Per his wishes, Neil Armstrong, the first man to set
foot on the moon, will be buried at sea. The US Navy confirmed it would perform
the ceremony, but would not say where, when, or from which ship or whether the
burial will be a full-body burial or a dropping of ashes.
Commercial fishing is the deadliest job in the United
States, topped by the fishermen in the Northeast's multi-species groundfish
(cod, haddock, etc.) and Atlantic-scallop fisheries. They are 37 times more likely
to die on the job than a police officer.
Because there are too many of the largest tankers
(the VLCC) and competition has become cut-throat, owners lose an estimated
$5,700 each day during the return voyage a tanker makes after each hopefully
profitable Mid East-to-Japan voyage. (That figure ignores any benefits from
slow steaming.)
Double hulls decrease the chances that oil and other
contaminants can get into the sea. Required after enactment of Oil Pollution
Act of 1990 (when many foreign experts scoffed at the US insistence on double
hulling), they cost more to build and take up valuable cargo space. Experience
soon showed that it was difficult, and therefore expensive, to control and
repair corrosion damage in the intra-hull void spaces and it also became clear
that the service life of double-hulled ships might be shorter than of
equivalent single-hull ships. Recently, government attention has focused on the
energy and air-pollution aspects, and OPA 90 may end up being rewritten.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Off
Cuba about 500 meters offshore between Mariel and Vista al Mar, the
container ship Hansa Berlin ran aground. The crewmembers were evacuated by
helicopter and were lodged in a hotel in Havana. In New Orleans, two tugs waiting for possible work
quietly sank one night. A lone watchman escaped safely. The owner is a
marine-salvage firm and will probably use one of its derrick barges to refloat
the two tugs. In Chile, the bulker Ocean Breeze went ashore after its
anchor chain broke. Parallel to the beach, the stranded ship provided
spectators with spectacular sights as surf-created spray spouted many times
higher than the mast tops.
At
Singapore, the bulk carrier Sunny Horizon collided with the LPG
gas carrier DL Salvia in the Temasek Fairway, about 700 meters east of
Sultan Shoal. The bunker tank on DL Salvia was breached but less than
60 metric tons of bunker escaped.
When the bulker Lucy Oldendorff arrived at Tauranga, New Zealand, the crew reported there had been
a fire in a hold carrying palm kernels four days earlier but they had
extinguished it with CO2. But smoke started coming from the same hold and so
conditions there were monitored by infrared cameras and smoke detectors while
the ship’s crew removed the palm kernels by crane. In the end, shorebased
firefighters were needed. In a Croatian repair yard, sparks from welding
started a fire on the crude-oil tanker Nordic Passat and three welders had
to be rescued by firefighters. At Lyttelton (the port for Christchurch) in New
Zealand, firefighters cut a hole in the side of the drydocked trawler Ocean
Breeze to get at a fire inside. It burned for twelve hours and leaking
ammonia remained a peril afterwards.
Alaskan Coast Guard medevacs are usually featured here but other
Coasties were busy A chopper medevaced a young woman off the Carnival
Elation some 250 miles south of Mobile, Alabama. Her kidneys had failed
after missing a routine dialysis treatment. And another Alaskan chopper lifted
the chief mate off the tanker Dreggen after he suffered a groin
injury when his pants got “caught in a spindle.” (No further explanation was
available.) But the Alaskan Coast Guard choppers were busy too. In one day they
did two medevacs of mariners with heart attack symptoms on container ships. One
was on the BBC Denmark originally about 585 miles southwest of Dutch
Harbor and the next was on the APL China originally about 420 miles
southwest of Kodiak. (In both cases, the ships steamed closer so as to reduce
the range.) Then an Alaskan chopper took an elderly female off the Diamond
Princess. She was showing signs of a possible blocked femoral artery.
Elsewhere, some seventy miles off Cornwall in sea state 8, forty-foot (12m) swells, and
atrocious visibility, a Royal Navy helicopter finally managed to find a
20-foot sailboat after searching for over an hour when the lone sailor lit off
a flare. He had injured an ankle while trying to repair mast and rigging. In
his haste to get off, he jumped overboard, and that did not make this rescue
any easier. Closer to shore, the cross-Channel ferry Armorique
and the container ship Maersk Patras stood by as a Royal
Navy helicopter lifted the crew of the sunken Brixham-based fishing vessel Chloe
T from a liferaft. In Switzerland, a survey boat with four aboard was
mapping the Rhine River near Basel’s port when it ran into a Belgian container
barge. A Swiss helicopter plucked three surveyors out of the River but one died
of his injuries. In the Seychelles, the three-man crew of the ferry Le
Cerf were rescued by a searching yacht four hours after the ferry sank.
They had used their cell phones to direct rescuers but it was the glare of a
searchlight that helped make the final connection.
Typhoon Bolaven broke the
empty bulker Pacific Carrier in half while it was anchored in South Korea.
The vessel was in lay-up after a collision with the container ship Hyundai
Confidence last year.
In Baltimore, the tanker Wawasan Ruby was heading
for a berth in Curtis Bay when it hit a coal-loading structure. The resulting
“substantial damage” was estimated at $5 million in repairs and lost business.
In New York harbor, a couple fishing from their modest dinghy had to jump into
Jamaica Bay when they were run down by a 600-hp NYPD patrol boat. They claimed
both coppers were using their cellphones but one officer explained he ran into
their boat while turning his head “to look at the rear of the vessel to ensure
his wake was reduced.” The couple are
suing. It took the artist a year to create a giant horseshoe crab sculpture and
arrange for its sinking as part of an artificial reef off New Jersey but a
strap broke as it was being lowered to the bottom and it flipped upside. Then
two small supporting barges landed on top of it. But it still attracts fish,
and that was the idea. Liberia’s president was denied an afternoon cruise when
the gangway of the coastal transport Diallo & Macedo jammed. His day
was doubly worse because he had to wait for an hour after his arrival before
two tugboats brought the vessel to the pier.
Gray Fleets
In the Arabian Sea,
thirteen starving crewmen radioed a passing US Naval patrol plane for help
because pirates had stripped the Iranian dhow Pavam of its supplies.
The destroyer USS Hue City provided medical help for two of the crew plus 50
gallons of fuel, 70 gallons of water, and food. (If you are curious about
Arabian diets, the “food” consisted of four bags of rice and six cans of kidney
beans.)
The guided-missile
destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill responded to a distress radio call
from the bulker Belde, and rendered medical assistance approximately 110 miles
north of Socotra Island, Oman. The injury was caused in a cargo-handling
accident. An embarked helicopter took the injured man to an Oman medical
facility for treatment.
The commanding officer of the ballistic-missile submarine
USS
Rhode Island became aware of onboard cheating problems during training
examinations for nuclear-submarine operations and he temporarily relieved of
duty one of his engineers. After investigations, he was reinstated without
disciplinary action.
The US Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship has a “core”
crew of forty to operate its highly automated systems but a Navy study revealed
that the crew was over-taxed in port and exhausted underway. More berths have
been added but it is not clear whether the crew size will be increased
The world’s oldest commissioned warship, the frigate USS
Constitution, set sail once again, this time using three sails and
travelling 1,100 yards in seventeen minutes. The event
commemorated the 200th anniversary of her victory over the British frigate HMS
Guerriere during the War of 1812, the first time a United States ship
defeated a Royal Navy frigate of nearly equal size. It was also the battle in
which the ship earned her nickname of “Old Ironsides.” The last
preceding sail was in 1997 during its 200th birthday and six sails
were set then. During a 1927-1934 nation-wide tour by Ironsides, a full set of
sails was installed but they were set just once and, by chance or plan, that
day was dead calm.
The Royal Navy discovered that it had overpaid more
than 400 tars and wants the money back. Current service people will have their
pay docked up to four days a month until each debt (up to £17,000) is paid.
The Dutch Navy will search for the wreck of the
Dundee-based World War Two submarine O-13 (Onderzeeboot 13) that disappeared more than 70 years ago. It escaped
from Holland during the German invasion in May 1940 to join the Royal Navy but
failed to return from a mission in the North Sea a month later.
An inquest revealed the intimate details of a suicide
on the minesweeper HMS Cattistock. A British seaman shot himself in the head on the
minesweeper HMS Hurworth in February of 2010 and that devastated a close
friend. He sought counseling and was taking sleeping pills and anti-depressants
but when he was cruelly taunted by senior shipmates (“not shot yourself yet?”
for example), he also shot himself.
White Fleets
The cruise ship Volendam was among ships that
responded when the far-smaller (79-foot overall) sightseeing vessel Baranoff
Winds ran aground in Alaska’s Glacier Bay. The Volendam took off seventy
of the 76 persons aboard. Back in the US mainland, the
coastal cruise ship Yorktown ran aground in the Detroit River, giving its 120
passengers something extra for their money. A tugboat soon pulled it free. On
Ontario’s Lake Simcoe, the excursion vessel Serendipity Princess
caught the corner of a dock and stopped dead. People went flying and two were
taken to a hospital. The boat has a capacity of 265 passengers and tours
Kempenfelt Bay off Lake Simcoe every day. In Venice, wind gusts up to 70 miles
per hour pulled the Carnival Breeze away from the pier during embarkation but
nobody was on the gangways at the time. Tugs re-docked the ship about an hour
later.
The Jewel
of the Seas hit an overhead power cable while sailing into the port of
Klaksvik in the Faroe Islands of Denmark. A seaman was injured by falling
debris and the mast and equipment on it suffered too. A company spokeswoman
later explained,” All the navigational tools and charts we use to plan our
voyage, including information we obtained from the local port authorities and
harbor master in advance of our arrival, indicated we had enough clearance to
pass under the cable."
Touring the US Inland rivers will be the new paddlewheel
steamer Queen of the Mississippi
as soon as it is christened.
Those That
Go Back and Forth
In Boston’s outer harbor, Nix’s Mate has a beacon
marking a cross-channel connecting the two main shipping channels. It is a
mini-island made from granite blocks and is topped with a prominent pyramidal
beacon. It’s big for a beacon but a master-in-training managed to run the fast
catamaran ferry Provincetown II aground on it with a screech. (Thick fog and
perhaps radar’s minimum-range limitation were mostly to blame.) None of the 149
on board was harmed and the company quickly explained, “The
fault is ours completely, and we bear the responsibility fully.” (Nix’s Mate was originally eleven or
twelve acres in extent but got smaller as ballast and, later, slate were mined.
In the 1700’s it was a place where pirates were executed and their bodies then
gibbeted. One was pirate chief
William Fly who scolded the hangman for incorrectly securing his noose, then
re-tied it himself.)
In Pakistan, outlaws who use Tarbela Lake to smuggle
timber have expanded their activities. Three outlaw passengers on a ferry on
the River Indus suddenly drew guns and relieved nearly thirty passengers of
their cash, mobile phones, wristwatches, and other valuables. Then they forced
the ferry to sail close to the riverbank and hopped ashore.
In China, a ferry carrying nineteen struck an
obstacle in the turbulent Xiyang River in the Guangnan county of Yunnan
province and capsized. Six went missing. And elsewhere in that massive nation,
a ferry carrying 21 people and 10 vehicles sank. Four days later, three bodies,
a truck, a taxi, and a Honda SUV had been retrieved. In southern China in
Xishuangbanna on the rain-swollen Mekong River, a ferry capsized when caught in
the strong current and swept off course. The ferry was overloaded with
motorcycles and other cargo plus 23 people, mostly Burmese schoolchildren. The
fourteen missing included nine schoolkids. Finally, the Yangtze claimed
thirteen lives and some trucks when a not-overloaded ferry carrying 21 people
sank in Anhui province.
In the Philippines, the Super Shuttle Ferry 15
lost power one night and drifted ashore off the town of Merida in Leyte. Most
passengers were transferred to the Super Shuttle Ferry 23 but six
remained on board since they drove embarked trucks. Super Shuttle 23 returned to the
scene to attempt to free its fleetmate.
Nature
Drought in the US Midwest meant less water for the
rivers and less grain to be barged, Unless it really rains upstream, the
Mississippi River is expected to stay low through October but will not reach
record lows. But water levels got low enough that a river bottom wedge of
saltwater started creeping upstream, threatening the water supply for New
Orleans. The US Army Corps of engineers quickly constructed a temporary
underwater barrier sill at Mile 64 Above the Head of the Passes.) The sill was
sized so that a draft of 45 feet is maintained for shipping. Similar sills were
built in 1988 and 1999.
In New Zealand, ironsands from its beaches are wet
into a slurry and pumped to an offshore tanker and they are important in making
superior types of steel in Japan and China. But Kiwis could be $1.3 billion
richer if the Chatham Rock Phosphate resource was developed, said an economic
research agency. All that would be needed would be to mine the 25 million-ton
rock phosphate deposit—but it is 400 meters deep on the Chatham Rise, only 450
km from New Zealand and 150 km from the Chatham Islands.
And there are even more ways Kiwis could get rich.
There are commercial mineral deposits on the Campbell Plateau, and potentially
valuable sites lie along several arcs of active and extinct seabed volcanic
activity. Their active underwater volcanoes, or “black smokers,” present a
tantalizing long-term prospect because their polymetallic sulphide “smoke”
contains iron, manganese, gold, silver, copper, and zinc, and the smokers’
deposits are self-replenishing.
Metal-Bashing
Removal of the cruise ship Costa Concordia from its
rocky berth near Giglio, Italy will take longer than previously announced. Look for it to be afloat again some time next
Spring.
Imports
A refugee boat with 150 on board capsized and sank
west of Java. Searchers found only 55 survivors. To give an idea of the
resources used, here were the searching vessels (figures in parentheses are the
number of survivors picked up): HMAS Maitland (34), APL
Bahrain (15), AS Carelia (4), Gwendolyn (1), Da
Qing Xia (1), Chemroute, Forever South West, Voyage
Explorer, Frontier Coronet, Pelafigue Tide, World Swan. Vessel types included a patrol boat, several
container ships, a tanker, bulkers, and an anchor-handler.
Nasties and
Territorial Imperatives
Off Somalia, piracy was virtually nil, with no attacks
against commercial vessels and only one attack on a local dhow. (It was
thwarted by naval forces.) But one hostage was executed on the bulker Orna,
which was hijacked off Seychelles in 2010 and is being used as a pirate
mothership. "The killing was a message to the owners of the ship who paid
no heed to our ransom demands," explained a pirate commander.
The Gulf of Guinea off Africa’s west coast was the
piracy hot spot. Hijacking product tankers off Nigeria must be profitable
because three hijackings took place. First was the Energy Centurion, and
about 3,000 tons of gas oil (worth about US$3 million) and ship’s equipment and
crew valuables were stolen before the ship was released. Next was an
unidentified Greek-operated oil tanker seized off Togo. Last was
the
Abu Dhabi Star, whose crew took to a citadel while radioing for help.
The pirates fled when the Nigerian Navy (or Togolese Navy; accounts vary)
intervened. All three hijackings may be the work of one sophisticated crime
cartel, and hijacked cargoes are often unloaded to another tanker and sold on
the region’s illegal fuel market.
Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
To dock the
ever-larger container ships coming into service, some harbor tugs being built
in the US will have massive bollard pulls of more than 90 tons. (In
1979, Falmouth Towage Company, a firm in the southwest of England, had five
respectably competent tugs with a combined bollard pull of just 70 tons. But
ships were far smaller then.)
A new anti-fouling treatment being tested on the
Dutch salvage tug Willem-B Sr is a self-adhesive textured film, not a chemical
that has to be re-applied periodically. The short fibers of the film provide a
physical barrier to mussels, barnacles, and algae.
During equipment testing, the commercial research ship Falkor spotted the wreck
of ship Terra
Nova, a whaler, sealer, and polar exploration ship that sank off the
southern coast of Greenland in September, 1943, after being damaged by ice
while carrying military supplies. A century ago, the historic exploration vessel carried
Captain Robert Scott to the Antarctic for his doomed and fruitless expedition
to the South Pole.
Retrieving HMS Hood’s bell was postponed due to
bad weather and strong currents after ten days of attempts from billionaire
Paul Allen’s mega-yacht Octopus. HMS Hood was sunk in the
Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland by plunging fire from the German
battleship Bismarck on 24 May 1941. (However, many believe it was an
8-inch shell from the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen that actually
caused the Hood to blow up.)
The Brit was UK-bound from the Azores but he and his
sailboat Elixir had been beaten-up by ten days of bad weather. His Mayday
call was answered by the Russian destroyer Vice-Admiral
Kulakov. Its crew
repaired his electronics and got the engine started (they couldn’t do much for
a torn mainsail) while the yachtsman gulped down hot food and drugs and then
motored onwards. The Russians also notified the British coastguard of the
situation and the indomitable lone sailor was later taken off by a coastguard
cutter. He was 83 years old.
