Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Other Shores - March 2011

The recent overthrow of Mubarak’s reign in Egypt left Suez Canal transits, port operations, and vessel movement largely unaffected despite some labor strikes. The SuMed pipeline and all oil and gas terminals also operated normally.

The US Coast Guard granted storm-avoidance requests from at least five foreign cargo ships that desired to shelter behind Aleutian Islands from 27-31-foot waves and winds gusts up to 100 mph.

A Russian firm will send more aframax and Suezmax tankers carrying Russian oil from Murmansk to Ningbo, China via the northern route next year. The 23-day voyage of 5,610 miles is 14 days shorter than the 13,110-mile regular route using the Suez Canal

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
The tank barge Waldhof flopped on its side while transiting a tight bend in the Rhine River near the famed Lorelei rock and that closed the river. Two of four crewmen were never found. Its cargo of 2,400 tons of sulfuric acid was a problem to both salvors and river traffic for the next month and more. Hundreds of vessels waited upriver while the wreck was sort-of stabilized after a couple of weeks of work and only then were smaller vessels allowed to creep by. (The revenue loss for a Rhine vessel averages about €4,000 or about $5,400 per day.) In Indonesia off the east coast of Palaun Bintan, the asphalt tanker AB9 reported it was listing and then it sank but the Indonesia Navy rescued the crew of fourteen. In Malaysia, all eighteen members of cargo ship Soon Bee II’s crew were found alive on the beach at Kampung Kabong after their ship sank. Off northern Japan, the small tanker Seiyoh radioed that it was in distress and then sank. Four of its crew of five were saved by the Japanese coastguard but the chief engineer subsequently suffered a fatal heart attack.

Ships ran aground: In one week, both ships of a New Zealand coastal shipping company ran aground. The Spirit of Endurance went ashore in Lyttelton Harbour when its engine failed and, due to an electrical fault, the Spirit of Resolution nosed into soft mud in Manukau Harbor, Auckland’s second harbor. In spite of these problems, the company maintained that it was operating in a safe and professional manner.

While undergoing tests off the shipyard in the southeastern port of Ulsan, an 88,000-ton container ship collided with the 1,500-ton Cambodian-flagged freighter Alexandra. One sailor was rescued, four died, and seven were missing from the sunken ship. Strangely enough, the container ship was not identified in any news account, perhaps because it may have been a brand-new local product. At Poti, Georgia, the cargo ship Gregory Petrovsk lost control during a storm and ran into a pier and broke into two. The crew of eleven, including a female, was saved. In the US off Massachusetts, the 51-foot local fishing boat Michael Brandon ran into the 600-foot freighter West Bay and suffered severe bow damage. The ship was undamaged. That night, the FV sank at its pier in Scituate and only parts of its rigging were above the harbor’s ice.

In Indonesia near Berhala Island, a watchman on the grounded container ship Baruna Mega was found dead inside a cargo hold, probably the victim of poisonous fumes. In the UK, a crewman on the vehicle carrier Tombarra died when the ship’s rescue boat fell about 30 meters from the top deck into the sea at the Royal Portbury Dock near Bristol. He and three others fell because of a mechanical or equipment failure during an emergency exercise drill. In New Zealand’s Marlborough Sound, a dolphin-watch eco-tour catamaran ran down a cutter crewed by an Outward Bound crew of youngsters. The boat floated due to its buoyancy tanks but one student suffered a broken leg and others had moderate injuries

A sailor on the carrier USS Carl Vinson went overboard but was spotted by a lookout. A helicopter pulled the sailor out of the water in less than twenty minutes. (But in the Gulf of Oman, a female sailor on the guided-missile destroyer USS Halsey failed to report for duty and her body was later found floating the water.) In the Gulf of Oman, the frigate HMS Iron Duke raced 170 miles to help a badly injured Korean fisherman on the Golden Lake. He was unconscious after suffering bad facial damage from a broken wire.

The container ship MCP Altona was en route to China when some of its containers shifted and two drums filled with uranium concentrate broke open. The ship returned to Ladysmith, British Columbia where experts were waiting to clean up the low-radiation substance. Once the ship was ruled to be clean, all drums were returned to the Canadian mine of origin for a careful check of their integrity.

Gray Fleets
In 2009, the guided-missile cruiser USS Port Royal was fresh out of the repair yard (where the bill was $18 million) and on its first day of sea trials when it ignominiously and conspicuously ran aground next to a runway at the Honolulu International Airport. It took several days to remove the warship and the Navy later paid over $40 million to the State of Hawaii plus $6.5 million for repairs to the reef (cementing nearly 5,400 coral colonies back in place and removing 250 cubic yards of debris). Failure to recalibrate navigation equipment was cited as cause of the grounding but an investigating board crisply noted that the warship’s navigation wonks might have used visual cues (such as the control tower of the Airport) to help determine the ship’s location.

In the UK, the newly commissioned and very expensive nuclear-powered attack submarine HMS Astute continued to suffer indignities. The horrors of its recent grounding in Scotland during a crew change were replaced by a failure of the sub’s sewerage system. It returned to its base at Faslane for six week’s of repairs to toilets and a weapon system.

The Australian Navy had 38 of its 54 vessels unable to operate at full capacity for at least some of the first six months of last year. And a female sailor on the submerged Australian submarine HMAS Waller had a lucky escape when a green signal flare accidentally ignited while she was loading it into a launch tube. Although her arms were seriously burned, she and the sub escaped further damage as the boat went to emergency stations and made a dash for the surface.

In South America, a female naval cadet’s fall from the rigging to her death on the German Navy’s training barque Gorch Fock triggered much nasty and childish behavior. One example: The remaining cadets claimed that the training ship’s master had shown little emotion at her death and had called her death unlucky but normal, like an airplane crash, and so they refused to go aloft. In response, he claimed that they were products of video game-playing childhoods and were not fit to be sailors. They were flown back to Germany, he was relieved of command, and a committee will determine whether the ship can ever resume its role as a training ship and ambassador for Germany.

White Fleets
An American passenger from the Ryndam was killed at Belize while on a snorkeling trip when she was chopped up by the excursion boat’s propeller. Eighty passengers on the Polar Star had their Antarctic trip disturbed when the ship hit an uncharted rock while anchoring near Detaille Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. The contact opened “a minor breach in the outer hull’ but that was enough to cancel the voyage and at least one future voyage. The passengers were dumped on South Shetland Island while the vessel limped back to Ushuaia after “temporary repairs.” South Shetland Island is home to many international research stations but has no scheduled air service.


They That Go Back and Forth
The crowded Indonesian ro-ro/pax ferry Laut Teduh 2 caught fire, possibly from a cigarette butt thrown on the deck, while en route to Sumatra. Although 427 passengers were saved, at least eleven died and nearly 200 were injured, many as they jumped into the sea. On Columbia’s Magdalena River a tugboat collided with the ferry El Titanic and six adults and three children went missing although a man and a woman were rescued shortly afterwards.

A man was known to have boarded the ferry European Highlander at Larne in Northern Ireland because he was part of a bus-transported party, but the driver reported that he did not disembark at Cairnryan, in Scotland, so a massive search was triggered. After a thorough search of the ferry and searches by a helicopter and three lifeboats, it was decided that he might have left the ship in a different vehicle. In the US, a 71-year-old man removed his coat, climbed the railing of a New York-bound Skystreak ferry, and jumped, but soon afterwards he was quite willing to grab a boathook and be pulled out of the water. (Cold water will have that effect.)

While berthing in Heysham, the Isle of Man ferry Ben-My-Chree was hit by a powerful gust of wind and made a heavier-than-usual contact with the fenders on the dock. The incident was relatively minor and did not cause any injuries to passengers. High winds also forced the ro/pax ferry Larkspur into a mud bank at Ramsgate.

Starting in June, a new vessel, the UK’s first hydrogen-powered ferry, will carry up to twelve passengers at Bristol for at least six months. A license-plate reader on a Seattle ferry led state police to arrest a man as he drove off the ferry in a van with stolen plates.

Legal Matters
A federal judge ruled that the river barge that landed on top of several homes in New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward during Hurricane Katrina did not break the floodwall but he also said that employees of the barge owner could have done more to prevent damage.

Imports
The freedom dash of ten Dominican Republic stowaways was drastically slowed by cold weather after they arrived at Port Chickasaw, Alabama on a barge. They had been spotted from the tug Annie T. Cheramie and, after an all-night search, were found huddled and half-frozen in a container yard. They were hospitalized for hypothermia and then charged.

Nature
Premature silting of the Mississippi River’s Southwest Pass, the main channel for river shipping to reach the Gulf of Mexico, caused reduction of allowable drafts from 47 feet to 44 feet.


Metal-Bashing
Shipping giant Maersk was reported as ready to order ten, possibly twenty, super-large container ships carrying 18,000 TEU, a ship size that has been nick-named Malaccamax. They would be twin-engined and fueled by oil, not LNG, and would cost about $180 million, or about $10,000 per container slot. But close competitor Mediterranean Shipping has no intention of following Maersk’s lead. (A Malaccamax could only operate between certain Far East and European ports and would use the Strait of Malacca because it is shorter than alternative routes but has a restrictive minimum depth of only 25 meters or 82 feet.)

Indian ship-scrappers paid more than $500 per light displacement ton for two bulkers as some shipowners decided scrapping was more profitable than operating vessels.

Four workers died of burns created by an explosion on the product tanker Pranam as it was being scrapped at a Bangladeshi yard. Apparently they were dismantling a fuel tank. Scrapping operations had been limited due to concerns over safety and environmental issues but the deaths caused a quick halt to all negotiations about continuing shipbreaking. Two workers were killed by an explosion at a yard in Sitakunda Chittagong. Officially, the ship was not being scrapped but photos showed that extensive plating had been removed. The explosion may have been caused by a warming fire made by watchmen or a gas cylinder may have exploded.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Somali pirates are being divided into two general categories:
Unskilled onshore opportunists such as fishermen and, farther offshore, highly trained ex-military types. As a result, pirate tactics have become increasingly aggressive and include the use of torture and even deliberate execution. Some security sources believe that the use of mother ships will soon see pirates able to strike east of Sri Lanka (an island off the eastern tip of India).

The seizure of the VLCC tanker Irene SL in the Gulf of Aden, the eighth attack on vessels of this type in a limited geographical area in four weeks, caused experts to declare that Somali pirates were deliberately singling out tankers on the exit route out of the Strait of Hormuz during the monsoon season. Four of the ships were captured. Fully laden tankers are extremely easy to board, and the high value of their cargoes presents a great temptation to pirates.

Perhaps typical was when Indian forces destroyed the pirate mother ship Prantalay 14 off the Lakshadweep islands, arrested 15 pirates, and rescued 20 fishermen of Thailand and Myanmarese nationalities, who had been held hostage since Prantalay was hijacked in April last year. It was used by the pirates to launch attacks on merchant vessels passing along the island chain and had been photographed towing fourteen skiffs. INS Cankarso (a recently commissioned water-jet fast attack craft) was directed to intercept and investigate. The mother ship did not respond to radio calls so Cankarso fired a warning shot across its bows. Then Prantalay opened fire, which the warship returned. A fire broke out on the mother ship and personnel were seen jumping overboard. (Prantalay is one of three fleetmate tuna trawlers held by pirates, who had demanded a $9 million ransom for each of the three. Five of the Prantalay‘s crew died of malnutrition and two were shot and dumped overboard during the long months of captivity.)

The Malaysian Navy foiled an attempt on the chemical tanker Bung Laurel and captured seven Somalis. Three of the pirates were wounded during a gun battle. And the South Korean Navy recovered the hijacked tanker Samho Jewelry. A destroyer pursued the vessel for nearly a week and then commandos stormed into action. All 21 crewmen were rescued unhurt except for the master, who had been shot in the stomach, but eight of thirteen pirates were killed. The US Navy’s guided-missile destroyer USS Momsen and cruiser USS Bunker Hill responded to a call from the Panama-flagged cargo ship Duqm, under attack by pirates trying to board from two skiffs. The warships chased the pirates back to a mother ship and then destroyed the skiffs.

The German heavylift vessel Beluga Nomination was hijacked and the crew hid in a citadel. But two days later, the pirates blew their way in and the crew was taken hostage. Then Seychelles and Dutch forces tried to retake the ship but failed. One pirate was killed and a crewman was shot.

If you’re a middle-aged Dutch couple sailing your way around the world on your sixty-foot sailboat Alondra, wouldn’t you feel justified in asking the Royal Navy for a warship escort while you transit waters rife with Somali pirates? The Royal Navy disagreed, feeling that devoting a warship to a dedicated escort for up to three weeks was “totally unrealistic.” The couple then riposted that, “It’s like asking for help from the police and being told you are not eligible.” (The Dutch couple had previously sailed with the British couple that were captured by Somali pirates and held for over a year so they are not completely naïve.)

Not all pirates were Somalians. In Nigeria, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), Nigeria's main militant group, threatened to renew attacks on the oil and gas sector because of the appointment of Kingsley Kuku as the Presidential Adviser on the Niger Delta. 



Odd Bits and Head Shakers
There are many ways to achieve international renown and driving a tugboat can be one. In Australia, Brisbane’s floating boardwalk was a great tourist attraction until massive floods recently tore it loose. The two-man crew of the small tugboat Mavis volunteered their services to maneuver a long stretch of the drifting boardwalk safely under the city’s Gateway Bridge as TV watched and thousands cheered.

Africa’s oldest floating ship, the 1898 steamer Chauncy Maples will not only be preserved but it will serve as a mobile healthcare clinic on Lake Malawi. The vessel was built in England and brought to its operating site in sections, The 11-ton boiler, fitted with a wheeled carriage, was hauled 64 miles overland by 450 Ngone tribesmen (averaging three miles a day) while other parts were carried on the heads of men and women.

College researchers are investigating squid, trying to determine how the cephalopods shift their colors to match a background. Understanding such a “dynamic camouflage” could be of extreme value to the US Navy.

What are the two most-popular liberal-arts colleges in the US? The answer will surprise many. Top is the US Naval Academy followed by West Point, the Army’s equivalent school.

Get-rich-quick schemes to get untraceable millions out of strange countries are plentiful but one recent offer (from Spain, yet) used the name of Admiral Mike Mullen (he’s only the US’s Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff) as needing help in sneaking a puny twenty-three million, six hundred thousand dollars out of Pakistan.

Sometimes your children bite you. Such was the case with the British research vessel James Cook, whose remotely operated vehicle or ROV, a hunk of machinery anthropomorphically named Iris,Iris contacted the ship’s port propeller. This was noticed when part of the ROV’s buoyancy package floated to the surface. The propeller was undamaged but will be monitored. suffered serious damage and was inoperable.

A five-man, one-woman British rowing team established a trans-Atlantic record by rowing 3,000 miles in 31 days, 23 hours, and 31 minutes. As a finishing touch, one male rower knelt on the beach and proposed marriage to his girlfriend, who had flown to Barbados to meet the team. She accepted. (For those desiring to emulate the team, their course was from Tenerife to the Barbados and the boat was rowed at all times.)

A British Navy helicopter rescued a man who fell 1,000 feet down Sgurr Choinnich Mor. He was standing up and reading a map and was virtually unharmed when the chopper crew spotted him at the Ayrshire mountain’s base.

A British fisherman on the FV Royal Sovereign discovered a 20-foot torpedo floating five miles off Beachy Head and near a busy cross-Channel shipping lane. He took photos of it with his mobile phone and forwarded them to authorities. They reported back that the device's explosive charge had corroded off and it was safe, and so he towed it in. The barnacle-covered torpedo was identified as a British Mk 9 device, it had a stamp showing it had been checked and tested in 1955, and it was believed to have come from a wreck. So the Big Question is: Why has the Royal Navy been using torpedoes to create wrecks in peacetime?