Thursday, February 9, 2012

Other Shores - February 2012

Industry experts urged faster vessel scrappings as one solution to the overbuilding that has led to excess ships and low charter prices.

Large product tankers face competition from newbuild aframax crude-oil tankers with their clean tanks.
VLCC sailing speeds remained slow in the fourth quarter of 2011 due to high bunker prices.

New Zealand’s Ports of Auckland made a “best and final offer” to striking dockworkers. It was rejected.


Thin Places and Hard Knocks
The Turkish-flagged freighter Dogu Haslaman issued a distress signal from international waters between the Greek islands of Samos and Chios. The skipper of the half-sunk ship refused assistance from Greek authorities, saying he would wait for Turkish rescuers. (Greece and neighboring Turkey are at odds over Aegean Sea boundaries – including who has jurisdiction in search and rescue operations.) The 12-strong crew was picked up by another Turkish cargo ship. The offshore supply vessel Int'l Hunter capsized and sank 30 miles southeast of the Sabine Jetties in Port Arthur, Texas, after striking a submerged object. Four crewmembers and three passengers quickly abandoned ship. The Chinese cargo ship Changda 216 capsized off the northern Philippine province of Cagayan, killing two but thirteen others were rescued. Off Molasses Key in the Florida Keys, the 25-foot dive boat Get Wet started sinking. Two of the eight passengers were trapped in the cabin, both were unconscious when rescued, and one couldn’t be revived. The Cambodian-flagged fishing vessel Ginga sank in Russia’s La Perouse Strait, which lies between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. Three bodies were found while “two trawlers, a Russian helicopter, a rescue vessel, two steamboats, and a Japanese maritime safety department ship” searched for five possible survivors. The vessel could have been poaching in the waters on the Russian-Japanese maritime border. The crew of Russian drilling rig Kolskaya was waiting for a helicopter rescue when the rig capsized in a fierce storm about 125 miles off Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East. More than fifty of the 67 people on board died. (Only twenty should have been on board.) The rig was being towed by a tug and an icebreaker. (The rig wasn’t supposed to be towed in wintertime.) Somewhere northeast of Luzon Island, the bulker Vinalines Queen went missing on Christmas Day. One seaman was found on a raft six days later. The ship was carrying 54,400 tons of nickel ore, a known ship-killer when wet, from the Indonesian port of Morowaii to China. The ship’s owner hired ships and a helicopter to extend the initial four-day search by governmental agencies.

In spite of having a Ukrainian pilot on board, the Turkish bulker Gökay-K ran aground in the northern part of the Kerch Strait when the vessel’s draft exceeded the channel’s depth by 7.5 meters. Two tugs soon freed it. The Maltese-registered cargo ship TK Bremen ran aground off the coast of Brittany in high winds and torrential rain. The vessel, built in 1982, was too badly damaged to be towed off and the owners were given until April 6 to “deconstruct” the ship and restore the beach at Morbihan.
Thucydides (471-400 BC) supposedly wrote, “A collision at sea can ruin your entire day” and that truism is valid: Thick fog was blamed for the collision of the chemical tanker Charleston and the empty bulker Harvest Sun in the Houston Ship Channel just north of the Texas City Dike. The fog was so thick that Coast Guard investigators were unable to get to the scene. (A photo showed that the bow of a tanker was invisible from the bridge, and the fog persisted for days.) The container ship Hyundai Confidence “came in contact” with the coal-carrying bulk carrier Pacific Carrier 17.7 miles southwest of the South Korean island of Yokjido. Both heavily damaged ships remained stuck together while salvors figured out what to do next.

The Russian fishing vessel Sparta radioed for help after it was holed by ice in the Antarctic’s Ross Sea while fishing for Antarctic toothfish. The 48-metre vessel had a 30-centimeter hole in the hull 1.5 meters below the waterline and was taking on water and listing 13 degrees. It landed many of its crew of thirty-two onto the ice while efforts were made to pump out the incoming water. A RNZAF Hercules dropped pumps, fuel, and supplies after two seven-hour flights from New Zealand, and other vessels made efforts to reach the sinking vessel. The New Zealand vessel San Aspiring pulled out after its crew determined the more-than-470 nautical mile journey was too dangerous. The Norwegian vessel Sel Jevaer was only nineteen miles away but was hemmed in by ice and unable to proceed. Sparta's sister ship Chiyo Maru No. 3 slowly made its way toward the stricken vessel but remained days away and finally gave up. The Sparta’s owners chartered the big South Korean icebreaker Araon, which happened to be in a South Island port in New Zealand, and it reached the Sparta a week later, appropriately enough, on Christmas Day. A cement box inside the hull and an outside metal patch made the Sparta seaworthy, and it followed the Araon through 100 miles of ice floes to the open sea.

Three crewmembers of the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker Vaygach were killed and another was injured in an accommodations-area fire. The shallow-draft ship has 50,000 HP and is designed to break ice in rivers and estuaries. The vessel was “moored in the estuary of the Yenisei River near the village Karaul, located on the Taimyr Peninsula in the Krasnoyarsk Krai” and an extensive research revealed only that a krai is “a federal subject of Russia.” Got that?

The Dutch tug RT Leader was towing the barge H-332 laden with three used container cranes from Amsterdam to Rotterdam when one of the towering 300-ton cranes toppled into the main shipping channel from Rotterdam to Scandinavia. About a metre of the crane was above water but the new navigation hazard was buoyed-off anyhow. In heavy weather, the freighter Ostee lost two mobile homes overboard while voyaging from Hull to Gdansk so it headed for Den Helder and its anchorage to tighten lashings on three other mobile homes. In Holland’s Friesland province, the skipper of the inland container ship Fides, carrying 100 empty containers, misjudged how high water was in the Princess Margriet Canal. Several containers hit the underside of the Borgum Bridge and folded up. One container was left dangling after Fides forced its way through.

Gray Fleets
China’s homebuilt subs are loud. The subs, except for a dozen Russian-made subs, can be detected as far away as twenty-five miles in what is known as the “first convergence zone,” a ring where outward-bound sound waves pack close together. The subs include the two Jin-class ballistic-missile subs that are in service; both are louder than Russian Delta III-class submarines produced three decades ago.
The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard at Kittery, Maine sent about 350 skilled workers to its San Diego detachment and they completed an extensive Pre-Inactivation Restricted Availability on the nuclear submarine San Francisco (SSN-711) in 56,000 man-days instead of a scheduled 63,000-plus man-days, thereby saving the Navy $2.45 million. (The work consisted of alternations, repairs, maintenance and testing.)

After futilely using a helicopter and tugboats to battle a towering fire in wooden scaffolding over the Russian Delta IV missile submarine Yekaterinburg, naval authorities put out the fire by partially submerging the sub. Nine people were injured fighting the fire but there was no radiation leak. (The sub launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from the Barents Sea firing range as recently as July.)

Shortages of skilled manpower have been affecting the operational performance (particularly by its submarines) of the Royal Australian Navy so it plans to recruit surplus Royal Navy personnel. The Senior Service will eliminate 5,000 jobs, reducing its numbers to just 30,000 as part of a plan to slash the UK’s defense budget and many have the skills Australia needs. (In an interesting size comparison, the US Coast Guard had approximately 42,000 men and women on active duty, 7,500 reservists, 30,000 auxiliary members, and 7,700 full-time civilian employees as of August 2009.)

And New Zealand’s Navy is also attempting to recruit ex-Royal Navy specialists. However, submariners need not apply because New Zealand doesn’t operate subs.

The Royal Australian Navy broke a glass ceiling when it created its first female admiral. She joined the navy in 1991 as a lieutenant and is the first female sailor to take on the job of Australian Defense Force’s surgeon-general.

A retired Navy commander was sentenced to 3-1/2 years in prison for faking an injury in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon. He was awarded a Purple Heart and Meritorious Service Medal after he claimed he was injured by falling debris as he raced back into the Pentagon to help his fellow comrades. He also received $331,000 in compensation for claimed constant pain in his neck, headaches, weakness, and numbness in his left hand and elbow but, two months after the attack, he ran the New York Marathon.
Pink warships? The US Navy’s Type 2/3 Low Solar Absorbance haze gray paint often weathers to pink so the service will use a more expensive, trickier-to-apply, but better-weathering Type 5 polysiloxane paint.

White Fleets
Passengers on the cruise ship Costa Deliziosa may have thought they were about to start a round-the-world cruise from Savona, Italy but the first stop was in drydock No. 8 at the Chantier Naval de Marseille shipyard because of a major but unspecified technical problem. Many of the 2,000 passengers stayed onboard after port authority had hurriedly positioned gangways around the 320-meter drydock and arranged parking areas for tour buses and taxis. The Bahamas Celebration had an engineroom fire that was extinguished in due course but the fire left air quality so poor that the Freeport-to-Palm Beach cruise was canceled. The MSC Poesia ran aground at Port Lucaya near Freeport. Five tugs freed the vessel.

Those That Go Back and Forth
In eastern Indonesia, a wooden ferry carrying people home for the Christmas holidays sank in stormy weather. Most of the 100 passengers were rescued. At Singapore, a lorry driver was eating lunch with a colleague in the cab of his 10-ton vehicle when it started rolling off a barge. His friend jumped out to safety but he died when the lorry plunged into the sea.

Due to a propeller-pitch problem, the British Columbia ferry Coastal Inspiration rammed the dock at Duke Point at five knots, badly damaging the lower vehicle ramp. The ferry then transferred to Departure Bay so passengers and vehicles could get ashore. It will take several months to repair the dock and at least one month to fix the bow of the Coastal Inspiration because a new hinge has to be made in Germany, where the ship was built.

In Kenya at Lamu, a policeman tried to prevent an overloaded small ferry from leaving but was talked out of it by the ferry operator. Soon after, in the dark of night, the ferry collided with a vessel loaded with oil drums. At least 23 of 82 passengers died. A new water ambulance equipped with first aid facilities and oxygen tanks, a gift from an international donor, remained moored throughout the rescue – the government had provided no funds for fuel or an operator. (The worst ferry disaster was in 1987 when 4,386 men, women and children lost their lives in a huge fireball that enveloped the Philippine ferry Dona Paz after it collided with the coastal tanker Vector in the Sibuan Sea.)

A Seattle man made deliberate arrangements before jumping off the ferry Cathlamet as it ping-ponged between Clinton and Mukilteo. He mailed his house key to his parents and left his laptop computer in the apartment before quietly stepping off the ferry into the night. Passengers took flashlights and helped in an unsuccessful search.

Passengers boarded the Blue Puttees for a voyage from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland but bad weather kept the ferry in port and people on board for two days. The ferry company provided free meals and shuttles for passengers who wanted to disembark for a few hours and explore North Sydney.

Because the US Coast Guard recently raised the weight of the average adult passenger to 185 pounds from 160 pounds, the legal carrying capacity of a 2,000-passenger ferry will drop by about 250 people.
Who will harvest and process Florida’s crops in the coming years? A ferry service, starting later this year, between Tampa and the peninsula of Yucatan in Mexico, may help attract migrant workers. Currently, they are bused from Mexico to Florida, a trip taking between two and three days that costs an average of $220 per passenger. A ferry could make the 500-mile trip from the Yucatan to Tampa in about 28 hours at a cost of $190 per passenger.

In Hong Kong, popular demand meant a larger ferry was put into service to carry mourners wanting to scatter cremation ashes at sea near the West Lamma Channel or Tung Lung Channel. The free trips are operated twice a month and a funeral director is on board to assist the relatives organize memorial tributes.


Legal Matters
Federal agents were waiting when the tanker Sanko Venture docked at Corpus Christi, Texas. Two stowaways jumped overboard but were captured and agents found 94 pounds of cocaine and more than five pounds of heroin in two nylon bags.


Imports
Finnish authorities were surprised to find 160 tons of explosives mismarked as fireworks and surface-to-air missiles on the British-flagged cargo ship Thor Liberty. The ship had left the German port of Emden and stopped at Kotka in Finland to pick up a cargo of anchor chains before heading to Shanghai. The cargo was 69 legal (but improperly marked and packed) surplus German-owned Patriot missiles being sent to South Korea.

A boat carrying more than 250 people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey was heading to Australia in search of a better life but more than 200 passengers went missing when “the boat became unsteady 20 miles (32 kilometers) off Java's southern coast, people started panicking, causing it to sway violently back and forth, until finally, it capsized.” Forty-nine people were rescued, including two children, aged 8 and 10, who were found clinging to debris. Survivors said an unidentified group loaded them onto four buses and brought them to a port, promising to get them to Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Indonesian authorities arrested seven people in connection with the sinking and were questioning four others on suspicion that they helped organize the boat journey, Also questioned were three soldiers accused of receiving payment for connecting the migrants with boat owners.

Nature
Are you a scientist who wants to collect data in deep water but can’t afford the necessary mooring? There’s now a mooring-free boat-shaped buoy with a small sail. The buoy can station-keep a position within two miles in spite of rather severe weather. It can also be programmed to sail a 1,000-kilometer predefined course.

Back in May, a barge carrying 2,400 tons of brown sugar hit a bridge in Ayutthaya, Thailand and sank. The melting sugar created an oxygen-depriving pollution that killed millions of fish being raised in submerged baskets.

The geared-bulker Tycoon went ashore on West Australia’s Christmas Island. It ended up broken in half in the surf and broadside to the dock used to unload most of the island’s fresh food and supplies. The ship’s bunker oil endangered local sea birds such as the Brown Booby, Brown Noddy, Abbotts Booby, and Frigate Bird. The rare Abbott’s Booby does not breed anywhere else.

Further news on those surprising microbes that ate much of the oil BP spilled last year in the Gulf of Mexico: The presence of much gas (mainly methane, propane, and ethane) and cold temperatures (the little bugs prefer it to be cold!) were keys to their rapid consumption of the plume. Among unknowns to be studied is how this affected the oil spill.


Metal-Bashing
Indian ship-scrappers bought two double-hull VLCCs for $38 million.

A Japanese shipyard worker in Drydock No. 5 at Yokosuka Naval Base died following an accident involving a US destroyer’s anchor.


Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
In Bangladesh in Bhola province, ten pirates wounded in a gunfight with police were later beaten to death by a mob after police recovered the body of an abducted fisherman.

In the Gulf of Aden, the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker Nordic Apollo radioed that it was under attack by pirates in a small skiff and another vessel reported "suspicious activity by a skiff." A helicopter from destroyer USS Pinckney confirmed that a skiff was carrying the telltale equipment of modern pirates including several ladders, weapons, and fuel containers and the suspected pirates were seen attempting to cover their weapons with blankets and throwing the ladders overboard. As a boarding team approached, they ditched five AK-47 rifles, one rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and three RPG rounds. In the skiff were nine pirate suspects, "one grappling hook, 36 barrels of fuel, and 75 and 45 horsepower outboard engines." The American sailors deep-sixed one of the outboards – to keep the skiff from getting up enough speed to think of coming alongside another merchant ship – but left its crew enough fuel and water to return to shore.


Odd Bits and Headshakers
The mast of his 32-foot sailboat cracked and so the solo American sailor activated his EPIRB, thus ending his seventh attempt to round Cape Horn. He was 84 years old. (The Chilean Navy located him and arranged for the Japanese bulker White Kingdom to pick him up.)

Five hundred feet from its destination, a 130-foot-long 950,000-pound cylinder fell off a barge into 120 feet of water. The cylinder, about 12 feet in diameter and worth several million dollars, was on its way to BP's Cherry Point refinery in northern Puget Sound where it was to be a reactor to create low-sulfur diesel. Two large barge-mounted cranes lifted the cylinder, apparently still OK, and it was delivered to the refinery.

What may be the world’s oldest purpose-built aircraft carrier has been at the Fleet Air Arm’s museum at RNAS Yeovilton for careful restoration and preservation. The 1918 Thorneycroft Seaplane Lighter. once numbered H21, was one of fifty such barges ordered during World War I. Thorneycroft used H21 for years as a cargo barge before it was discarded to rust away on a bank of the River Thames. Towed by a destroyer, each 58-foot barge had a high-speed ship-shaped bow and a stern ramp that allowed launching for water takeoff and subsequent recovery of a Curtis H12 flying boat. Alternatively, a wooden flight deck allowed a Sopwith Camel fighter to take off. It either landed ashore or was ditched.

Technology developed to spot periscopes breaking the surface and missiles skimming across wave tops is now being used by British helicopters to detect Afghan camel trains, pickup trucks, and insurgents on foot dozens of miles away. Drug traffickers and Taliban terrorists are the main targets.