Other Shores - April 2011

Some shippers voiced concern that a major freight-rate war might break out once again on the westbound leg of the Asia-Europe container traffic. 
 

The International Transport Workers’ Federation wants to extend the double-pay zone for seafarers facing piracy risk from the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean. If accepted, shippers would pay an additional $120 million in wages each year.

Refusal by the Libyan government to approve use of chartered aircraft to evacuate Americans from Libya forced the US Government to charter the high-speed ferry Maria Dolores. But its master decided that bad weather meant keeping the vessel at its dock at Tripoli for two days before he transported 338 people, 183 of whom were Americans, to Malta. Meanwhile, the British frigate HMS Cumberland made two round trips to Malta with evacuees, and numerous aircraft, both chartered and military, lifted others, some from airstrips near remote oil fields. 

In 2006, China imported its first LNG. Now it imports vastly larger amount to fuel its growing industries and to help clean up its filthy environment. But do not be surprised if China becomes an LNG exporter. As the US has recently learned, shale deposits can carry natural gas and China’s deposit are huge. 

As this column is being written, damage from the Japanese earthquake, subsequent tsunamis, and nuclear powerplant breakdowns are becoming obvious although the extents are still ill-defined. But wasn’t it fascinating to watch on TV as coasters and large fishing vessels were pushed inshore by the tsunamis!

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

As usual, ships capsized or sank: At Sochi, a port city just north of Russia's border with the republic of Georgia on the Black Sea coast, bad weather broke a Tanzanian dry-cargo vessel in two. The bow sank and the stern was driven ashore, where rescuers managed to save ten of the crew. Off Chile, bad weather caused the long-liner Faro de Hércules to sink while on a hake fishing trip and only 38 of the crew of 42 were saved by other ships.

Ships also ran aground: Off Long Beach, California are four artificial islands concealing oil production rigs. During a storm, the 624-foot bulker Ocean Sunrise somehow drifted onto Island Freeman. The weather may have overwhelmed tugboats accompanying the vessel. In Norway not far from Oslo, the Icelandic cargo ship Godafoss managed to run aground on a well-charted reef in Norway’s only marine natural reserve. Some oil spilled but the spill wasn’t as damaging as first feared. The vehicle carrier Hoegh Seoul ran aground on the outer River Weser, probably because of a rudder failure. The vessel was carrying a full load of vehicles and was refloated by the tugs Bugsier 3, Bugsier 4, Bugsier 6, and Bremerhaven. In Indonesia, the cargo ship Jutha Pathama, carrying rapeseed and castor-seed extraction meal, ran aground near Duni island of Jamnagar’s Marine National Park.

Outside Richards Bay in South Africa in a crowded anchorage, the 149,505-dwt bulker Dong-A Rhea ran across the anchor chain of the 26,300-dwt bulker African Lion and the anchor chain ended up seriously wrapped around the bigger vessel’s propeller. In spite of a strong current and 2.5-meter swells, divers managed to cut the chain free. In the East China Sea, the cargo ship Zheryuji No. 618, carrying 500 tons of scrap steel, collided with another ship and capsized. Seven crewmembers went missing. In the Karabiga anchorage in Mamara region of Turkey, bad weather caused the container ship Esther to drag its anchor and it struck the far-smaller bulker Celal Amca, which was loaded with coal. Eventually, the container ship managed to heave up its anchor and it moved to another part of the anchorage. No leaks, water ingress, or pollution but probably lawyer talk and some bent steel. 

At Manta in Ecuador, five firemen and a crewman were severely burned on the tuna seiner Lautaro. Welding was the probable cause of the explosion and fire. Elsewhere, one man died and two others were injured by fire on the cargo ship Shirvan while it was docked at Baku, the capital and largest port of Azerbaijan. Again, violations of safety procedures while welding were reported as causing the explosion and fire. 

Humans died: An employee of a Finnish refining company went missing from the oil tanker Palva during a routine trip in the North Sea and was presumed dead. In Deira Creek within the shadows of Dubai’s skyscrapers, fires raked two dhows, one carrying 15 cars, textiles and other material and the other, highly inflammable materials. One sailor jumped into the water and was caught in a rotating propeller. “His body was cut into two when it was recovered.” said one eyewitness.

High winds at Baltimore tore the 960-foot container ship Atlantic Companion from its berth and pushed it to a grounding across the channel. Four tugs quickly responded. Elsewhere in the harbor, the same winds tore an 80-foot crane barge free and it drifted into the Coast Guard’s base at Curtis Bay. The container ship Salmarine Nomazwe was anchored off Cape Town when fire broke out in three of six containers containing charcoal. (Another report the fires started in coal while the ship was en route to Cape Town.) The ship returned to Duncan Dock where local firemen put out the fires. 

Gray Fleets

The US Navy’s standards for morality and PC standards seem to be exceptionally high. The commanding officer and a female top warrant officer on the destroyer USS Stout were relieved of command. Their failure? They allowed some of the crew to act badly while in port. Eight of the Stout’s sailors were dismissed for fraternization, being drunk, disorderly conduct, and violation of orders while in port. And, several years ago, the executive officer of the carrier USS Enterprise made and showed about two-dozen raunchy movies for entertainment of the crew. As a result of an in-depth investigation of his expressions of concern for crew morale, the Navy is recommending letters of censure and other punishments for (hang on!) forty officers (including six admirals) and enlisted men.

The Royal Navy officially opened a new rehabilitation center at HM Naval Base Devonport for Armed Forces personnel recovering from long-term injuries and illnesses. About the same time, HMS Ark Royal, the former flagship of the fleet, was retired three years earlier than previously scheduled, a major casualty of the government’s recent defense cuts. 

White Fleets

Repairs to the fire-stricken giant cruise ship Carnival Splendor included installing two new generators and a new engine. The 220,000-lb engine, intended for a sister ship still under construction in Italy, was flown to San Francisco in an Antonov AN-124, one of the world’s largest cargo planes. The fire cost the owner about $65 million in repairs and lost revenue.

At Akaroa in New Zealand, the Pacific Sun had a problem with one engine and making repairs was impossible at nearby Lyttelton (the port for earthquake-stricken Christchurch). The ship bypassed two stops and returned to Australia at a slower speed, and passengers received A$50 for each port skipped. 

At the time of the 6.3 earthquake, the Europa was in port at Lyttelton and 57 of the crew and 267 passengers were on shore. Nobody was hurt. A Korean research ship, also in port, was also undamaged. 

CMA CGM, the world’s third-largest container shipping line, now carries passengers in reasonable comfort or, depending on a person’s tastes, even luxury, on its new 13,800-TEU containerships. A variety of voyages are offered, all at a standard rate of €100 a day.

Those That Go Back and Forth

Two ex-Swedish ferries have started operating between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. The chartered ships were shortened and heavily modified for the new service. Both have military names, Highlanders and Blue Puttees, the last commemorating The Royal Newfoundland Regiment. It served at Gallipoli in World War I and later the 780 men who went into the Battle of the Somme were reduced to 68 available for roll call the next day. When the Regiment was first formed, shortages forced the creation of puttees from blue cotton cloth rather than the drab material commonly used for the leg wrappings. 

In the general vicinity of the Statue of Liberty, a man jumped off the Manhattan-bound Staten Island ferry John Noble and the ferry’s rescue boat (or a Coast Guard boat, according to another account) did its thing. The unconscious man, suffering from hypothermia and perhaps other problems, was taken to Bellevue Hospital for observation.

In Australia, as a ferry approached the western end of Polmaise Reef on a voyage from the Great Barrier Reef’s Heron Island, it was hit head on by three huge waves in succession. Passengers were flung out of their seats and hit the ceiling. Two men suffered broken bones and a child received minor injuries. And in Sydney, an East by West harbor ferry carrying 44 people, many schoolchildren, nosed into at least one wave that broke forward windows and flooded the cabin. One passenger was knocked overboard but was rescued. He and the master were taken to a hospital with suspected hypothermia. (One of the schoolchildren had just moved to Wellington to escape the earthquake-created devastation at Christchurch.)

In the Philippines, the passenger vessel Kinswell caught fire while undergoing repair at Cebu City. Welding was probably responsible. The vessel had been plying the Cebu-Tubigon (Bohol) route before it went into preventive maintenance about two weeks earlier.

In Indonesia, the ferry Balboa, with 33 passengers and 27 six -wheeled and two-wheeled vehicles, ran into tropical storm Carlos while several miles at sea. After battling huge waves, the ferry ended up on rocks near Pantai Raru Rote harbor.

Nature

NOAA released images of the Nantucket whaling ship Two Brothers that sank nearly 200 years ago on French Frigate Shoals near Hawaii. Master of the vessel was Nantucketer George Pollard, who had previously skippered the whaler Essex when it was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale (thus leading to Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”) During the subsequent 95 days in a small-boat, starving crewmembers resorted to cannibalism and Pollard ate his own cousin. After returning to Nantucket from the wreck on French Frigate Shoals, Pollard never went to sea again and ended up as a night watchman.

Searches for possible oil and gas in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas are also finding commercial quantities of Pacific cod, walleye pollock, and other fishes. 

Japan suspended whaling in the Antarctic, at least for a time, but Sea Shepherd’s Steve Irwin found work in the search for the vanished Norwegian yacht Beserk. On the upper side of the globe, the Canadian Coast Guard’s Leonard J. Cowley escorted Greenpeace‘s Arctic Sunrise from sea into St. Johns after it radioed that it had suffered damage in a hold when a container broke free in 11-meter seas some 530 kilometers south of Cape Race.

Recovery from the damage done by Category 5 Cyclone Yasi to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef may take decades. Winds of up to 177 miles per hour were one villain. 

Metal-Bashing

The Chilean earthquake of February 2010 inadvertently launched the sizable research vessel Cabo de Hornos before it could be christened and launched the next day. The tsunami then washed it back on soft land. Recently, a salvage firm dug out the sand, hardened it into a roadway, and used multi-wheeled transporters to carry the vessel onto a 300-foot deck barge. The barge was then towed to a drydock, which was submerged, allowing the Cabo do Hornos to float free. 

The members of Maersk’s new Triple E-class (Economy of scale, Energy efficient, Environmentally improved) super-large container ships will be delivered between 2013 and 2014 and each will carry a record 18,000 TEU in 23 rows across. The ships will be distinguishable by size and their separated engine and bridge superstructures. At 400 meters, they will be also the longest ships in the world now that former title-holder, the 458.45-meter ULCC tanker Knock Nevis, has been scrapped. (Other length competitors are the very large ore carrier Berge Stahl at 328 meters, the cruise ship Allure of the Seas at 361 meters, the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise 341 meters, and the very large ore carriers being built for Vale at 360 meters but a Triple-E, at a deadweight of 165,000 tons, will be out-hefted by the ore carriers. Each Triple-E will be crewed by only nineteen people, will have a top speed of 23 knots, and might have cost $160 million each but the added specifications raised their price to $190 million. 

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

Although warships from 23 nations are on anti-piracy work in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, results have been less than possible due to memberships in differing organizations operating in accordance with differing policies. The pirates are equally diverse and seem to fall into four groups controlled by warlords. Most groups are strongly military in nature and one is even headed by a “fleet admiral.” By the way, most of the ransom money ends up abroad. 

The anti-pirate warfare has been escalating, sometimes with good results, sometimes not. The oil tanker Guanabara was seized 328 nautical miles southeast of Duqm, Oman. As four pirates boarded the ship, he crew of 24 took refuge in the vessel’s citadel and sent out a distress call. The destroyer USS Bulkeley, backed by the Turkish NATO frigate TCG Giresun, was dispatched and its specialist boarding team climbed aboard the Guanabara and, without exchange of fire, detained the pirates. 

But sometimes, results were less than desirable. Pirates captured the American sail yacht Quest with four Americans on board. An entire carrier strike force (the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, guided-missile cruiser USS Leyte Gulf, and guided-missile destroyers USS Sterett and USS Buckeley) responded and started a radio dialog with the pirates. Two pirates even boarded the Sterett to negotiate. Then someone on the yacht fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Sterett and gunfire was heard inside the yacht. Several pirates appeared on deck and moved to the bow, hands in the air. A special-forces boarding party found the four Americans shot and dead and, in the process of clearing the yacht, two more pirates died, one by knife and the other by pistol. The rest of the 19 pirates were taken prisoners. (The couple owning the Quest operated a Bible ministry and distributed Bibles. It is not known whether these facts had anything to do with their executions.)

Yachties of all nationalities are sailing around the world and a large number (perhaps 100) want to cross the waters in which the Somali pirates operate. The yachties are organized enough (via SSB radio and the Internet, etc) that they are prepared to sail in a flotilla but the Royal Navy says it doesn’t have the resources for an escort across the Indian Ocean for those indulging in “unnecessary sailing.” A Dutch spokesman for the yachties said, “We are not simply cruising around irresponsibly. We are caught on the wrong side of an ever-changing and expanding problem.” (However, circumnavigating sailors tend to be very conscious of the piracy threat and do their very best to take suitable precautions. These sailors may have hoped for an armed escort leading to an easy access to the Mediterranean because the alternative is a hard slog thousands of miles south to the Cape of Good Hope.)

For a third time, pirates targeted the container ship Maersk Alabama. An embarked security team fired warning shots and four suspected pirates in a skiff with a hook ladder bugged-out. In April 2009, pirates held the master for days in one of the ship's lifeboats. Navy snipers killed the captors and arrested one of the pirates. He was recently sentenced to more than 30 years in a US prison.

All piracy isn’t in the Mid-East. Include Bangladesh, Malacca Strait, Malaysia, the South China Sea, Vietnam, Cameroon, Brazil, and Peru. And add the Gulf of Guinea on the west side of Africa, an area where piracy isn’t quite as sophisticated as elsewhere. There, fourteen pirates boarded the chemical tanker Panega off the coast of Benin. They ordered the master to sail the tanker to Gabon in order to offload the cargo. After several failed attempts near Gabon, Warri, and Lagos in Nigeria, the pirates settled for stealing the crewmembers' personal belongings and then took the master and two engineers ashore with them while the tanker was left adrift. The three crewmembers later returned to the ship. In a separate incident, three persons approached a chemical tanker at anchor off Lagos. They fired their weapons in the air and demanded the gangway to be lowered. The master refused and moved the vessel from the anchorage. 

Odd Bits and Headshakers

The crew of a tug at Lyttelton, New Zealand was routinely steaming between the knolls at the mouth of the harbor when the recent earthquake struck. The tremors caused them to think debris was caught in both nozzles of the tug’s azimuthing drives and then the engines went into emergency shutdown! Noting that shore objects were suffering damage, the crew restarted the engines and resumed the job. (The port suffered remarkably little damage in spite of being directly above the shallow epicenter of the 6.3-magnitude earthquake, and was partly operational in a day or two. However, no cruise ships or container vessels will be able to use the port this year.)

At Portsmouth, Virginia, the converted-tanker, crane-carrying Zhen Hua 24 had unloaded two towering container cranes and was pulling away from the pier when one of the cranes still on board clipped one of the offloaded cranes and knocked it off its tracks. The ship was arrested and the pier company sued for $14.65 million in damages. 

In Antarctic waters, the 48-foot Norwegian steel sailboat Berserk dropped off two crewmen onto the ice shelf, who, using quad-bike ATVs, made a dash for the Pole to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of Amundsen’s reaching the South Pole. Soon after, the Berserk was not to be found and its EPIRB apparently had deployed. The Sea Shepherd’s anti-whaling vessel Steve Irwin searched and found an inflated but unused liferaft from the yacht so it and its three crewmen were presumed to have been lost. Other searching vessels included New Zealand’s newest offshore patrol vessel, HMNZS Wellington, and the passenger-carrying Russian scientific vessel Professor Kromov. 

A Brit who operates a property-maintenance business was unloading his van at a tip (dump) when he was surprised to find a sizable missile in the rubbish. Authorities promptly closed the busy M6 highway nearby and evacuated the neighborhood until experts decided that the missile, probably a Sea Cat anti-aircraft missile used by the Royal Navy some twenty years ago, was harmless. It turned out that one of his men had found the missile in the trash from a house-clearing job.

Helicopter crews can always use a little more rescue training so a Royal Navy chopper crew happily retrieved a set of galvanized metal steps that a storm had washed away from a Royal Navy building on the Lizard near St Keverne.

Other Shores - March 2011

The recent overthrow of Mubarak’s reign in Egypt left Suez Canal transits, port operations, and vessel movement largely unaffected despite some labor strikes. The SuMed pipeline and all oil and gas terminals also operated normally.

The US Coast Guard granted storm-avoidance requests from at least five foreign cargo ships that desired to shelter behind Aleutian Islands from 27-31-foot waves and winds gusts up to 100 mph.

A Russian firm will send more aframax and Suezmax tankers carrying Russian oil from Murmansk to Ningbo, China via the northern route next year. The 23-day voyage of 5,610 miles is 14 days shorter than the 13,110-mile regular route using the Suez Canal

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
The tank barge Waldhof flopped on its side while transiting a tight bend in the Rhine River near the famed Lorelei rock and that closed the river. Two of four crewmen were never found. Its cargo of 2,400 tons of sulfuric acid was a problem to both salvors and river traffic for the next month and more. Hundreds of vessels waited upriver while the wreck was sort-of stabilized after a couple of weeks of work and only then were smaller vessels allowed to creep by. (The revenue loss for a Rhine vessel averages about €4,000 or about $5,400 per day.) In Indonesia off the east coast of Palaun Bintan, the asphalt tanker AB9 reported it was listing and then it sank but the Indonesia Navy rescued the crew of fourteen. In Malaysia, all eighteen members of cargo ship Soon Bee II’s crew were found alive on the beach at Kampung Kabong after their ship sank. Off northern Japan, the small tanker Seiyoh radioed that it was in distress and then sank. Four of its crew of five were saved by the Japanese coastguard but the chief engineer subsequently suffered a fatal heart attack.

Ships ran aground: In one week, both ships of a New Zealand coastal shipping company ran aground. The Spirit of Endurance went ashore in Lyttelton Harbour when its engine failed and, due to an electrical fault, the Spirit of Resolution nosed into soft mud in Manukau Harbor, Auckland’s second harbor. In spite of these problems, the company maintained that it was operating in a safe and professional manner.

While undergoing tests off the shipyard in the southeastern port of Ulsan, an 88,000-ton container ship collided with the 1,500-ton Cambodian-flagged freighter Alexandra. One sailor was rescued, four died, and seven were missing from the sunken ship. Strangely enough, the container ship was not identified in any news account, perhaps because it may have been a brand-new local product. At Poti, Georgia, the cargo ship Gregory Petrovsk lost control during a storm and ran into a pier and broke into two. The crew of eleven, including a female, was saved. In the US off Massachusetts, the 51-foot local fishing boat Michael Brandon ran into the 600-foot freighter West Bay and suffered severe bow damage. The ship was undamaged. That night, the FV sank at its pier in Scituate and only parts of its rigging were above the harbor’s ice.

In Indonesia near Berhala Island, a watchman on the grounded container ship Baruna Mega was found dead inside a cargo hold, probably the victim of poisonous fumes. In the UK, a crewman on the vehicle carrier Tombarra died when the ship’s rescue boat fell about 30 meters from the top deck into the sea at the Royal Portbury Dock near Bristol. He and three others fell because of a mechanical or equipment failure during an emergency exercise drill. In New Zealand’s Marlborough Sound, a dolphin-watch eco-tour catamaran ran down a cutter crewed by an Outward Bound crew of youngsters. The boat floated due to its buoyancy tanks but one student suffered a broken leg and others had moderate injuries

A sailor on the carrier USS Carl Vinson went overboard but was spotted by a lookout. A helicopter pulled the sailor out of the water in less than twenty minutes. (But in the Gulf of Oman, a female sailor on the guided-missile destroyer USS Halsey failed to report for duty and her body was later found floating the water.) In the Gulf of Oman, the frigate HMS Iron Duke raced 170 miles to help a badly injured Korean fisherman on the Golden Lake. He was unconscious after suffering bad facial damage from a broken wire.

The container ship MCP Altona was en route to China when some of its containers shifted and two drums filled with uranium concentrate broke open. The ship returned to Ladysmith, British Columbia where experts were waiting to clean up the low-radiation substance. Once the ship was ruled to be clean, all drums were returned to the Canadian mine of origin for a careful check of their integrity.

Gray Fleets
In 2009, the guided-missile cruiser USS Port Royal was fresh out of the repair yard (where the bill was $18 million) and on its first day of sea trials when it ignominiously and conspicuously ran aground next to a runway at the Honolulu International Airport. It took several days to remove the warship and the Navy later paid over $40 million to the State of Hawaii plus $6.5 million for repairs to the reef (cementing nearly 5,400 coral colonies back in place and removing 250 cubic yards of debris). Failure to recalibrate navigation equipment was cited as cause of the grounding but an investigating board crisply noted that the warship’s navigation wonks might have used visual cues (such as the control tower of the Airport) to help determine the ship’s location.

In the UK, the newly commissioned and very expensive nuclear-powered attack submarine HMS Astute continued to suffer indignities. The horrors of its recent grounding in Scotland during a crew change were replaced by a failure of the sub’s sewerage system. It returned to its base at Faslane for six week’s of repairs to toilets and a weapon system.

The Australian Navy had 38 of its 54 vessels unable to operate at full capacity for at least some of the first six months of last year. And a female sailor on the submerged Australian submarine HMAS Waller had a lucky escape when a green signal flare accidentally ignited while she was loading it into a launch tube. Although her arms were seriously burned, she and the sub escaped further damage as the boat went to emergency stations and made a dash for the surface.

In South America, a female naval cadet’s fall from the rigging to her death on the German Navy’s training barque Gorch Fock triggered much nasty and childish behavior. One example: The remaining cadets claimed that the training ship’s master had shown little emotion at her death and had called her death unlucky but normal, like an airplane crash, and so they refused to go aloft. In response, he claimed that they were products of video game-playing childhoods and were not fit to be sailors. They were flown back to Germany, he was relieved of command, and a committee will determine whether the ship can ever resume its role as a training ship and ambassador for Germany.

White Fleets
An American passenger from the Ryndam was killed at Belize while on a snorkeling trip when she was chopped up by the excursion boat’s propeller. Eighty passengers on the Polar Star had their Antarctic trip disturbed when the ship hit an uncharted rock while anchoring near Detaille Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. The contact opened “a minor breach in the outer hull’ but that was enough to cancel the voyage and at least one future voyage. The passengers were dumped on South Shetland Island while the vessel limped back to Ushuaia after “temporary repairs.” South Shetland Island is home to many international research stations but has no scheduled air service.


They That Go Back and Forth
The crowded Indonesian ro-ro/pax ferry Laut Teduh 2 caught fire, possibly from a cigarette butt thrown on the deck, while en route to Sumatra. Although 427 passengers were saved, at least eleven died and nearly 200 were injured, many as they jumped into the sea. On Columbia’s Magdalena River a tugboat collided with the ferry El Titanic and six adults and three children went missing although a man and a woman were rescued shortly afterwards.

A man was known to have boarded the ferry European Highlander at Larne in Northern Ireland because he was part of a bus-transported party, but the driver reported that he did not disembark at Cairnryan, in Scotland, so a massive search was triggered. After a thorough search of the ferry and searches by a helicopter and three lifeboats, it was decided that he might have left the ship in a different vehicle. In the US, a 71-year-old man removed his coat, climbed the railing of a New York-bound Skystreak ferry, and jumped, but soon afterwards he was quite willing to grab a boathook and be pulled out of the water. (Cold water will have that effect.)

While berthing in Heysham, the Isle of Man ferry Ben-My-Chree was hit by a powerful gust of wind and made a heavier-than-usual contact with the fenders on the dock. The incident was relatively minor and did not cause any injuries to passengers. High winds also forced the ro/pax ferry Larkspur into a mud bank at Ramsgate.

Starting in June, a new vessel, the UK’s first hydrogen-powered ferry, will carry up to twelve passengers at Bristol for at least six months. A license-plate reader on a Seattle ferry led state police to arrest a man as he drove off the ferry in a van with stolen plates.

Legal Matters
A federal judge ruled that the river barge that landed on top of several homes in New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward during Hurricane Katrina did not break the floodwall but he also said that employees of the barge owner could have done more to prevent damage.

Imports
The freedom dash of ten Dominican Republic stowaways was drastically slowed by cold weather after they arrived at Port Chickasaw, Alabama on a barge. They had been spotted from the tug Annie T. Cheramie and, after an all-night search, were found huddled and half-frozen in a container yard. They were hospitalized for hypothermia and then charged.

Nature
Premature silting of the Mississippi River’s Southwest Pass, the main channel for river shipping to reach the Gulf of Mexico, caused reduction of allowable drafts from 47 feet to 44 feet.


Metal-Bashing
Shipping giant Maersk was reported as ready to order ten, possibly twenty, super-large container ships carrying 18,000 TEU, a ship size that has been nick-named Malaccamax. They would be twin-engined and fueled by oil, not LNG, and would cost about $180 million, or about $10,000 per container slot. But close competitor Mediterranean Shipping has no intention of following Maersk’s lead. (A Malaccamax could only operate between certain Far East and European ports and would use the Strait of Malacca because it is shorter than alternative routes but has a restrictive minimum depth of only 25 meters or 82 feet.)

Indian ship-scrappers paid more than $500 per light displacement ton for two bulkers as some shipowners decided scrapping was more profitable than operating vessels.

Four workers died of burns created by an explosion on the product tanker Pranam as it was being scrapped at a Bangladeshi yard. Apparently they were dismantling a fuel tank. Scrapping operations had been limited due to concerns over safety and environmental issues but the deaths caused a quick halt to all negotiations about continuing shipbreaking. Two workers were killed by an explosion at a yard in Sitakunda Chittagong. Officially, the ship was not being scrapped but photos showed that extensive plating had been removed. The explosion may have been caused by a warming fire made by watchmen or a gas cylinder may have exploded.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Somali pirates are being divided into two general categories:
Unskilled onshore opportunists such as fishermen and, farther offshore, highly trained ex-military types. As a result, pirate tactics have become increasingly aggressive and include the use of torture and even deliberate execution. Some security sources believe that the use of mother ships will soon see pirates able to strike east of Sri Lanka (an island off the eastern tip of India).

The seizure of the VLCC tanker Irene SL in the Gulf of Aden, the eighth attack on vessels of this type in a limited geographical area in four weeks, caused experts to declare that Somali pirates were deliberately singling out tankers on the exit route out of the Strait of Hormuz during the monsoon season. Four of the ships were captured. Fully laden tankers are extremely easy to board, and the high value of their cargoes presents a great temptation to pirates.

Perhaps typical was when Indian forces destroyed the pirate mother ship Prantalay 14 off the Lakshadweep islands, arrested 15 pirates, and rescued 20 fishermen of Thailand and Myanmarese nationalities, who had been held hostage since Prantalay was hijacked in April last year. It was used by the pirates to launch attacks on merchant vessels passing along the island chain and had been photographed towing fourteen skiffs. INS Cankarso (a recently commissioned water-jet fast attack craft) was directed to intercept and investigate. The mother ship did not respond to radio calls so Cankarso fired a warning shot across its bows. Then Prantalay opened fire, which the warship returned. A fire broke out on the mother ship and personnel were seen jumping overboard. (Prantalay is one of three fleetmate tuna trawlers held by pirates, who had demanded a $9 million ransom for each of the three. Five of the Prantalay‘s crew died of malnutrition and two were shot and dumped overboard during the long months of captivity.)

The Malaysian Navy foiled an attempt on the chemical tanker Bung Laurel and captured seven Somalis. Three of the pirates were wounded during a gun battle. And the South Korean Navy recovered the hijacked tanker Samho Jewelry. A destroyer pursued the vessel for nearly a week and then commandos stormed into action. All 21 crewmen were rescued unhurt except for the master, who had been shot in the stomach, but eight of thirteen pirates were killed. The US Navy’s guided-missile destroyer USS Momsen and cruiser USS Bunker Hill responded to a call from the Panama-flagged cargo ship Duqm, under attack by pirates trying to board from two skiffs. The warships chased the pirates back to a mother ship and then destroyed the skiffs.

The German heavylift vessel Beluga Nomination was hijacked and the crew hid in a citadel. But two days later, the pirates blew their way in and the crew was taken hostage. Then Seychelles and Dutch forces tried to retake the ship but failed. One pirate was killed and a crewman was shot.

If you’re a middle-aged Dutch couple sailing your way around the world on your sixty-foot sailboat Alondra, wouldn’t you feel justified in asking the Royal Navy for a warship escort while you transit waters rife with Somali pirates? The Royal Navy disagreed, feeling that devoting a warship to a dedicated escort for up to three weeks was “totally unrealistic.” The couple then riposted that, “It’s like asking for help from the police and being told you are not eligible.” (The Dutch couple had previously sailed with the British couple that were captured by Somali pirates and held for over a year so they are not completely naïve.)

Not all pirates were Somalians. In Nigeria, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), Nigeria's main militant group, threatened to renew attacks on the oil and gas sector because of the appointment of Kingsley Kuku as the Presidential Adviser on the Niger Delta. 



Odd Bits and Head Shakers
There are many ways to achieve international renown and driving a tugboat can be one. In Australia, Brisbane’s floating boardwalk was a great tourist attraction until massive floods recently tore it loose. The two-man crew of the small tugboat Mavis volunteered their services to maneuver a long stretch of the drifting boardwalk safely under the city’s Gateway Bridge as TV watched and thousands cheered.

Africa’s oldest floating ship, the 1898 steamer Chauncy Maples will not only be preserved but it will serve as a mobile healthcare clinic on Lake Malawi. The vessel was built in England and brought to its operating site in sections, The 11-ton boiler, fitted with a wheeled carriage, was hauled 64 miles overland by 450 Ngone tribesmen (averaging three miles a day) while other parts were carried on the heads of men and women.

College researchers are investigating squid, trying to determine how the cephalopods shift their colors to match a background. Understanding such a “dynamic camouflage” could be of extreme value to the US Navy.

What are the two most-popular liberal-arts colleges in the US? The answer will surprise many. Top is the US Naval Academy followed by West Point, the Army’s equivalent school.

Get-rich-quick schemes to get untraceable millions out of strange countries are plentiful but one recent offer (from Spain, yet) used the name of Admiral Mike Mullen (he’s only the US’s Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff) as needing help in sneaking a puny twenty-three million, six hundred thousand dollars out of Pakistan.

Sometimes your children bite you. Such was the case with the British research vessel James Cook, whose remotely operated vehicle or ROV, a hunk of machinery anthropomorphically named Iris,Iris contacted the ship’s port propeller. This was noticed when part of the ROV’s buoyancy package floated to the surface. The propeller was undamaged but will be monitored. suffered serious damage and was inoperable.

A five-man, one-woman British rowing team established a trans-Atlantic record by rowing 3,000 miles in 31 days, 23 hours, and 31 minutes. As a finishing touch, one male rower knelt on the beach and proposed marriage to his girlfriend, who had flown to Barbados to meet the team. She accepted. (For those desiring to emulate the team, their course was from Tenerife to the Barbados and the boat was rowed at all times.)

A British Navy helicopter rescued a man who fell 1,000 feet down Sgurr Choinnich Mor. He was standing up and reading a map and was virtually unharmed when the chopper crew spotted him at the Ayrshire mountain’s base.

A British fisherman on the FV Royal Sovereign discovered a 20-foot torpedo floating five miles off Beachy Head and near a busy cross-Channel shipping lane. He took photos of it with his mobile phone and forwarded them to authorities. They reported back that the device's explosive charge had corroded off and it was safe, and so he towed it in. The barnacle-covered torpedo was identified as a British Mk 9 device, it had a stamp showing it had been checked and tested in 1955, and it was believed to have come from a wreck. So the Big Question is: Why has the Royal Navy been using torpedoes to create wrecks in peacetime?

Other Shores -February 2011

Offshore oilfield work is hard but lucrative, fishing pays off, and LNG is a coming area but don’t expect great profits from shipping in the next two years, predicted one expert.

Seafarers are subject to greater penalties than pirates – at least that is true in the European Union. The master of the Prestige (a tanker that broke in half 250 miles at sea and spilled its oil onto Spanish beaches) was prosecuted harder than any pirate in the last 50 years. He was detained for three months and then released on a “provisional” bail of €3million ($4million). That sum is greater than pirates get for simply keeping hostages for same amount of time! Now the EU’s and NATO navies advise that they will not even try to help a ship that has been boarded by pirates, and they even advocate non-resistance.

More than fifty years ago, New Zealand decided to ban visits by US naval vessels because the US Government would not state whether nuclear weapons were or were not on board. The US Navy’s official position now is that it has no military requirement for ship visits but would consider participation in naval exercises. But a message released by WikiLeaks revealed that a top-ranking United States navy commander privately admitted that the US had no reason to send any of its fleet to New Zealand anyway.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
A rice barge did the bubbly act on the Saigon River in Ho Chi Minh City when hit by the container ship Fortune Freighter. The ship went on to damage nine more barges. In the China Sea, the Vietnam-flagged container ship Phu Tan sank 110 miles west of Hainan Island’s Sanya city. Two of a crew of 27 were saved. The stone-carrying Hung Cuc 168, probably overloaded, was capsized and sunk by strong winds near the Minjiang Estuary in the East China Sea. Thirteen of seventeen crewmen were saved. The 6,800-dwt ore-carrying freighter Van Don-2 sank quickly in off Vietnam and twelve of the crew were rescued by fishermen but eleven more were missing. The Korean trawler In Sung No.1 sank in the Antarctic in 30 minutes while long-line fishing for toothfish. Twenty fishermen were rescued, five were dead, and seventeen went missing. A company spokesman said the ship could have struck an iceberg or was hit by a giant wave.

In Chittagong’s wreck-littered harbor in the dark of night, the 40-foot fishing trawler Dwarkamal ran into a jutting piece of wreckage in the W-1 Anchorage and sank. Three fishermen managed to swim for two hours until picked up by a passing tugboat. The other six swam in the chilly water for four hours and finally reached the coast at Navy Nagar. All eight fishermen came from the same village and villagers later helped them retrieve the sunken boat.

On Turkey’s Mediterranean coast two Bolivian-flagged ships went ashore. The Sea Bright ran onto rocks off the popular resort city of Antalya while the Rant went ashore off the town of Adrasa southwest of Antyalya. Most of the Sea Bright’s crew was saved but the ship’s cook jumped into the sea and drowned. (In emergencies, cooks sometimes to do that.) The 173-metre-long Dutch cargo ship Stadiongracht, with a cargo of china clay from Brazil, ran aground near the town of Rauma on Finland’s west coast. Damage was limited to ballast tanks and the crew of seventeen patiently waited nearly a week for an Estonian tug to show up. In Florida, the research vessel Endeavour, operated by the University of Rhode Island, ran aground on the St Johns River near the Navy base at Mayport.

The smallish (10,000 dwt) ro/ro Jolly Amaranto had main-engine failure during a passage from Malta to Alexandria. Extreme bad weather then caused the ship to list 30-40°, several containers went overboard, and inside cargo was damaged. A salvage contract was signed and the deep-sea tug took the vessel in tow for Alexandria. There, two local pilots were on board and three local tugs were in attendance but theSimoon Jolly Amaranto veered off course anyhow and went hard aground between the roads and a quay. At the time the port was closed due to bad weather. (Some reports state that the vessel took on water and capsized, sinking in the shallows.)

Four Chinese sailors died when fire gutted the 1,400-ton Cambodia-flagged cargo ship Yunxing two miles from South Korea’s southern port of Busan. The coast guard said the blaze might have been caused by a short circuit in the ship’s galley.


At sea near Houston a Ukrainian crewmember died on the Dutch cargo ship Alexia. The FBI is investigating whether the death was a murder or an accident – according to some reports, there was a scuffle between two Ukrainians. At Lyttelton in New Zealand, two crewmen on the cruise ship Volendam were doing something (what is not clear from contradictory reports) on a lifeboat when a wire snapped. Both men were not wearing lifejackets and both fell into the water. One survived by clinging to a bucket but the other man, who was wearing heavy clothing and boots, was seen to go under and did not reappear.

Gray Fleets
Brazil’s new leftist government banned HMS Clyde, the 1,800-ton Falkland Islands protection vessel, from making a routine visit to Rio de Janeiro. Instead it had to reroute to Chile. The snub was to demonstrate solidarity with Argentina’s claim to the South Atlantic islands. In September, Uruguay refused to allow HMS Gloucester to carry out a routine visit to Montevideo.

The last of the US’s battleships, now swinging from a hook in Suisun Bay north of San Francisco, is looking for a permanent home and several California communities would like to have the USS Iowa as a war memorial. In 2005, San Francisco rejected the warship because of its association with the Iraq war and the military’s ban on gays. Stockton, on a navigable river leading to Suisan Bay, failed the financial test. Vallejo would like to exhibit the vessel at the former Mare Island Navy Yard but may lack enough money ($2-3 million a year) to support it. Los Angeles wants the battleship and would place the Iowa at Berth 87, now used only six times a year when other cruise-ship docks are occupied. No decision yet but one is looming just over the horizon.

Several years ago, the executive officer of the carrier USS Enterprise thought that part of his duties was to increase crew morale by amusing them. He produced a series of raunchy, definitely non-PC videos, and most of the crew didn’t seem to object to his broadcasts. Certainly, the Commanding Officer never brought him to heel. Years later, several of the videos came to public attention, and the XO, now paradoxically the CO of the Enterprise, was fired from his job. The CO at the time of the video showings is now a Rear Admiral and was about to retire. That retirement was deferred and he has been ordered to hang around while the circumstances surrounding the videos are investigated by the Navy.

The Royal Navy is down to just eleven submarines if you include the new HMS Astute, which is on sea trials when not running aground. The eleven can be compared with the fleet of 32 submarines back in 1982 at the time of the Falklands War. Present boats include four Vanguard-class boats that carry Trident nuclear missiles, and Trafalgar- and Astute-class attack subs.

White Fleets
An elderly man seriously injured his neck while disembarking (probably from the Emerald Princess, although no name was provided) and the company was quick to point out that he fell “ashore in Bonnaire…while stepping ashore.” In other words, technically he wasn’t on its ship. He needed an air ambulance to the States. A young man died by falling from the 14th deck of MSC Orchestra while it was anchored in Brazilian waters. The company stated, "He was rescued from the sea, but succumbed to his injuries and died," and considered that the man had placed himself in a “situation of high risk and dangerousness.” About thirty passengers were hurt and several public spaces were torn up when the Brilliance of the Seas hit rough weather while en route to Alexandria. A US Coast Guard helicopter lifted a thirteen-year-old and his mother off the Jewel near Cape Hatteras, NC. He had a suspicious appendix that needed attention. Similarly, an infant and her mother were flown off the Gem 245 miles south of Cape Lookout, NC. The baby girl was suffering from upper respiratory tract infection and respiratory distress. A Puerto Rican may have jumped off the Liberty of the Seas, possibly to his death, in the early hours of morning while the ship was at Belize.

Last November’s electrical fire on the Carnival Splendor of Mexico’s Baja California must have been more serious than first believed. The company added cancellation of five more sailings to nine earlier cancellations. Unexpected damage and the need to have parts made in Europe were cited as causes.

They That Go Back and Forth
The Alaskan fast ferry Chenega rode out a sudden storm by anchoring for a night in a remote bay, then proceeded to Cordova, The trip took somewhat longer that the scheduled 3 hours 15 minutes and the forty passengers on board had to rough it since the ferry has no sleeping accommodations.

In the UK over the past year, extensive dredging has been carried out at the major cross-Channel ferry port of Ramsgate Harbour but more work remains to be done, with the next round not due to commence until February. Which is too bad, because high winds pushed the 14,458-ton ferry Larkspur aground on a mud bank while entering the port with passengers from Ostende in Belgium. The emergency standby tugboat Nore Challenger was dispatched to dislodge the ship and guide it into its berth.

A ferry collided with a cargo ship in Bangladesh, dumping eighty people into the Suma River. At least 37, mostly women and children, died. In Malaysia, an overloaded boat (29 people on a vessel rated for 12) capsized about 300 meters from the Tanjung Lleman jetty in Pulau Sibu and only fourteen were rescued. The vessel had been coming to shore from a kelong (an offshore fishing platform on piles). Two men were missing at night after the ferry they were travelling in capsized in the Thames. The small boat was carrying six passengers when it went over near Pharaoh’s Island close to Shepperton.

Nature
The US Navy is serious about climate charge, with a rear admiral (the Navy’s oceanographer) heading a 450-man staff. “We in the US Navy believe climate change is real. It's going to have big impacts, especially in the Arctic, which is changing before our eyes.”

Nauru (pronounce it in three syllables) is a small island nation in the South Pacific Ocean, a solitary speck with a landmass of 8.1 square miles, surrounded by a coral reef. It was originally a heap of phosphate (guano) created from seabird droppings but almost all that has been mined off and shipped out, and most areas now resemble the surface of the moon. During the phosphate-mining era, Nauru had one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world. (Families imported top-of-the-line speedboats as well as BMWs and Cadillacs, which, given that Nauru only has 32 km of drivable surface, were somewhat curious luxuries.) After the phosphate ran out, Nauru briefly became a tax haven and illegal-money-laundering center. From 2001 to 2008, it accepted aid from the Australian government in exchange for housing a center that held and processed those immigrants who had tried to enter Australia in an irregular manner. The nation’s airline (Our Airline, formerly Air Nauru) is down from seven aircraft and an extensive route serving many islands to two Boeing 737s that serve only Fiji, Kiribati, the Solomon and Norfolk Islands as well as Australia. Unemployment now averages 90% and the nation survives on international aid.

Approximately 15,000 gallons of liquid animal fat flowed into the Houston Ship Channel, where it solidified into multiple foot-long, beef-tallow "patties." Clean-up workers soon scooped them out of the Channel.

Metal-Bashing
Mammoet Salvage, part of Mammoet, the worldwide leader in heavy lifting and transport, will salvage seventy shipwrecks in Nouadhibou Bay, Mauretania after the European Union made €28.8 million available for their removal. The junk ships, ranging from 200 to 1,200 tons, form obstacles and hazards to shipping and are one reason local shipping has dropped off greatly in recent years.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Shipping companies are ignoring official advice and routinely employ armed guards on ships sailing in pirate waters. It’s far cheaper and far more effective than other anti-pirate means or paying a (typical) $6 million ransom plus lawyers, bankers, and other middlemen, whose costs may add another $19 million. Then add on the loss of income as a pirated ship awaits a parachuted delivery of ransom cash.
But officialdom frowned on the practice of the Yemeni government, acting through at least two private companies, of renting out its coast guard vessels and crews as anti-pirate escorts even though it was claimed that all proceeds accrued to the government. (Since 2003, the US Coast Guard has delivered two dozen vessels to its Yemeni counterpart, and two larger "coastal protection boats" are scheduled for delivery this year. The US Coast Guard has also given extensive training to the Yemen Coast Guard's estimated 1,800 servicemen and 200 officers.)

Chinese fishermen feel they can fish in South Korean waters; the South Korean Coast Guard disagrees, and things can get nasty. When two Korean patrol ships approached a Chinese trawler and tried boarding it, the Chinese crew started swinging iron pipes, shovels, and clubs that injured four Koreans. Then the 62-ton Chinese boat bumped one of the 3,000-ton patrol ships and capsized, putting ten Chinese fishermen into the sea. Eight were rescued but the boat’s 28-year-old captain died at a hospital after going into a coma, and another Chinese fisherman was missing. The Korea Coast Guard dispatched six patrol ships and two helicopters to find the missing man but failed.

Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
Two, perhaps three, Russian icebreakers (reports vary) tried to free ten vessels carrying 450- 500 fishermen, scientists, and mariners trapped by ice on the Okhotsk Sea in northern Russia only twelve miles from the coast. The ice was up to 30 cm (12 inches) thick in some places. The minister assured families that the men are quite safe and said they have enough food, water and medicines. There was good radio connection with all of the trawlers. The Russian port icebreaker Magadan failed to reach the trapped vessels and had to halt some four miles from the scene as temperatures in the region plunged to an all-time low. Arriving soon after were the Admiral Makarov and, later, the Krasin, both bigger, more-powerful icebreakers. Initial attempts to free vessels failed and rescue efforts were resumed as this item is being written in mid-January.

Whatever the experience of those now trapped by ice, it will hardly match that of the crew of the Grimsby trawler Sargon, stuck in ice in the same region in the early 1920s over 80 years ago when most trawlers were not fitted with radio. The Sargon was officially given up as lost but appeared outside Grimsby docks one day; the crew had survived for at least 16 weeks on seal meat and the fish they had on board. Meanwhile, one of the "widows" had remarried; the wedding was later held to be valid because her first husband had been officially recorded as having perished.

The remains of the USS Revenge, a Baltimore-built schooner, have been discovered off the coast of Rhode Island. US Navy hero Oliver Hazard Perry (of “Don’t give up the ship” fame, was in command of the Revenge in 1811 when it was wrecked while charting Rhode Island waters. The shipwreck was actually discovered back in August of 2005 by two civilian divers but they only recently revealed the wreck, and continued to investigate the wreckage in the meantime.

Transporting nickel ore is OK if you know what you are doing but it can sink ships. For example, last October, the 45,107 dwt Jian Fu Star capsized in rough seas off Taiwan and sank, killing 13; in November, the 55,000-dwt Nasco Diamond sank off Japan in calm weather, moderate wind, good visibility, and little rain, and twenty-one died; and in December, the 50,149-dwt Hong Wei sank in Philippine waters, killing ten. A common factor in the three sinkings was excessive moisture content of the nickel ore when it was loaded. The moisture turned the ore into a slurry or liquid that sloshed around, shifting a ship’s stability into nasty states such as extreme listing, and the ship capsized or filled. (It is possible that the Van Don-2, whose sinking was noted above, may have been carrying nickel ore.)

It is sometimes hard to “translate“ foreign news reports even when they are written in English. Here is one with creative language:

“A cement clinker-laden lighterage ship has been drowned at the outer anchorage of Chittagong port. The incident occurred around 6:45 am on Saturday when another lighterage ship hit it. Port secretary Syed Farhad Uddin said the accident happened when the drowned ship Manik Mia 2 was departing the port and Abdullah Al Asif 1 from the opposition stroke it near 'B Anchorage'. No casualties, however, were reported so far.”

In Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, Dutch Harbor put money into its concerns about possible pollution from broken-down ships. (Ships thread the Aleutians on the great-circle route to the Far East.) It created an Emergency Towing System that could be helicopter-dropped onto a stricken ship and picked up by a tug. A second, heavier system was purchased and one of them was recently used when the bulker Golden Seas lost its supercharger and could only proceed at three knots.

The tugboat Smit Yallarm was on a routine delivery voyage from its builders in Turkey to a customer in Gladstone, Australia when it was asked to divert in response to a pan pan radio call. A fisherman was in a critical state and needed evacuation from his boat 280 kilometers northeast of Bundasberg in Queensland. But Australian Army helicopters didn’t have sufficient range to handle a complete rescue. So one chopper picked up the sick man and delivered him to the tugboat, which then headed for shore at best speed. The second chopper met the tugboat at a rendezvous point near shore and took the sick man to a hospital.

A spur-of-the-moment hovering of two US Navy helicopters about 70 feet above Lake Tahoe to take photos for the squadron’s Facebook page caused the choppers, worth $33 million, to sag without warning to the water. Luckily, both aircraft were able to regain altitude and land nearby. There were no injuries to ten embarrassed crewmen but damage to both helicopters totaled a whopping $505,751. (A video of the incident is available on YouTube.)

Other Shores - January 2011

In 2009, there were 74,951 merchant ships, totaling 853,276,000 gross tons.
One in three shipowners feels the worst is over. In fact, some containers lines look forward to being quite profitable soon.

Look for Ghana to become the next major oil-producer. Its Jubilee Field, which went into production on December 1, holds an estimated 450 million barrels and it is only one of a series of crude-bearing formations.

The use of LNG as a fuel for ships is gaining momentum, partly because of its lower polluting emissions and partly because there seems to be plenty of LNG available at relatively low prices. About twenty ships, mostly ferries in Norway, are currently fueled by LNG but some experts expect that nearly half of all new ships will use LNG by 2020 and it will fuel the entire world fleet by 2050.

A design team of thirty, all under 34 years old to eliminate traditional prejudices, have come up with a concept they call Triality, the world’s first gas-powered (ie, LNG), ballast-free VLCC. If such a tanker is ever built, the team predicts that the daily fuel costs ($32,260) would be lower than for an equivalent vessel using current marine fuels (($37,000). That should save the owners a minimum of $24 million over the 20-year life of the tanker.

Some shipowners believe they can prove that the reduced fuel consumption from slow steaming saves money but one owner believes any savings are eaten up by the need to build intermediate distribution and storage facilities at waypoints to compensate for the increased transit time of cargo.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Off the Peruvian port city of Callao, the Chinese fishing vessel Fuyuan 3 capsized and four of the crew of 19 fishermen went missing, presumably trapped inside the overturned vessel. Off Vietnam, the 34-year-old handysize bulker Jianmao 9 sank for reasons not given. It usually carries sand. Also off Vietnam, the steel-carrying Jian Mao 9 sank and its crew of 26 were rescued by the Panamanian-flagged container ship NYK Aquarius. They were then turned over to provincial border guards and later turned over to officials at the Chinese consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. The big tug Fairplay 22 inexplicably capsized in outer Rotterdam harbor in clear weather and 25-mph winds with gusts to 60 mph and the master and chief engineer both died. Quick work by other tugs stabilized the capsized vessel and it was taken into calmer waters where the sheerlegs crane Taklift 7 carefully rolled the tug upright. The company announced that the name Fairplay 22 will never be used again in the Fairplay fleet.

In strong winds, the 3,000-ton cement-carrying Arklow Raider ran aground while leaving Drogheda, County Louth. (That’s in Ireland.) In Norway while traveling from Oslo to Fredrikstad with cargo, the 4450-dwt ro/ro Cometa went aground on a small spit of land called the Fugletangskjaer, which is somewhere near Kirkeoy.

In the Black Sea, the general cargo vessel Karaiml (Karim 1?) sank after colliding with the empty chemical tanker Alessandro DP about 20 km south of Emine Cape and five crewmen went missing. Near Hong Kong eight of fourteen mariners on the sand barge Runze001 died after it collided with the small (164-foot) container ship Huijinqiao 08.

Fires and explosions took a toll: At Montevideo, the South Korean squid-fishing vessel Seo Gin 11 caught fire and one of the crew of twenty-three was found dead in the engineroom. It was the fifth ship fire in the port this year and authorities are concerned.

At Bremerhaven, vehicles were being routinely unloaded from the car carrier Don Pasquale when someone noticed that the vessel’s stern was about 15 meters from the pier and the stern ramp was about to plunge into the water. Strong winds had broken mooring lines. A tug pushed the ship back into position. North of Adak in the Aleutian chain of islands, the 738-foot bulker Golden Seas reported supercharger failure and its engine was capable only of marginal power output. The 18,300-hp offshore anchor-handling tug Tor Viking II was working in the general area for Shell Oil and pushed through high seas to take the big vessel in tow for the 500+ miles to Dutch Harbor where repairs could be made. During the tow, the two vessels threaded the Aleutian Islands to get to their south side and somewhat-calmer waters. (The average speed during the tow was about 8 knots, a tribute to the tug and its four engines.) At Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta), Malaysian logs were being unloaded from the Kyaukpyu using equipment (the crane’s boom or a sling, it is not clear) rated at a 14-ton capacity when a 30-ton load was tackled. Something snapped and the logs fell into the ship with an almighty crash. The vessel was somewhat damaged but, luckily, that was not true for bystanders or stevedores, who escaped unharmed.

In the case of the master of the Moldova-flagged Carina I, he died at sea near the port of Kalmnos while en route to Syria, and officials want to know why he died. (He was sixty years old.)

Gray Fleets
The US Navy set a world’s record of sorts when an experimental electric railgun sent a 20-pound projectile rocketing through the air at seven times the speed of sound. The trailer-sized weapon generated 33 megajoules of force out of the barrel, a world record for muzzle energy. (One megajoule is roughly equal to the energy generated by a 1-ton vehicle moving at 100 mph.) And the Navy’s Electro-Magnetic Aircraft Launch System, which will be used on newer carriers, should shoot an actual F/A-18E Super Hornet into flight in mid-December. The test was eagerly awaited although the EMALS has already made 722 dead-load launches at speeds up to 180 knots.

The US Navy informed all hands that from now on the Persian Gulf is to be called the Arabian Gulf. This mightily irked the Iranians, who think of themselves as Persians and the gulf as theirs. The Navy’s Facebook page – yes, even the Navy has a Facebook page – was quickly awash in thousand of pro-Iranian messages that denied service members around the world of opportunities for posting their own messages.

You have to watch advertising agencies like a hawk. The Indian Navy had a nice public-relations campaign going until someone noted that some special advertising supplements showed India’s Jaguars and Sea Harriers flying over what was supposed to be the Indian aircraft carrier INS Viraat. Unfortunately, someone had substituted an American carrier, complete with non-Indian aircraft on its deck! And another triumph of Indian advertising showed a miniscule Viraat streaming between two gigantic American carriers. (The Viraat displaces a mere 24,000 tons and carries most of India’s remaining dozen of Sea Harriers plus several elderly Sea King helicopters, while an American carrier displaces between 80,000 and 100,000 tons and carries several dozen aircraft.)

The White Paper “Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The Strategic Defence and Security Review” issued earlier this year announced a number of cuts to the Royal Navy’s surface fleet, including scrapping the four Type 22 frigates, HMS Ark Royal, a Bay-class RFA ship, and either the light aircraft carriers HMS Illustrious or HMS Ocean. Now it has been decided that HMS Ark RoyalHMS Illustrious will be withdrawn from service at the end of this year, will be withdrawn from service in 2014, and HMS Ocean will be retained to provide a Landing Platform Helicopter capability for the longer term. (Hopefully, it will be supplemented by at least one of the two large aircraft carriers under construction.) The Bay-class amphibious support ship RFA Largs Bay will be withdrawn from service next April along with the Auxiliary Oiler RFA Bayleaf and the Auxiliary Oiler Replenishment RFA Fort George. The head of the UK’s armed forces admitted that scrapping the Sea Harriers and aircraft carriers was a risk to national security but that “can be managed.”

The Royal Navy is hoping to sell the 1977-vintage light aircraft carrier HMS Invincible for as much as £2 million but don’t expect to operate it if you purchase it. It’s been pretty well stripped (the engines have been removed and the generators and pumps are “generally unusable”) but if you do buy it, rest reassured that it is towable.

The Canadian Senate enthusiastically passed a motion urging the federal government to change the name of Canada’s naval force from Maritime Command to something with the word “navy.” The naval force already refers to itself as “Canadian Navy” but some senators and MPs want a return to its pre-1968 name of “Royal Canadian Navy.” “I myself would quite prefer to have it called Royal Navy,” said one member of parliament. “We have the RCMP, Royal Canadian Legion, why not Royal Canadian Navy?”


White Fleets
The 100-passenger, 290-foot Clelia II is perhaps the most elegant cruise ship that sails in Antarctic waters but it is accumulating a reputation for giving its passengers perhaps more than they bargained for. In 2009, most of the season was cancelled after stronger-than-expected currents pushed the vessel onto rocks and damaged one of its propellers This year, in the Drake Passage, the five-story vessel was hit by a 30-foot wave that broke a window on the bridge, damaged electrical circuitry, and slightly injured one crewman. Both engines suffered damage but kept running and the ship crept back at five knots to Ushuaia for repairs and cancellation of its next voyage. The similarly sized expedition ship National Geographic Explorer accompanied the vessel on its slow voyage to Ushuaia and several passengers took dramatic video footage that can be found on the Internet of the ship laboring in massive seas.

An explosion on the Queen Mary 2 while approaching Barcelona last November was more serious than first thought. One of twelve capacitors in a harmonic filter exploded, doing severe damage to neighboring equipment and buckling frames and the door to the compartment. Another capacitor was bulging badly and may have been about to explode. Any fire was quickly extinguished by activation of two hi-fog fire outlets. The ship was blacked-out for 29 minutes but the ship was underway again in less than an hour. (A harmonic filter attenuates harmonic currents in AC current that may damage equipment.)

The elderly (1981) Indian cruise ship Ocean Life, on its first voyage for new owners, was between Goa and Mumbai with 250 passengers when the master radioed that the ship had developed a 5-degree list and water was entering through a crack in the hull. Three tugs arrived and the Ocean Life was towed to a shipyard. Strangely, workers there could not find any crack. At sea en route to Florida, an intoxicated male passenger on the Ryndam thought it would be helpful or funny or something if he dropped the stern anchors “just like he did on yachts.” No damage was done.

Cruises can be safe but watch out for those shore tours! Four passengers from the Norwegian Sun were injured when brakes failed on the taxi van bringing them back from a Bahamian casino. They later explained they hadn’t used the seat belts because the ship was nearby. Without travel insurance and a medical plan with no coverage outside the US, one badly injured woman’s family was forced to dig up $9,000 for the local hospital’s care and $21,000 for an air ambulance to take her home to Massachusetts for further treatment


Those That Go Back and Forth
In Sydney Harbour, a wooden party boat crashed into Pyrmont Wharf, injuring nine people, some seriously. (A passenger with multiple broken bones and head injuries was standing on the top deck and fell over the rail when the boat hit.) The boat’s skipper blamed equipment failure but reluctantly admitted that there had been some “agrro” (aggravation or aggression) as the vessel hit the sea wall and four other vessels. It turns out he was being violently assaulted by some passengers as he tried to fix the faulty equipment and make the landing; authorities decided that, under the circumstances, “the skipper did a good job.”

While en route from Oslo to Copenhagen, the Pearl of Scandinavia had a fire on board. The 490 passengers were mustered but there was no need to evacuate the vessel. However, clean up of fire damage took longer than estimated and voyages were cancelled for the next several days. The fire started in a defective lead to a battery charger in a Nissan Qashquai (a British-built compact SUV) that had been converted into an “electro-car.” The car’s owner had been charging the battery using a regular extension cord but he admitted maybe it hadn’t fit the special recharge socket tightly. Three vehicles and a truck were destroyed. Last month, the company’s Lisco Gloria caught fire somewhere between Germany and Lithuania. The fire, which totally engulfed the vessel and forced evacuation of the 236 persons on board, started with an explosion in a trailer on the cargo deck. Fire broke out in the engineroom of the Stena Pioneer while it was 12 miles off the UK’s Lancashire coast. Twelve passengers, mostly lorry drivers, remained calm and the ship’s crew extinguished the fire without outside help. While being extensively upgraded at a shipyard in Gdansk, the Britannica (ex-Stena Britannica) caught fire and suffered undetermined damage. At Aberdeen, the Shetland and Orkney ferry Hrossey was docking when it was hit by the oilfield supply boat Maersk Finder. As a result of the damage to the ferry, bread, fruit, vegetables, and the like became in short supply in Shetland shops. Finally, while en route to Ancona from Corinth, the Colossus went aground on rocks in Vassiliki Bay, the impact cracking a ballast tank. The tug Hector went to the rescue but no results were reported.

In Prince William Sound in Alaska, worsening weather got a kayaker into trouble but the fast ferry Chenega was not too far away and launched its fast rescue boat with good results as far as the kayaker was concerned. But at Mukilteo, in Washington, matters were less straightforward. A man called a crisis hot line to announce he was suicidal and was going to jump off the ferry. Police and a Coast Guard helicopter were unable to locate him but a motorist called in about two hours later to say he had seen a young man in his underwear near the water. He was actually wearing swim trunks and said he had jumped into the water for fun. “He thought it was a good joke,” explained a fire official.

Legal Matters
A Wisconsin man was sentenced to fifty months in custody for sinking the pleasure boat Misty Morning in navigable Michigan waters and polluting the water. Before being sentenced, he explained, "I had a business and I couldn't keep up with technology." The sentence may seem stiff but he had been convicted in 2009 on three of four counts and failed to show up for sentencing. He was arrested eight months later in Costa Rica, thanks to help from Interpol. The vessel used to tow the Misty Morning was also confiscated and he lost his mariner’s license.

Longshoremen went out on a wildcat strike for two days so major shipping lines, terminal operators in New York/New Jersey, and the New York Shipping Association sued the International Longshoremen’s Association seeking damages of more than $5 million.

In Malta, a drydock employee who fell five stories when scaffolding gave way on the Lobo Elif was awarded €44,154 in actual damages and another €136,800 for loss of earnings but the court deducted €39,957 he had already received from his personal accident insurance. He has a 95% permanent disability.

Nature
Navigation on the upper Mississippi became difficult after early winter weather created much pancake ice, and crewmen were using long poles to push chunks of ice from between towboats and their barges. At Duluth, commercial tugs had to start breaking ten inches of prematurely early ice because Coast Guard icebreakers were caught away doing routine navigational-aids tasks.

Two American scientists who have been studying the cyclical nature of sunspots announced that the world could be headed toward another ice age. Over the last twenty years, billions have been spent on the assumption that global temperatures will rise but virtually no money was expended investigating the possibilities that global temperatures might fall and the implications thereof.

Metal Bashing
Prices for ships to be scrapped held up. A Chinese shipbreaker bought a capesize bulker for $448 per light displacement ton, a price comparable to those being paid on the Indian sub-continent.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
A US federal court convicted five Somalis of engaging in piracy and related acts, probably the first such US conviction since 1820. They had attacked the frigate USS Nicholas, after mistaking it for a helpless merchant ship, and now face life in jail.

Another Somali pirate was sentenced to thirty years in a US jail for attacking the dock landing ship USS Ashland. He also pleaded guilty to piracy against the Danish merchant vessel CEC Future and received a 25-year sentence.


Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
Sonar experts spotted a ship-like object on the sea bottom and a Finnish diver brought up 168 bottles of champagne, including some bottled by a firm that ceased operations in 1830. The wreck also holds many bottles of what may be the world’s oldest drinkable beer.

The US National Transportation Safety Board updated its wish list of Most-Wanted Safety Improvements, hoping that all motorcyclists will wear approved safety helmets but dropping recreational boating, which, it felt, had made substantial safety progress.

Many foreign ports are so littered with wrecked or abandoned vessels that navigation by larger vessels is difficult and cleanup is difficult to finance but the Liberian government seems to have struck a deal with a multimillion-dollar biomass-energy company that does business in that country. It is removing wrecks from various Liberian ports. Among the first seven vessels removed at the freeport of Monrovia were the Tom Alexandra, a freighter sunk at pierside while being unloaded in 2006 during civil unrest, another vessel named the African Style, about which about no information is available, and two tug boats.

New naval ships usually have teething problems and most are not too visible to the general public. But New Zealand’s new offshore patrol vessel HMNZS Otago was taking NZ’s Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand and wife Lady Susan and a Cabinet Minister to visit the sub-arctic Campbell Island 700 km south of New Zealand when it had electrical problems on one engine. The couple was transferred to sister OPV HMNZS Wellington (which was carrying a party of scientists for a three-month stay on the island) and the Otago limped back to Auckland for repairs.

That was the official story. But, according to a reporter on board the Otago, very heavy seas on the way south from Bluff had caused a spring on a switchboard to break, temporarily disabling one engine. The Governor-General-less OPV was then ordered to return to Auckland, which it did using both engines. Makeshift repairs had been made using duct or “gaffer" tape.

Other Shores - December 2010

By Hugh Ware

Necessary repairs to locks on the Columbia and Snake River will close the two rivers to barge traffic for three months. Much barge-carried cargo will shift to semi-truckers and trains, although wheat growers have stored grain and stocks of petroleum products filled all available tankage, much of it in the idled tank barges.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In northeastern China, a sand-dredging barge flipped in rough seas. A helicopter saved three crewmen but another eleven were missing.

In Yemen, the small Syrian livestock carrier Gamma Livestock 12 had a fire in the accommodation area so its crew abandoned the ship and its livestock (probably sheep), and the ship ran up on the beach about eight miles north of Kwawkhah. In the Caribbean, the tanker Azra-S went aground because of heavy seas and two weeks later it was refloated by the St Croix-based tug Storm. At Oxelosund in Sweden, the tanker Chantaco was driven aground by heavy winds during the night but was underway the next day. Off Brisbane, Australia, a sudden failure of steering put the containership MSC BaselCommodore Straits onto the Yule Sandbanks. After being freed, the ship was detained while investigations took place. On the St Lawrence Seaway, the Canadian tug went aground while pushing two barges. Both barges took on water but there was no polluting spill.

In the North Sea, some 30 kilometers off the Dutch coast, the Greek tanker Mindoro carrying jet fuel collided with the Cypriot container ship Jork Ranger. The holed tanker spewed jet fuel for a while but the leak was quickly contained.

At Lami in the Fijis, the sizable ro/ro Suilven was the star in an Emergency Planned Beaching (yes—“Emergency Planned …”) to repair its starboard propeller, damaged by entangling fishing lines. In South Australia at Port Lincoln, the bulker Grand Rodosi approached a pier. It overshot the desired berth and crashed into the tuna boat Apollo S. The FV slowly heeled over as fiberglass gave way and it sank within half an hour. The grain ship was arrested as part of a $28 million legal action but soon sailed with a full cargo. (Port Lincoln is featured as the major Australian loading destination in many books about the grain trade and square-riggers.) Speaking of square-rigged vessels, in nasty conditions about 100 miles off the Isles of Scilly in western UK, the Polish barque Fryderyak Chopin lost its bowsprit, quickly followed by both topmasts, and had to be towed into Falmouth. None of the 47 people aboard were injured but the ship was a picturesque old-time-y mess with yards hanging down and lines trailing overboard.

A female cadet fell from the rigging of the German Navy’s square- rigged training ship Gorch Fock to the deck. She died in a Brazilian hospital.

A Coast Guard helicopter took an American mariner suffering multiple leg injuries off the northbound 831-foot tanker Sierra 284 miles southwest of Sitka. He was injured when a deck plate fell on his legs. And perhaps the same chopper rescued a Chinese fitter from the 890-foot container ship Ever Unique 54 miles south of Dutch Harbor. He too had leg injuries but they were inflicted in the engine room.

Gray Fleets
The smallish (150 tons) South Korean Navy patrol boat Chamsuri sank after hitting a protuberance on a larger (270 ton) fishing boat. An injured sailor died in the hospital on Jeju Island.

The US Navy will station 24 women officers in teams of three or four on the following subs: USS Wyoming and USS Georgia, both based at King’s Bay, Georgia, and the Bangor-based USS Ohio and USS Maine. The lone head for officers on each sub will be fitted with a reversible sign.

Where was the US Navy born? At least five saltwater communities still lay claim although Congress decided in 1965 that Whitehall, New York (on Lake Champlain several hundred miles from saltwater!) was the real birthplace. The claimant communities are Beverly and Marblehead in Massachusetts; Machias, Maine; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Providence, Rhode Island.

The Australian Navy had to fly naval cadets to New Zealand for sea training on HMNZS Canterbury because Ozzieland’s two training ships, HMAS Kanimbla and HMAS Manoora (both ex-US LSTs), were under repair.

Did you know that little Thailand owns and operates an aircraft carrier? The “Offshore Patrol Helicopter Carrier” HTMS Chakri Narubet is the world’s smallest jump-jet carrier but can operate 18 VSTOL or rotary aircraft.

Has the Royal Navy hit upon hard times? One might think so. Stringent budget cuts will harm all UK military services but those for the Royal Navy approach ridiculousness. For example, the Senior Service has two large aircraft carriers under construction. Political realities ensure that both will be finished but one will carry troops and helicopters upon completion, and the other will have no aircraft until the VSTOL version of the Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is delivered in 2020 (if that version is not canceled by US budgetary cuts.) The carrier/s could have had some VSTOL fighters up to then except that the Harriers are scheduled to be deleted. (And what then would be available to defend the Falkland Islands a second time?)

French Rafale jet fighters might fly off the new carrier(s), a prospect that angered many Brits. The arrangement would give France a “permanent presence” at sea even when its single carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, is down for maintenance.

Privatization of the Royal Navy’s nuclear base at Coulport on the Clyde is in the probable future. A consortium that includes the US firm of Lockheed Martin is in the running for the job of storing, processing, maintaining, and issue of the Trident Weapon System and all ammo for the base’s four submarines. Letting a US firm in is a prospect that also angered many Brits.

The brand-new nuclear-powered attack submarine HMS Astute, which has been described as “the most expensive and technologically advanced submarine in the world,” was on pre-delivery trials in Scotland when it ran painfully, publicly, aground on a shingle bank near the Isle of Skye during a crew change. To the rescue came the local Emergency Towing Vessel Anglian Prince (ironically, all four of the UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency-chartered ETVS are scheduled be scrubbed next year as part of the budget cuts). The big seagoing tug put a towline over to the ship and took a strain. The line parted and recoiled, missing the matelots (seamen) on the sub’s deck but wrapping itself around the sub’s sail, then fouling the Anglian Prince’s propeller. That pulled the two ships together, damaging a foreplane on the £1 billion submarine. The commercial tug Ayton Cross took over towing the sub while the Anglian Prince was towed to Ullapool for removal of the line.

A stray budgie landed on HMS Westminster and was quickly adopted by an eager crew. But the bird died of shock when an alarm went off. The little yellow and green bird was given a burial at sea “with full honors.”

White Fleets
Cruise ships are getting so big that passing under bridges can be a problem. Take the 138,000-ton Enchantment of the Seas. To the top of the mast is about 240 feet but the ship had to transit Denmark’s Storebaelt Bridge, whose air draft is only 213 feet. No problem! The ship and at least one fleetmate are designed with retractable exhaust pipes protruding from the funnels, and they were retracted. About 4,000 tons of water ballast were taken on, and the watermakers had worked overtime since departure. Lastly, the ship increased speed so as to cause squatting in the shallow water. The result was a fascinating and tense view for spectators but plenty of air-draft clearance for the ship.

The cruise ship Carnival Splendor had an after engine room explosion and fire (due to a cracked crankcase of one of six engines driving generators) while about 150 miles south of San Diego. The fire was quickly extinguished but the resulting damage left the ship with only auxiliary power. Close to 4,000 passengers had no air conditioning, toilets, or hot food, while food supplies were low because the ship had expected to arrive at San Diego within the day. The US Navy quickly loaded Carrier Onboard Delivery planes with groceries including boxes of crabmeat, croissants, and other delicacies for the stranded passengers. (However, one photo showed endless rows of Spam cans being loaded on a COD.) The goodies were flown out to the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and from there helicopters carried them to the ship. Meanwhile, two tugs towed the cruise liner to San Diego.

The Costa Atlantica had steering problems shortly after leaving Bermuda’s Dockyard and the pilot stopped the ship and called for two tugs. Engineers quickly fixed the problem and the ship headed for Port Canaveral. At the mouth of the Yangtze, the Costa Classica collided with the Belgian-flagged bulker Lowlands Longevity traveling in the same direction. Three of the 1,311 passengers were hospitalized and the cruise ship had a gash on its port side that was – how can we measure it? – eleven portholes long or maybe 80-90 feet long, and high enough to allow the curious plenty of room to look out and wonder at the damage.

Those That Go Back and Forth
In the Falkland war in 1982, the Brits chartered many commercial ships. Among those ships serving as troopships were the liner QE2 and the 27,000-ton ferry Norland. The Norland carried Royal Marines and other forces in San Carlos Sound, where the ship was under multiple attacks by Argentinean aircraft. Now, the 1974-built Norland and sister Norstar will be scrapped in India after many successful years of service.

In Scotland, the Hjaltland managed to dock at Rosyth a day late and more than 100 miles from its intended destination of Aberdeen. And across the North Sea, the Bergensfjord carrying 250 people from western Norway to Hirtshals in Denmark arrived three hours late but winds were too strong to allow it to dock so it spent hours idling in the harbor until the winds diminished a bit.

In Indonesian waters between the islands of Adonara Timur and Lembata, the wooden vessel Hasmita III (or maybe it was the Hastina III) capsized when hit by a 3-meter wave. Many people drowned but 21 were saved. (A later report said 70 were rescued.) Also in Indonesian waters but this time about 10 kilometers off the cape of Watumanuk on Flores Island, the ferry Tersanjung (or was it the Karya Pinang or the Karya Terang; reports vary?) sank because of rough weather. Local fishermen saved 44 but 22 went missing. As a casual footnote, the news report also noted that a small freighter (possibly the Karya Pinang mentioned above) with seven crew was reported as going down off Flores the same day. (Four of the crew were rescued.) A ferry with a listed capacity of 60 was carrying 220 when it sank near Ghoramara on Sundarbans Island in the eastern state of West Benegal. Dozens, many pilgrims returning from a Muslim religious event, went missing while more than 90 swam to safety.

A woman fell off a ferry as it approached Rosslare Harbor from Wales. She was rescued by the ferry’s rescue boat. In Scotland, a Dutchman fell off a ferry traveling from Tarbert to Ulg. Again the ferry’s rescue boat was quickly successful. But in spite of a fast (about five minutes) rescue by the ferry’s rescue boat and a nearby New York high-speed policeboat, a woman who jumped off the Staten Island ferry Guy V. Molinari was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

In Sydney Harbor, a speedboat carrying six became wedged under a ferryboat. Two occupants were thrown clear and one woman suffered a broken neck. The operator was charged with “culpably navigating in a dangerous manner so as to cause grievous bodily harm,” plus other charges.

The two ex-Hawaiian catamaran super ferries, repossessed by the Maritime Administration when the ferry line ran into political problems and ceased operations, were bought by MARAD for $25 million each at an auction. (The government was owed $135.7 million-plus.) The vessels are expected to end up in government service.

Legal Matters
A Detroit man, age 19, was sentenced to 18 months in jail, fined $100,000, and must pay $14,302 in restitution for making the Coast Guard respond to a hoax radio call.

A US firm owns and operates the 3,000-ton ice-breaking research vessel Laurence M. Gould in the Antarctic on behalf of the US Government. It must pay a $2.1 million fine for allowing crewmembers to knowingly discharge oily wastewater while en route to and from the Antarctic.

The Coast Guard found the Korean master of the 20,763-ton STX Daisy and another officer were drunk while transiting the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He served 14 days in jail and cannot sail in US waters for six months. (The news item made no mention as to what happened to the other officer. )

Nature
Large tabular ice floes are common in the Antarctic but are rarer at the northern end of the Earth. But an iceberg four times the size of Manhattan (about 1,700 acres) recently calved off one of Greenland’s two main glaciers and it will keep scientists and others busy for the next two years as it drifts into East Coast shipping lanes and toward offshore oil platforms. Perhaps paradoxically, the Newfoundland town of Twillingate, the Iceberg Capital of the World, is hurting because tourists did not show up to see icebergs floating past because none showed up this summer and a local businessman had to go to Labrador to get ice for his clients. Normally, the town of 3,000 people swells to 30,000 each summer.

Gamboling humpback whales, frolicking and breaching just outside and inside Sydney Harbor, delighted passengers on some Australian ferries. Several whales even ventured past the Opera House as far as the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

The US Congress passed the Coast Guard Authorization Act and that means that even double-hulled tankers will have to have two escorting tugs while transiting Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
Using financial assistance from the Port of Long Beach, Foss Maritime will convert one of its Dolphin-class tugs to hybrid propulsion. The Campbell Foss will join the Carolyn Dorothy, a Dolphin-class tug specifically built to be the world’s first hybrid tug.

Metal-Bashing
Shipbuilding in China can be unprofitable. About eighty shipyards were operating at a loss in 2006 and that number rose to more than 140 this year.

Three ship-scrappers were instantly killed in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Port when a steel plate dropped on them. A gusty wind played a role.

The US Government has ruled that all non-producing oil and gas wells (about 3,500) in the Gulf of Mexico must be permanently plugged and about 650 idle platforms must be removed. The cost to producers and explorers will range between $1.4 billion to $3.5 billion and some experts believe that plugging idle wells near active wells is unwise.

Austal Ltd received a US Navy contract to build two more Joint High Speed Vessels at its Mobile, Alabama facility. That makes five of the speedy catamarans on order in the $1.6 billion program, with options for five more. Five of the vessels will belong to the Army with the other five owned by the Marines. The Military Sealift Command will operate the vessels, with government-employee “civilian mariners” manning the first two and union members operating the next three in a shootout to see which kind of labor will operate the remaining vessels.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Since piracy is an international crime, any nation can capture a pirate and any nation can try him but it is proving hard to convict him. For example, a Kenyan court freed seventeen suspect Somali pirates, saying the US Navy hadn’t provided the necessary evidence. But the struggle went on. The sail yacht Choizil with three aboard was captured by Somalis but its South African skipper jumped overboard during a chase by naval forces and was picked up. Royal Thai navy ships saved twenty two crewmen and one Yemeni policeman after the Thai trawler Sirichai Nava 11 was sunk by the Somali pirates, who had captured it earlier. But survivors said one Thai and four of the Yemeni policemen hired to guard the FV were missing. The trawler was fired at and sunk in the night by an unidentified vessel.

Imports
At Tampa, authorities arrested three stowaways on a barge that had just arrived from Turks and Caicos and a fourth man leapt overboard. He was soon spotted and detained.

The destroyer HMS Manchester used darkness to hide its approach to smugglers off Columbia. The ship was within 150 meters off the stern of the smuggling vessel before the naval vessel was spotted. The cargo was about 240 kilos of cocaine street-worth £67.2 million.

Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
In the UK, about 200 people gathered to block access to the Devonport Dockyard at Plymouth in a protest of the UK’s Trident sea-launched nuclear-missile system and thirteen of the anti-nuclear demonstrators demonstrated their solidarity by supergluing their hands together.

Hope Cove is an extremely scenic seaside village located in a Devon cove and it has its own RIB rescue boat. The nearest RNLI rescue boat is stationed at Salcombe, some twenty minutes away at top speed, so the Hope Covers use their boat when needed. Several years ago, the locals took the boat out for a rescue although the Maritime and Coastguard Agency authorities had “grounded” the boat for a crack in the transom – the Agency deemed it “an unacceptable risk” and forbade further use of the RIB. Recently, however, the urge to help those in trouble predominated and the Hope Cove boat and its crew rescued a canoeist in trouble off Bolt Tail and brought him back to Hope Cove before the Salcombe fast inshore boat even got to Bolt Head. The bureaucratic MCA remains adamant in its position, however, even returning a donation of £3,600 for repairs of the Hope Cove boat.

How to interpret news items from other countries is sometimes tricky. Take this item from Belize (edited, shortened, and italicized): “The barge Benita caught fire on Ambergris Caye. The fire apparently started in the cabin section of the barge and quickly ran to the tank located on the bottom compartment. Just before the explosion, all three passengers managed to escape by jumping through the front glass window of the barge.”

Overworked Indian coastal police borrowed six speedboats from other police departments in order to improve security coverage for President Obama’s visit to Mumbai. Operating at speed at night, the Sagar Shakti ran into a ship that had been submerged for more than twenty years. On board was a phlegmatic deputy commissioner of police who later commented, “We noticed a hole in the bottom of the boat through which water had started entering.”