off the coast of China’s Zhejiang province, and the big one won. Six mariners died. Somewhere above the Russian landmass in difficult ice conditions and poor visibility, the Russian tankers Indiga and Varzuga collided in that nation’s North East Passage. Some hull damage resulted but no spill of its cargo (diesel oil) or bunkers. Both vessels resumed steaming for Chukota in the Far East.
Ghanaian authorities ordered that the product tanker Seven Seas be beached after it collided with a Cambodian cargo ship. Locals decided to vandalize the ship and about 200 were present while fuel was being siphoned off. Four were killed and another 70 injured when there was an explosion. Explosion and fire on the Vermillion Oil Platform No. 380 some 90 miles south of the Louisiana coast forced 13 workers into the water. Twelve of the well-trained men were spotted in life preservers and clipped together for maximum visibility for searchers. They were supporting a thirteenth man without a preserver. The platform only produces gas and oil and there was no spill.
The chief engineer of the bulk carrier Almeda died from drinking industrial alcohol while the ship was sailing to the Red Sea’s Port Sudan. An explosion at an east China shipyard killed five and left one worker missing.
A sick 3-year-old boy was airlifted from the ferry Stena Europe while it was 13 miles from Stumble Head on the west coast of Wales. Not far away, a lifeboat was taking a sick seaman to a hospital from the merchant vessel Marida Melissa. The lifeboat was used because the local RAF rescue helicopter was busy transporting the little boy.
Gray Fleets
The nearly new destroyer HMS Daring suffered a long dent when its escorting tug Svitzer Sussex lost power and steering control and they collided. The tug, protected by much rubber fendering, was unharmed.
The Royal Navy will scrap the icebreaker HMS Endurance and replace it with a leased or purchased Norwegian icebreaker, and it may receive the same name. The Endurance nearly sank when someone improperly opened an engineroom valve during maintenance while the ship was off the coast of Chile and that caused £30 million of damages. The icebreaker is a key contributor to Royal Navy presence in the South Atlantic.
The Canadian Navy may pare down the number of ships or reduce the capability of its Arctic/Offshore Patrol Ship program due to strict budget constraints on the CAD3.1 billion (USD2.9 billion) program. Measures included reducing the caliber of the main gun from 76 mm or 57 mm to 25 mm, using less-powerful engines, and only building six hulls instead of the "six to eight" specified previously.
The president of Ghana wanted “big” ships for that nation’s navy so he bought two elderly East German fast patrol craft that had been built in the late Seventies and retired in 2005. He paid a staggering $38 million, $23 million for the boats and another $15 million for refurbishment. (Tunisia purchased six of the better boats, two were sold to private parties, and the last two will be scrapped.)
In recent months, British subs have had frequent encounters with Russian attack subs and there seems to be only one reasonable answer to the sudden popularity of the Brit subs. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian Navy has put submarines on patrol so infrequently that officials must have suddenly realized that its library of vessel and other marine sounds is obsolete and needed refreshing. One may surmise that submarines of other nations are also being dogged, but the Yanks, French, and Chinese aren’t talking.
A New Jersey salvage company will recover the remains of USS Scorpion, Commodore Joshua Barney’s flagship of a small fleet of shallow-draft warships in the War of 1812. At the abortive Battle of Bladensburg , his ships and marines were far more effective than the US land forces in attempting to slow British forces advancing on Washington, DC. In the end, Barney was forced to scuttle his flotilla way up the Patuxent River at Pig Point and surrender. He was promptly paroled by the British commander, who had recognized his dogged gallantry.
The executive officer of the Indian Navy submarine INS Shankush lost his life about 60 miles off Mumbia when a wave swept him off the sub’s deck while he and five others were trying to rescue a maintenance worker who had fallen into the sea.
White Fleets
In Canada’s far north some 55 miles from Kugluktuk (aka Coppermine), the cruise ship Clipper Adventure ended up on some rocks and the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen was sent to take off the 110 passengers and 69 crewmembers.
The Explorer of the Seas (3,100 passengers) and the smaller Independence (100 passengers) sought refuge from Hurricane Earl at Portland, Maine. Passengers on the first vessel reported it had steamed for Portland at its top cruising speed of 23 knots and it had been too windy to stand on deck. (The hurricane’s impact on Portland was minimal but offshore waves were reported to be 15 -25 feet.)
In Russia, the river cruise vessel Viking Kirov hit a barge while on a cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. None of the nearly 300 passengers on the American-operated vessel were hurt and alcohol was mentioned as a possible contributor to the excitement.
A 72 year-old woman with head injuries was heli-lifted off the Island Princess 63 miles from Yakutat in Alaska.
Some junior crewmembers of some cruise ships are into child porn. Convicted in May was an assistant waiter on the Costa Atlantica and an assistant room steward on the Carnival Glory was recently arrested at Halifax.
Sixteen Brits are suing a cruise company because the Alexy Maryshev was too close to a glacier when it calved in 2007. Most of the 48 passengers were on the foredeck to get good close-up photos of the glacier and many were hurt, some seriously, by falling chunks of ice and violent wave motions induced by the calving. The cruise ship was originally an ice-strengthened research vessel.
They That Go Back and Forth
The operator of a Le Havre-Portsmouth ferry line substituted the ferry Cote d’Albatre on that route after the high-speed catamaran ro/ro Norman Arrow struck a mooring buoy at Le Havre and holed itself below the waterline
Five people were injured at Mayne Island when the British Columbia ferry Queen of Nanaimo made a very hard landing even though an anchor had been dropped. One passenger was airlifted to a hospital.
The State of North Carolina hired a retired Coast Guardsman to head up its ferry division. Within two months he reported nepotism, payroll padding, and out-of-control spending and he was promptly fired for not being a team player. But his reports triggered investigations that showed he was right – among other things, a list of ferry employees showed many repeats of the same surnames.
In central Manitoba on the Bloodvein River, a probably intoxicated young man threatened to jump into the river so the ferry returned to the dock. There, two Mounties attempted to speak to the youth. He backed away, then jumped off the ferry. One Mountie felt he had to jump in to save the teenager, who appeared to be sinking. In full accordance with ancient traditions of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mountie got his man!
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a river ferry caught fire while on the Kasai River, a tributary of the Congo River. Only fifteen people made it to shore and some 200 others died. Meanwhile in the same country, a fishing vessel capsized and 24 (according to the government) or 60 (reports from locals) people died.
Legal Matters
Usually the US government wins when it comes to prosecutions involving oily water separators, ”magic pipes,” and erring logbooks but a jury recently acquitted the chief engineer of the tanker Georgios M of five such charges. Earlier, his employer had paid a $1.3 million fine and cooperated with the prosecutors in their assault on the chief. Now he’s suing his employer and the tanker for $22.8 million for their complicity in his 28-month incarceration in Texas. However, the US government won in the case against the chief engineer of the bulker New Fortune for a “magic pipe” violation. His punishment was surprisingly mild: he got three years of probation, a $5,000 fine, and a $100 special assessment for failing to maintain an oil record book. The Greek owners paid a $750,000 fine and a community service payment of $100,000.
The Ukrainian master of the Dutch coaster Flinterforest was drunk (at least twice the legal limit) when he ran his ship aground in the Orestund strait that separates Sweden and Denmark. A Malmo court let him off with a sentence of the 17 days of time he had already served but his career was probably finished. And in Wellington, New Zealand, a cargo ship failed to sail because its master was too drunk. The harbormaster described him as, “I understand he was conscious but not feeling well.” The owners flew a new skipper from Japan. Authorities would not release the ship’s name but a news account at its next port revealed that it was the Tasman Pathfinder.
Waterfront workers in the US must possess a TWIC (Transportation Worker Identification Credential) card and pay for it themselves ($132.50 each and good for only five years) but not everyone is happy with the little marvel that carries so much identity information on a chip. For example, Houston longshoremen carry their cards in their hip pockets, where the cards get bent and the chips inside become broken. (The card is supposed to be carried on a lanyard around the neck but many think this practice is hazardous). And airport security workers have refused to accept a TWIC as evidence of a mariner’s identity although the card is government-issued and is on the Homeland Security’s list of approved IDs.
A Korean shipping company was fined $852,000 for carrying more than 1,400 tons of toxic waste from Europe to Brazil in 89 containers. Their contents were supposed to be clean plastic for recycling but included soiled diapers and other nasties.
Imports
Justice can be slow and perhaps not very just. Three years after their arrest, two Ukrainian officers were sentenced in Venezuela to nine years in jail for cocaine smuggling. Divers had found 128 kg of the white powder clamped to the hull of their ship, the bulker B Atlantic.
Packaged cocaine must have a distinctive smell because the crew of a Columbia Navy patrol boat reported it smelled 12 tons ($240 million worth) of cocaine in the hull of a 50-foot semi-submersible smuggler two miles away and gave chase.
Royal Navy destroyer HMS Gloucester vs. the 36-foot sailboat Tortuga in mid-Atlantic – no contest! The American-registered Tortuga was taken to Cape Verde where inspectors found £4 million worth of cocaine packets built into its hollow rudder. The destroyer had been en route to its station in the Falkland Islands when it was asked to accept a Cape Verdean law enforcement team.
Nature
The Danish Navy stopped the Greenpeace vessel Esperanza on its way to an Arctic oilrig off the island of Disko near Greenland. Greenpeace’s plan was to protest drilling in 500 meters as too dangerous to the environment.
Five Inuit villages in Canada near Greenland got an injunction that stopped a German icebreaker from conducting seismic tests that could be possibly dangerous to the environment in an area that abounds in wildlife and, possibly, gas, oil, and minerals
LNG seems to be the fuel of the future and a Swedish shipowner is one of the first to use LNG in its ships. The company is converting its 25,000-dwt tanker Bit Viking from heavy oil fuel to LNG. One reason for the conversion may be that the twin-engined vessel normally operates in Norwegian waters where NOx is taxed.
The Richter scale 7.1 earthquake that ravaged Christchurch, New Zealand moved parts of that country up to 11 feet closer to Australia. It is not clear whether airfares between the two nations will be reduced.
In Australia, the Brisbane River is full of bull sharks. Those found up-river are normally less than 1.5 meters long but when the water warms up in summer, they leap out of the water and spin around. Although bull sharks don’t target humans, they have been known to grab one here and there, and Brisbane-local sharks did bite the hand and finger of a boy, attack a racehorse being exercised in the water, and snap up a Chihuahua.
Metal Bashing
Vietnamese officials arrested another four executives of that nation’s fast-growing, state-owned shipbuilding industry. Two of them had made major purchases when the state had already expressed its disapproval. The other two had intentionally violated regulations, thus causing grievous losses.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Piracy charges against six Somali pirates were dismissed because a 1819 US law said piracy was maritime robbery and the suspects hadn’t been caught while actually committing a robbery. (They had only approached and shot at a US warship.) Congress was asked to pass a more-suitable law defining piracy for the contemporary scene.
Conditions were just right and appropriate forces (the amphibious transport dock USS Dubuque and the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton) were present so 24 battle-experienced US Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit on the Dubuque boarded the German-owned but Somali pirate-controlled bulker Magellan Star and took over. Nine pirates were captured and none of the crew or Marines were injured.
Odd Bits and Head Shakers
The 1864-built square-rigger City of Adelaide, the world’s oldest clipper ship, made some 23 emigrant-carrying round trips between the UK and Adelaide but, in recent years, its hull has been parked at Irvine in Scotland. Four options for its future were identified, with the leader being what authorities called “an archaeological deconstruction” (aka demolition). Option four was to transfer the hull to an Australian entity and, luckily, the City of Adelaide Preservation Trust wanted possession of the old vessel. Now there is the problem of how to get the relic to Australia in time for the celebration in 2011 of South Australia’s 175th anniversary of the State. (For those interested in genealogical data, about a quarter million Ozzies owe their existence to ancestors who emigrated in the old ship.)
Billionaires must find it hard to spend all their wealth. One arrived at Sydney aboard his Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran largely made from recycled plastic beverage bottles held together by an organic glue made from cashew nuts and sugar cane. The 12,860-km voyage from San Francisco took 128 days and he was seasick most of the time. But an onboard filmmaker had been able to watch the birth of a son via Skype over the Internet.
Some years ago, the master of the Zim Mexico was prosecuted in the US after his ship hit a shore-side crane, toppling it and killing an electrician inside. The master was judged to be guilty (he hadn’t notified the pilot about an “erratic” bow thruster although the thruster had worked the last fifty times or more). The case raised much international furor over its unfairness. Recently, he and three friends were fishing off the coast of County Cork when their boat caught fire. He and two other friends didn’t survive.
In the UK, Greenwich University kicked off a EU-sponsored study called Safeguard that focused on ship-evacuation and safety procedures. The fire-safety engineering group ran an unprecedented research project on the cruise ship Jewel of the Sea in which more than 2,300 passengers took part in an assembly drill while at sea. The passengers wore infrared tracking tags and were monitored by more than 100 video cameras as they moved about the ship on twelve decks to reach their assembly areas. As the project leader later exulted, “This assembly was unique in several aspects, as we collected data from a large cruise ship during a virtually unannounced assembly drill and while we were actually at sea.”
December 2009 was a bad month for the US Coast Guard: two of its small boats collided with other vessels. One was at Charleston, South Carolina and the other at San Diego, California. One child was killed and several injured. A common denominator in these accidents seems to have been that the Coast Guard boat operators were using cell phones for texting or conversation not pertinent to the job.
For many years, British mariners guilty of “unwanted and/or improper attention” towards female passengers were charged with “broaching cargo.”
