Neil Armstrong’s cremated remains were dropped at an unknown
location into the Atlantic Ocean during a Navy burial-at-sea military service aboard
the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea.
The ship’s master was not included when the crew of the wrecked
cruise ship Costa Concordia was awarded Lloyd's List "Seafarer of the Year"
award for 2012 for displaying "true examples of courage and professionalism"
during the dangerous night evacuation of the ship.
Opening of the widened Panama Canal in 2015 will lead to “fierce”
competition among US ports for inbound containers but should present opportunities
for increasing exports. But probable after-effects from a possible longshoremen’s
strike at East and Gulf coast container ports next year are already causing shippers
to review their plans on how to best use the Canal.
US crude-oil and product
imports hit the lowest levels in a decade but tanker exports of products
were booming.
About two-thirds of the US has been
enduring drought conditions and the cost might be $77 billion, making the drought
the third-costliest natural disaster in US history after Hurricane Katrina in 2005
and another devastating drought in 1988.
About every three days, a cargo vessel, tanker, or passenger
ship is involved in an accident somewhere in the Baltic Sea. Last year, 121 ships
ran aground, collided, caught fire, or were involved in some other type of mishap.
An international tug company cited
lower volumes of shipping and increased costs as reasons for upping towage fees
at one Australian port by a whopping 54 percent. (The tug company has no competitors
at that port.)
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Off Valencia, the smallish container ships Celia
and BSLE Sunrise dragged their anchors and went aground in a violent rainstorm with heavy swell and wind gusts
to 77 km/h (about 48 mph). Welding sparked a fire that killed five crewmen and a
fireman on a tanker possibly named the Shun Cheng while it was anchored in the
Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam. At New Orleans, authorities notified anchored ships
that their rudders may have set into the soft mud near the riverbanks while swinging
at anchorage but no damage to steering apparatus was anticipated. Blamed was low-water
conditions on the Mississippi. At Finnsnesrenna in Norway, the small Straumvik
carrying 380 tons of salmon and a crew of four ran aground after passing the fairway
light on the wrong side. It suffered a gash in a ballast tank. The news account
did not specify whether the salmon were alive or dead.
It is embarrassing when your car hits a police vehicle so imagine
the feelings on the Canadian laker John
D. Leitch when it struck a pier and a Lorain County Sheriff’s
Office boat while traveling the Black River near Lorain. Ohio. Breathalyzer tests
of the captain and crewmembers were negative.
Fire broke out in a container carrying hazardous and toxic substances
so the Amsterdam Bridge was moved to the outer anchorage at Mumbai Port
for some serious firefighting. Most of the ship-based conflagration was extinguished
within three days but containers smoldered on for at least another month. A major
fire ravaged the New Zealand-based fishing vessel Amaltal Columbia at sea but
the vessel was safely towed into Lyttelton.
About forty miles off South Devon, the master of the German-owned
coaster Krempertor went down into a hold to investigate an alarm that was
sounding. He died of injuries suffered in a fall there. Police treated the accident
as “avoidable.” About 900 km east of Japan, the 119-ton tuna-fishing vessel Horiei
was run down by the 25,000-ton bulker Nikkei Tiger. The larger vessel could
find
only nine of 22 fishermen. The smallish sand-carrying Fairland
ran aground in the Demerara (think rum because that’s where it comes from)
River in eastern Guyana. During efforts to free the ship,
it was necessary to move a crane and a hydraulic line burst, causing the crane’s
boom to fall and hit a plank that struck the chief mate on his leg. He fell, fatally
hitting his head.
At the Port of Indiana, the laker Algoma Transport was unloading
26,000 tons of iron ore concentrate onto a pier when the pier started cracking and
collapsing. Loading stopped. In the south China port of Gaolan, while being unloaded
from the semi-submersible heavy-lift ship Zhen Hua 12, a 1,700-ton unloader fell
into the water and hit the ship, punching two holes in its hull. Mis-ballasting
of the ship as the unloader was being moved ashore was the probable cause. The unloader
may have been one of seven coal unloaders recently bought by the port.
In the South China Sea, the tug Swiber Charlton spotted and
picked up a floating Thai fisherman. Little else is known except his name was Montri
Srirak and he summed up his gratitude by saying, “I am thankful that Swiber
Charlton saved my life. Everyone treated me well." In Alaska, a forward-deployed
Coast Guard helicopter took a male with heart-attack symptoms off the Harvey
Spirit, a 245-foot offshore supply boat some 134 miles west of Barrow. Off
Cornwall, a lone yachtsman fell off the Regulus but he had a personal electronic
locator beacon on him and was picked up by a Royal Navy helicopter an hour later.
In South Carolina in Charleston harbor, a Coast Guard small boat took a crewman
off the geared bulker Clipper Tenacious after he started suffering
abdominal pains as the ship neared port. On the other side of the world in the Java
Sea, the bulker Clipper Mayflower picked up two injured survivors of a sunken immigrant
boat and later received praise for its role as on-site communications coordinator.
The remaining 78 survivors were picked up by Australian defense vessels and taken
to Christmas Island for sorting out.(One might assume the two Clippers
are fleetmates but the Mayflower is Danish-owned and the Tenacious
is owned out of Nassau. Both are Bahamas-flagged, however.)
Gray Fleets
Airships were in the news last month. The US Navy is back into
operating blimps – well, at least one blimp. The East Coast-based non-rigid airship
MZ-3A
is a manned platform for testing sensors that could be used on a future US Army
airship. (The US Army ordered "up to three" of Northrop Grumman's Long
Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicles (LEMV) in a $517m deal in 2010. They should
see service in Afghanistan this year.)
The Thai Army seems to have purchased an airship back in 2009.
It is not yet operational but could be by November. Critics claimed its sensors
cannot see into Thailand’s deep jungles because the system was designed for desert
regions such as Afghanistan. It is known that fixes were needed to US-supplied cameras
and a video streaming system.
Finally, the Royal Navy was briefed on possible British-built
airships for surveillance and supply carrying. At only £50 million each and filled
with an explosion-proof 60 percent helium / 40 percent air mix, an airship could
carry 150 commandos and their boats or 50 tons of supplies. Best of all, it could
even be remotely operated as a drone.
There are no color bars in the US Navy, at least in the upper
ranks. Rear Adm. Brian Brown relieved Rear Adm. Jonathan White as head of the Naval
Meteorology and Oceanography Command.
The CO of the nuclear submarine USS Pittsburgh was relieved
of command of the sub a week after taking command. He had dumped his mistress by
sending her an email from a fictitious fellow-worker saying he had unexpectedly
died. She learned the truth when she visited his former residence to offer condolences
and was told he had moved to Connecticut to take command of a submarine. Charges
included dereliction of duty, adultery, and unbecoming conduct.
The US Navy awarded a $94 million contract for advance planning
and preliminary execution of fire-restoration efforts on USS Miami. The sub was damaged
in a fire in May while it was drydocked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery,
Maine, and estimates of repair costs are currently at the $650 million level.
The US Military Sealift Command uses civilians to operate many
non-combat Navy and governmental vessels. Most MSC ships can be identified by the
USNS prefix to their names but four retain the USS prefix and remain in commission
because they have a US Navy Captain in charge. They are the submarine tenders USS Frank
Cable and USS Emory S. Land, the command ship USS Mount Whitney, and the
newly created Afloat Forward Staging Base (Interim) USS Ponce.
The Royal Navy’s Sea King helicopters
will be taken out of service in 2016, leaving as much as a four-year gap in airborne
early warning capability until 2020 when replacement airborne surveillance and control
helicopters should become operational.
The Iranian Kilo-class
attack submarine Tareq needed repairs but the original Russian builders declined
the work (no comment) so Iranian personnel repaired the radars, pneumatic and compressor
systems, pumps, engines, telecommunications, and other systems.
Delivery to the Indian Navy of the aircraft carrier INS
Vikramaditya (formerly the Russian Navy’s Admiral Gorshkov) has been deferred yet again to October 2013.
On sea trials, seven out of eight boilers providing propulsion steam were defective.
Why, one may ask? Read on! According to a Russian spokesman, India had refused to
use asbestos as a means to protect the boilers from heat, fearing that the material
was dangerous for the crew and the boilers’ designer had to use firebrick, which
proved not sufficiently heatproof. (Firebrick is used to line boilers and asbestos
is used externally to keep heat in pipes and people from being burned by hot surfaces.)
In spite of Congressional disapproval, the US Navy is dead-set
on achieving non-dependence on fossil fuels. US Navy scientists are hot on the trail
on making fuel from seawater. Extract carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas from seawater
and then use catalysts to convert them into J5 jet fuel. (J5 has been proposed as
the energy source for all Navy operations, including fighter jets as well as shipboard
boilers, diesels, and marine gas turbines.) One drawback to the process is that
producing the hydrogen “requires nearly 60 percent of the amount of energy that
would be stored in the liquid hydrocarbon fuel” but nuclear-powered ships could
produce a lot of electricity and seawater is cheap.
And is the unused runway on Ford Island at Pearl Harbor a significant
historical site that should be preserved as a memorial to Dec 7, 1941 or can it
be used as the site of a 60,000-panel solar-panel farm? The runway and the rest
of Ford Island were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 but the Navy
says, “it is an inactive space that is ideally located and sized“ and it is “critically
important to achieving renewable energy mandates.”
White Fleets
Several cruise lines eliminated planned calls at North African
ports because of Muslim protests about an anti-Islamic film posted on the Internet.
In Maine, a cruise-ship tender carrying 93 passengers from the cruise ship Celebrity Summit ran abruptly
aground at night on a remote shoal off Bar. Harbor. The whale-watch boat Bay King
III and the pilot boat Frenchman Bay took off the passengers
and two crewmembers. In Vietnam, five Taiwanese tourists heading back to their ship
died when their tender named Paradise collided with the tourist boat
Dong
Phong 02. Thirteen other tourists survived their expulsion from paradise.
In Bermuda, passengers watched mooring lines snap as 45-knot winds (52 miles per
hour) pushed the Norwegian Star into the Explorer of the Seas at the next berth.
Two tugs eventually pushed the Norwegian Star back into position. Both
vessels suffered some hull damage. (Two of Bermuda’s three government tugs were
recently out of service.) Off Portugal, the Queen Victoria suffered problems
in one propulsion unit so the cruise ship headed for Bremerhaven for repairs that
would enable it to achieve the speeds required on its next cruise.
A Portuguese cruise company went into bankruptcy when three of
its five ships were arrested, and those arrests stranded at least 550 Ukrainian,
Indonesian, and Portuguese seafarers without their pay. The 1948-built Athena
was originally the Swedish Stockholm that infamously collided with
the Italian liner Andrea Doria in 1956. The Princess Danae was converted from the
cargo liner Port Melbourne, and in
September this year the Yugoslavian-built Arion, although highly rated by some
passengers, was named the “worst-performing small cruise ship” among 300 cruise
ships.
Those That Go Back and
Forth
At Hong Kong off Lamma Island, the ferry-turned-into-excursion
boat-for-a-night Lamma IV and the ferry Sea Smooth collided although the night
was clear. The damaged ferry continued on, its master fearing it might sink. The
other, smaller vessel was holed in its engineroom and quickly sank stern-first with
only its bow thrusting upwards above water. It had been chartered to take company
employees and their families to watch fireworks celebrating China’s National Day
and thirty-seven of them died while 100-plus were taken to local hospitals. (A nine-year-old
later died of her injuries.) Crewmembers from both vessels were arrested, and even
the highest levels of disciplined Hong Kong were upset and stunned by the rare accident.
On the Mahakam River in Indonesia’s portion of Borneo island
the wooden ferryboat Surya Indah carrying 97 crew and passengers
upstream hit a log and sank. Twenty-two people died and at least fourteen others
were missing.
“The ship was made in 2001 and is really seaworthy. According to
the boat manifest, the passengers only numbered 40 and there were 10 tons of goods,”
explained port official. But other reports said 112 people might have been on board.
Off Sumatra, the ro/pax Bahuga Jaya sank after colliding with
the LPG-carrying Norgas Cathinka. The tanker left the scene because its master though
leaking gas might cause a catastrophic explosion and fire. Eight died, 207 were
rescued, and the master and chief officer of the Norgas Cathinka were accused
of negligence. The accident led to increased calls for a bridge connecting Java
and Sumatra. In New Zealand, a ferry serving Waiheke Island inadvertently surged
forward (a crew-at-the-throttle goof) and the gangway broke, leaving a man dangling
off the bow and in the water, Luckily, his four-year-old son wasn’t involved. The
new freight ferry Huelin Dispatch touched bottom hard enough to cause leaks. It was
on its maiden voyage from Southampton to the Channel Islands.
Legal Matters
Arresting a nation’s largest sail-training vessel in a foreign
country will get attention. That happened to the Argentine Navy’s square-rigged
Libertad
in Ghana. The court order was sought by creditors suing Argentina in international
courts after Argentina declared a world-record sovereign debt default during an
economic meltdown a decade ago. Bondholders want to recover the full value of the
defaulted bonds and have sought to freeze state assets. The Libertad
qualified as such.
Nature
Although fishing was stopped three years ago, sonar surveys by an experienced
fisherman revealed that the fish populations of tilapia and sardines in the Sea
of Galilee (aka Lake Kinneret) have risen to “very optimistic” levels.
Shell had hoped to do some serious drilling in the Alaskan Arctic
but decided to limit efforts to drilling shallow “top holes” that won’t reach oil-bearing
depths and wait for next year.
Could rising sea temperatures be melting methane hydrates, which
remain frozen in a seabed under very low temperatures and very high pressures? Scientists
investigated methane vents near Spitzbergen and decided that at least some of the
gas outlets had been active for a long time since carbonate deposits, which form
when microorganisms convert the escaping methane, were found on the vents.
Metal Bashing
What keeps some ships afloat? You might be surprised. After 51 years of distinguished
service, USS Enterprise (CVN 65) will be decommissioned later this
year. One of its nuclear-powerplant engineers walked under the ship while it was
drydocked during a mid-life extension program many years ago. Intrigued by something
sticking down, he discovered that someone had sealed a hull opening with a wooden
plug. It may still be there.
The former 31-year-old former Royal Navy flagship HMS Ark
Royal was sold to a Turkish scrap metal firm for £3 million. Alternative
bids would have turned the warship into a diving reef, a helipad in the Thames,
a museum, or a casino were “judged either not feasible or appropriate, or carried
too much risk.” The Ark Royal was withdrawn from service last year five years early
as part of sweeping military cutbacks.
Imports
A boat carrying illegal
emigrants sank halfway to its destination of Lampedusa Island and Italian authorities
arrested two survivors, probably the master and his assistant. That particular tragedy
triggered creation of an investigative committee. On it are Italy’s Minster of the
Interior and Tunisia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. (Lampedusa has become illegal
immigrants’ entry to Europe and thousands of illegals are camping out on the island.)
Nasties and Territorial
Imperatives
The Thai Navy (using five vessels and two helicopters) plus five
other governmental agencies arrested 108 Vietnamese fishermen on ten trawlers that
had been catching giant cuttlefish in Thai waters.
Odd Bits and
Head-Shakers
Six British and Australian adventurers will attempt to authentically
re-enact Sir Ernest Shackleton's incredible boat voyage from Elephant Island to
South Georgia, followed by the difficult crossing of its mountainous interior. Their
22-and-a-half-foot (6.86-metre-long) boat is a precise replica of the James
Caird. Her crew will also endure the hardships of that age, wearing clothing
of the time. (How “authentic” can the replica voyage really be? If memory serves,
the Caird’s
cockpit held only three and that meant Shackleton’s off-duty men spent many hours
below shivering in slimy, mouldering reindeer-skin sleeping bags awash in the bilge
water, and with loose reindeer hairs everywhere including in their food and mouths.
And when it came time to climb, they improvised mountain-climbing boots by carefully
inserting small brass screws into the soles of their leather boots.) BTW, this replica
boat is not to be confused with the state-of-the-art survey motor boat James
Caird IV carried aboard HMS Protector, Britain’s Antarctic protection
vessel.
A small-boater was killed in Mississippi when his 23-foot center-console
fishing boat struck "an unidentified object" east of Deer Island in the
Mississippi Sound. That broke his outboard motor free and it flipped up and into
the boat, where the propeller hit him in the back. He died while rescuers were trying
to get him to a hospital. Most probably, he hit a dredge pipe floating just below
the surface that carried slurried spoils to a remote deposit site.
At one political party’s national convention, a patriotic tribute
by a retired admiral to fellow veterans inadvertently featured four Soviet Navy
vessels.
One sometimes wonders at the ads created by advertising agencies
and reviewed and paid for by their clients. Take, for example, the current ad by
an engine maker. The headline reads “Go with the generator that works as hard as
you do.” The illustration shows four fishermen, seated and standing but all idly
staring back at the FV’s turbulent wake.
