The UK’s oldest shipping company, Stephenson Clarke, founded in 1730 and affectionately known to generations of seafarers as Stevie Clarke’s, went into bankruptcy.
The Zanzibar Minister for Infrastructure and Communication tendered his resignation after the ferry Karama Star sank with loss of 94 lives. Nine months earlier, the ferry M/V Spice Islanders sank. The death toll then was 2976 people.
Larger numbers of humpback whales stayed later in Western Antarctic waters than usual. Less ice? More krill? Nobody knows for sure.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In China at Zhenjiang Port, the iron ore-carrying bulker Changqing 16 abruptly rolled over and sank. Fifteen persons were rescued, two children died, and seven were missing.
The tugboat Sun Fat 3 struck the cargo ship Infinite Hope 1.4 nautical miles east of Tanjung Pungga, Malaysia and was swamped. The tug’s crew of seven took to a liferaft from which they were rescued by the cargo ship. (This is the same area where authorities recovered a hijacked tug and barge last October.)
On the Parana Guazu River, part of a natural border for Ecuador, navigation in the Martin Garcia Channel was blocked for some days when the tanker FR8 Endurance ran aground. (In 2008, the same vessel had a temporary loss of steering while inbound to Houston.)
Following a repair operation on the Sat3-Safe cable between South Africa and Europe, the cable ship Chamarel caught fire in the bridge area, firefighting efforts failed, and it was abandon-ship time. A Namibian fishing boat took aboard the crew of 56 and the still-burning cable ship drifted towards Namibia’s infamous Skeleton Coast. In mid-Atlantic fire broke out in containers on the MSC Flaminia and eventually the crew had to abandon ship. Three large seagoing tugs fought the fire while towing the ship toward shore. Almost a month later, the four ships are still offshore and have yet to receive permission to enter a sheltered area or an emergency port.
A British report stated that an AB on the berthed container ship Tempanos at Felixstowe apparently took a shortcut using a hatch cover laid across a hold last December. He slipped on ice and fell 25 meters to his death. In Oregon, a crewman died when he fell off the stern of the sternwheeler Queen of the West while the vessel was moored at Ranier. And a worker was unplugging cables on a ship being scrapped in Chittagong when he slipped and fell. Seriously injured, he was rushed to Chittagong Medical College Hospital where he died about an hour later.
Not far from Perth, a massive search paid off when an Australian news helicopter spotted a naked man floating on his back and waving for help. A large hammerhead shark slowly circled him 20 meters away. The 49-year-old man had been in the water for 22 hours after his small boat had capsized. One companion was later rescued but died in a hospital. A third man was missing. In Alaska, a Coast Guard chopper took an unconscious and unresponsive female off the Norwegian Pearl 23 miles west of Juneau. A 50-year-old man suffered third-degree burns while trying to extinguish a fire on the container ship Jupiter 30 miles west of San Diego and the Coast Guard choppered him to a hospital. An Alaskan Coast Guard small boat rescued a man in the water, He had been tending his near-shore crab pots from a canoe and got a pot line wound around his leg. Only his lifejacket saved him. On Long Island Sound near Stamford, a motorboat overturned, trapping two underneath the hull in an air pocket. Rescue divers had a hard time persuading the girl to re-enter the water and one diver said the conversations between the victims and the rescuers were strange and, psychologically, it was something for which they could never trained. Two other yachties were found clinging to the keel and a fifth went missing. Near Dutch Harbor in Alaska, the Coast Guard icebreaker Alex Healey took the sailboat Nkhovazi with two British nationals aboard in tow after it became obvious that its broken steering and subsequent attempts at improvisation were ineffective. An Alaskan Coast Guard HC-130 flew two orphaned and badly malnourished walrus calves from Barrow to Anchorage after wildlife officials decided they were in need of immediate veterinary assistance. “Even though this is a unique case, it aligns with our Coast Guard roles and missions,” explained the air station commander.
At Portsmouth in the UK, two men entered the water to save two youngsters, aged 4 and 10, in trouble. The kids and one man made it ashore but the other rescuer disappeared.
Gray Fleets
A Chinese frigate that had been discouraging Philippine fishing boats from entering disputed waters in the South China Sea ran aground near Half Moon Shoal in the Spratly Islands. The warship was described by Western diplomats as being “thoroughly stuck.”
A contract worker set two fires on the nuclear submarine USS Miami to get out of work because he was suffering from anxiety and having problems with his ex-girlfriend. One fire quickly got out of control and the steel hull trapped heat, causing superheated smoke and a stubborn fire that kept more than 100 firefighters busy for hours. The damage estimate was $400 million. He set a smaller fire to external timbers because he got anxious after a text-message exchange with the ex-girlfriend about her current boyfriend. He had been hired to strip paint off the sub, undergoing maintenance at the Kittery Naval Shipyard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Navy had originally thought the big fire had started in a vacuum cleaner.
The US Senate’s appropriations subcommittee reversed the Navy's proposal to prematurely retire seven cruisers and two amphibious ships. The guided missile destroyer USS James E. Williams plucked ten men from the sea near a burning Iranian-flagged dhow. Not far away, a night-time collision in the Strait of Hormuz between the guided-missile destroyer USS Porter and the bulk oil tanker Otowasan left a gaping hole in the warship’s stern while the tanker and all persons involved were unharmed. The Porter moved under its own power to Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates, for assessment and repair. And at Hong Kong, a sailor fell off the flight deck of the USS George Washington and died when he hit a service barge.
The US Navy will gender-neutralize its newest carriers by removing urinals from berthing spaces. Two of several obvious reasons why are that urinal drainpipes clog more often than toilet drains do and urinals are smellier and more expensive to maintain.
Want to buy a Type 42 British destroyer? You can if you are a government. HMS York and HMS Edinburg are available.
Ukraine’s only submarine, the Zaporozhye, submerged in the Black Sea for the first time in 18 years. Built forty years ago as a Soviet-era Foxtrot-class diesel-electric submarine, it was recently refitted by Russian engineers.
White Fleets
Getting to an airport or going on a tour may be the most-dangerous part of a cruise. In Alaska, a kayaking accident killed a passenger from the cruise ship Rhapsody of the Seas. A family rented tandem kayaks for a tour of Mendenhall Lake, they got a safety briefing, and then set out. One man apparently became fatigued and was unable to paddle. The group tied their kayaks together and then the man was somehow in the water. The group flagged down a passing canoeist but it took 30 minutes to get the family to a beach and that was too late. In the Caribbean, 36 passengers from the Freedom of the Seas got a scare when a defective tour bus landed in a ditch at St Martin. Six people were injured, the worst with a broken wrist, and they were taken to a local hospital Guest-care team members and a ship’s doctor remained with the passengers during their stay at the hospital and all returned to the ship the same day. The Carnival Spirit was among responding vessels when a float on a small seaplane failed upon landing on Tracy Arm, south of Juneau, Alaska. The two occupants were uninjured. And automatic sprinklers quickly killed a cabin fire on the Crown Princess. No injuries but some damage.
Those That Go Back and Forth
The Manly ferry Collary struck an unknown object in spite of extra lookouts (it is the whale season in Sydney Harbor) and a propeller blade was bent. Soon after, a humpback and its calf left the harbor and were spotted heading north, both with nasty gashes in their topside blubber. No-one knows whether the two incidents are connected, the propeller showed no signs of blubber, and can cutting into the blubber of a whale or two bend a blade?
The fast ferry Rich Passage I has been doing low-wake research on its four daily Bremerton-Seattle runs but even low ticket prices haven’t attracted enough passengers to provide the desired full loads.
A woman exited, probably by jumping, a ferry between Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island in Texas. No foul play was suspected.
In southern Myanmar, the double-decked Irrawaddy River ferry Mya Min Aung developed engine trouble, drifted downstream through rapid waters in heavy rain, and hit several docked vessels before sinking. At least ten died including five university football players and their coach but 73 others were rescued.
In the Philippines, the often-renamed ro/pax Super Shuttle Roro 1 ran aground two nautical miles off Agoho Point, Tablas and holed itself. It also somehow had a fire in the superstructure and that killed one passenger. Rescued from liferafts, however, were 56 other passengers and 48 crewmembers but none of the 16 vehicles onboard.
Energy Usage
The magic words” “shale” and “fracking” have made it possible for the US to start exporting natural gas next year. Profits might be high; natural gas was recently fetching $2.87 a million BTU in the US while prices abroad were about $10 (Europe) and $17 (Japan). But don’t forget the expenses of gasification and liquefaction, shipping, etc.
Export of petroleum distillates from the US reached new levels (980,000 barrels a day in April) due to demand from Europe and Central and South Americas while imports into the US reached the lowest level in over two years.
The carrier USS Nimitz and other ships burned 900,000 gallons of a 50-50 blend of advanced biofuels and traditional petroleum-based fuel during this summer’s RIMPAC Exercise. (Operations use more than 50 million gallons of fuel each month.) And the US Air Force is also exploring the reliability of biofuels. It recently bought 11,000 gallons of alcohol-to-jet fuel at $59 a gallon.
The US House-approved version of the $608 billion defense spending bill cut $70 million from the Obama administration's request for domestic development of biofuels production but a US Senate subcommittee approved funding for the US Navy’s adoption of biofuels and the goal is that the American fleets will run on biofuels by 2020. The US set that “green” target date to reduce the military's environmental footprint and continue operations worldwide in spite of any fossil-fuel shortages. The US Navy Secretary later explained, "We're not doing it to be faddish, we're not doing it to be green, we're not doing it for any other reason except it takes care of a military vulnerability that we have."
The Royal Australian Navy signed an agreement that will give it access to the US Navy’s biofuel technology.
Nature
When a Royal Navy survey ship discovered a previously uncharted underwater Red Sea mountain the size of the rock of Gibraltar, it found that Yemeni fishermen already knew of the mount— a dhow was anchored there. The seamount, only 131 feet below the surface, poses no danger to ships but could embarrass a submarine.
Scientists have been exploring the use of species-specific robotic fish to lead fish away from oil spills and other aquatic dangers (or to fish traps?). To date, there has been some success traffic-directing zebrafish and golden shiners.
A Royal New Zealand Air Force plane spotted a massive floating raft of pumice about 250 by 30 miles in extent. Using satellite photos, scientists decided that the pumice probably came from the Havre Seamount and associated the eruption with a recent cluster of earthquakes in the Kermadec Islands about 1,000 km north of New Zealand.
In places in the US, there wasn’t much of a winter last year and now the Lower Mississippi River is feeling the results and business is suffering. Flooding to record levels last year, this year the River has dropped more than fifty feet, to the point where the grounding of the Bootsie B and its tow of 28 barges closed the River for some time. Long-range predictions in August showed the River might drop another two or three feet. (About 60 percent of the nation's grain, 22 percent of its oil and gas, and 20 percent of the nation's coal goes down the river.) However, the Upper Mississippi River is a series of pools behind dams and is less-affected. And 100 miles of the Platte River in Nebraska dried up. Because of a massive, nearly nationwide drought. (The Platte is not used by barges.)
Sunken Things and Salvage
In 1944 off Nantucket Island, the U-505 torpedoed the American tanker SS Pan Pennsylvania and three destroyer escorts then attacked the U-boat. It hid under the sinking tanker but the USS Joyce saw it on its sonar and its depth charges forced the sub to surface, There, the Germans manned deck guns and fought it out with the USS Gandy until it rammed the sub. When the USS Peterson then hit the U-boat with more depth charges, the Germans set off scuttling charges and abandoned-ship. Now, U-505 has been located by a private group.
In New Zealand out on Astrolabe Reef, an American salvage company will cut up and helicopter away the bow section of the wrecked container ship Rena down to one metre below low water. And in apologies to Kiwis, the owner’s rep said the ship's owners and insurers had spent $200 million so far on the salvage operation, with $70 million being spent in the local economy.
What happens to salvaged butterfat? If it came off the Rena, it will be recycled into biodiesel fuel.
Billionaire (Microsoft co-founder) Paul Allen will underwrite an UK Government-sanctioned expedition to recover the bell of the battle cruiser HMS Hood, sunk in Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland by the Nazi warships during World War II. His mega-yacht (414 feet long) Octopus will act as the base ship but it is not clear whether its submarine and remotely controlled vehicle will be used. Its two helicopters might see some use too.
Metal-Bashing
A Korean shipbuilder has started construction of the first of twenty containerships for a Danish shipping company. At 18,000 TEU each will be the world’s largest box ship. Delivery will start in the second half of 2013.
The world's first nuclear-powered cruiser, the USS Long Beach, was recently put up for auction with an opening bid of only $150. It was the last such US vessel with teakwood decks.
The US Coast Guard’s new fast-response cutter USCGC Bernard C. Webber went back to the builders because paint, in patches up to 18 square feet, had peeled off. High humidity and poor ventilation while being painted were blamed for the failure of the final coat to cling to the primer.
Russia is building a 12,000-hp spill-response and salvage icebreaker with an asymmetrical hull (flat on one side) and three azimuthing drives that can drive the ’breaker in any direction. When moving sideways, the 250-foot-long ship would clear a 250-foot channel through 0.6-metre ice.
Piracy, Terrorism, and Nasties
Sentences for piracy worldwide range from four years to life imprisonment, with sentences in Africa and Europe tending to be below the world average while those in the US and the Seychelles are far stiffer.
The founder of anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd brags about operating outside the law, both organizationally and personally. He recently forfeited bail after being held under house arrest for 70 days in Germany (something about fighting extradition to Costa Rico to face decades-old charges.) His bail-jumping so invigorated a whale-watch outfit in Alaska that it announced it will publically back the “beleaguered” captain now that “governments are going after Captain Paul personally rather than his cause or movement alone.”
Near the UAE port of Jebel Ali, the naval security detail on the replenishment ship USNS Rappahannock put .50-caliber rounds into a small approaching fishing boat after it ignored repeated warnings of multiple types. One fisherman was killed and three others inured, and Dubai’s police chief rejected the US explanation and will now deal with the case as a murder.
Odd Bits
Members of a high-school class in Capistrano, California constructed three model boats they hoped to sail to the Hawaiian Islands. All three ran aground on the first try but later the 92-pound Kanaloa, was 32.1 miles from San Diego when it ran into an incoming tanker. The model was retrieved by an escorting tug for yet another try after repairs are made.
The Enterprise Land Mobile Radio system, used by the military to coordinate responses with civil emergency workers, operates on radio frequencies between 380 and 399.9 megahertz. The system at the Naval Submarine Base at New London, Connecticut works but has also has been blocking the radio signals that open and close garage doors.
In England on the Solent, the gravel-carrying powered barge Goole Star spotted a man swimming without a lifejacket. He had fallen off his 26-foot sailboat Rascal and it was sailing off on autopilot. Amazingly, the yachtsman felt well enough to get aboard his recovered yacht and four hours later he sailed up alongside the barge and handed back the loaned clothes – plus a bottle of whisky.
Ever wonder why the cargo ship BBC Steinhoff ran aground last year, blocking the South Shore Canal of the St Lawrence Seaway? A report noted that the steersman’s stand was offset and when the pilot requested the helmsman steer for a certain object, the course taken did not coincide with the ship’s centerline. Then, as the ship neared the entrance to a narrower part of the channel, bank suction pulled it off course, a sheer that could not be countered in time.
Head-Shakers
A Cuban married to a Russian woman must leave Russia every 30 days so he traveled to Finland on a ferry. But storms delayed his return to Russia and upon arrival he learned his Russian visa had expired. Back to Finland, only to find his Finnish visa had expired. He spent the next 47 days on the ferry, volunteering as waiter, to pay his passage, until the Russians finally allowed him back in. He is now trying to establish permanent Russian residency.
Rescuers took an exhausted, wet, and cold 50-year-old man off a construction barge near the Dumbarton Bridge in San Francisco Bay. His boat had become disabled and he tried to swim to shore while towing the boat.
