Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Other Shores – July 2012

The US Navy has been a leader in using green fuels and this summer an entire aircraft carrier strike group will be experimentally powered by 450,000 gallons of fuel made from chicken fat and other waste greases, algae, and perhaps even mustard seeds. But it may be the last time the Navy ever uses biofuels. The House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying any alternative fuel that costs more than a “traditional fossil fuel” – and environmentally friendly fuels cost about four times more than the traditional fuels made from “dirty” petroleum.

“It's cheaper to ship three bushels of grain – that would be about 180 pounds – from Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico by water than it is to buy a first-class postage stamp…. each barge holds 1,200 tons, that's equivalent to 60 semi-trailer trucks worth of material. Twelve barges are pushed out at a time. So, a towboat with a crew of 10 is pushing the equivalent of 720 semis trailer trucks. That's why it's cheap," explained a Midwest shipping expert.

When the engine of the bulker ID Integrity failed while well off Australia’s shores, greenies got publicly worried that the drifting ship would mess up the Great Barrier Reef. Australia’s premier wasn’t worried, though. “The green groups’ theory is that the more ships that you have going around then the more accidents you have,’’ he said. “If that was the case then people would be involved in far more plane crashes today than we saw 20 years ago, and clearly that’s not the case.”

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In the Solomons, the interisland freighter Solfish 001 sank and four days later a search plane spotted survivors in life rafts. Forty-nine were picked up by the Micronesian Pride.

In thick fog, the Japanese fishing trawler Eihatsu Maru plowed up onto Cape Town’s exclusive Clifton Beach and subsequently was driven farther ashore. An attempt by the Smit Amandla, one of the world’s most powerful tugs, failed when the tow wire snapped and another attempt failed when a shipboard fitting started to rip away. Installation of a special bracket solved that problem and the FV was eventually removed.

Although two tugs were assisting, the palm oil-laden tanker Stena Conqueror somehow managed to chew up a wooden pier at Brake (a small river port south of Bremenhaven).

An explosion caused by welding on the container ship MSC Idil left it drifting and listing off Puerto Rico. Hull cracks let in water but no oil escaped. A US salvage firm made temporary repairs and, eleven days after the explosion, the ship continued to Freeport, Bahamas for further assessments of the ship’s condition.

At Gdynia in Poland, three technical-types were injured, two seriously, when the container ship Stena Spirit allided with a container crane and caused it to collapse. The three men were unfortunate enough to be working on the crane at the time. A longshoreman was killed while unloading bananas at Port Manatee, Florida when a 5,500-pound crane basket fell on him. In Texas, at a Houston Ship Channel work site, a forklift was loading a truck when a pipe rolled off the forks and killed the truck driver standing on the other side of his vehicle. In Seattle, two workers were killed on the same day. One collapsed while power washing a large fishing boat and may have been the victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. The other was a forklift driver who was crushed between a forklift and a container. In British Columbia’s famed and feared Skookumchuck Narrows, where water levels can differ by two meters from one end to the other and currents can exceed 19 mph, two female volunteers died when a Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue rigid-bottom inflatable flipped during a training session. They were trapped underneath. Two male trainees were saved by a nearby boat.

White Fleets
In Wenzhou City, part of China’s Zhejiang Province, four tugboats were pulling the newbuild floating hotel No. 7 Mingzhu Cruise when it grazed the underside of the Wenzhou Highway Bridge, setting the suspension central span swaying. The master later admitted that he had forgotten to take into consideration the lack of passengers and the high tide. The unpowered, seven-deck (seven story?) vessel suffered damage to its two funnels.

Miss the newly compulsory pre-sailing muster drill on a cruise ship now and you will be sent ashore. Even if you are 90 and your wife is 84. Happened on the Seabourn Sojourn recently. (She refused to attend because “she had done it before.”)

Those That Go Back and Forth
At Poole in Dorset, the owner of the small motorboat Katie Emma dropped off his son and a male friend onto the Sandbanks chain ferry to make free use of its toilets. When the engine of the small craft failed, a strong tide threatened to suck it under the ferry and a girlfriend became stranded on a narrow ledge on the ferry. The Poole inshore lifeboat came to the rescue, she was coaxed off her perch, and one assumes the boys weren’t left on the ferry.

It took a barge-mounted crane to remove the fast ferry Maverick Dos, which was completely out of the water atop the small Balearic Island of Sa Torreta. It had run up there at night while carrying 21 passengers from Ibiza to Formentera. (One was slightly injured.)

A woman jumped off the Seattle-Bremerton auto ferry. The ferry crew, well trained for such common events, quickly got her back on board and the ferry returned to Seattle and a waiting ambulance. At Quincy, Massachusetts, a tank-truck driver died after he opened a gate so he could refuel a ferry and the truck rolled back, pinning him between it and the gate.

In the UK, a mourning party was respectfully scattering the ashes of a deceased off the stern of the Shields river ferry when some ashes blew over nearby passengers. One protested to a conductor and was told to ”get a life.” The party had notified ferry officials before boarding the ferry.

Nature
Five non-West Virginians protested mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia by locking themselves onto a barge at Kanawa County, West Virginia. They carried a banner saying, “Coal leaves, cancer stays.” No word on whether the banner itself stayed behind when they were arrested for trespassing and obstruction of justice.

In Sweden south of Öland, Greenpeace activists boarded the icebreaker Nordica to protest Shell’s plans to drill oil wells in the Far North. The Nordica, under contract to Shell, was heading to Alaska to join sister ship Fennica in supporting the drillships Kulluk and Noble Discoverer that will drill five exploratory wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Odd Bits and Headshakers
The pilot in control of the container ship Cosco Busan in 2009 when it sideswiped a San Francisco bridge in heavy fog and caused a massive oil spill wants his license back so he can become a tugboat captain. So far, the Coast Guard has said NO.

The search for missing aviatrix Amelia Earhart resumes this summer with some US government support. The focus will be on a steep and craggy underwater mountainside to the west of the island of Nikumaroro, a former British colony that is today part of the republic of Kiribati. British colonial records in Fiji reported the discovery of the partial skeleton of a castaway who perished shortly before the island was settled in 1938. The site was dotted with the remains of small fires on which birds, fish, turtles, and even rats had been cooked. Previous research trips have turned up parts of aluminum skin from an aircraft, plexiglass from a cockpit, a zip made in Pennsylvania in the mid-1930s, a broken pocketknife of the same make as listed in an inventory of Earhart's aircraft, and the remains of a 1930s woman's compact.

An upside-down catamaran that washed ashore at Surfside Beach in South Carolina was identified as the racing sailboat Région Aquitaine - Port Médoc that had flipped while returning from a race to the Bahamas in December, 2010. The crew was rescued.

The stately row barge leading the Queen’s Pageant on the Thames was not as ancient as it appeared. True, it has eighteen rowers but it also has two electric motors. And it was launched only two months ago. Owned by a maritime corporation, its commodious deckhouse will see usage in royal occasions and corporate events.