According to the International Transport Workers’ Federation, morale of seafarers is at an all-time low due to: piracy, fatigue, denial of shore leave, visa problems, the ISPS (International Ship and Port Facility Security Code), and lack of communication facilities while on board. Add the criminalization of seafarers. (A tank-truck driver can have an accident that spills thousands of gallons of oil without the law stepping in but let a vessel create an oily sheen...)
The Southern Africa country of Mozambique has the world’s last major untapped coal reserves but needs heavy investments to get coal to a port for export. The Brazilian mining company Vale has bee making such investments and the first export shipment, 35,000 tons of thermal coal for Lebanon, recently left on the bulker Orion Express.
In its relentless pursuit of a cleaner environment, California passed a law requiring vessels to switch from heavy oil fuels to fuels with less than 1.5% percent sulphur as they approach the state but there has been a 100-percent increase in engine failures and blackouts since the law went into effect in July 2009.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
A British report revealed details why the feeder container ship K-Wave ran aground at full speed thirteen miles east of Malaga last February while the bridge was unmanned. The vessel’s Voyage Data Recorder preserved sounds of a very boozy party on the bridge involving many ”toasts” and most of the ship’s officers. The festivities broke up after several hours when the second officer announced he needed to carry out his duties as officer of the watch. But he left the bridge at some time in the next four hours, the course was changed, and the ship ultimately and gently ran aground. A local fishing vessel notified the Spanish coast guard that the ship appeared to be aground and about the same time the chief mate found the bridge was unmanned. Efforts by the master to free the ship were unsuccessful. Interestingly, the report noted that the course change was due to a deliberate manipulation of the autopilot controls.
On the Columbia River, an electrical failure put the vehicle carrier Luminous Ace ashore somewhere between Portland and Astoria. No leaks, not much excitement, just the non-routine deployment of a precautionary anchor and the tedious wait for high tide and some tugs. On the Westerschelde, the largest channel leading to Antwerp, the container ship MSC Luciana ran up on a sandbank near the Belgian border. One observer commented, “The ship is well and truly stuck.”
At Hamburg, the container ship Charlotta ran into the stern of the cargo ship Hanse Confidence at high speed. The Hansa Confidence suffered a hull crack that threatened for a time to sink her but fire-brigade pumps barely kept her afloat. Near Singapore, the Singapore-flagged cargo vessel Xetha Bhum collided with the Vietnam-flagged tanker Dainam. The tanker ended up in a drydock while the other vessel anchored with severe damage to its portside. Off Mangalore in India, the fishing vessel Ocean Fisher-2 hit a sunken ship and capsized. The skipper was saved but six others went missing. At 53 12.15 north and 005 18.19 west (that’s near Wicklow harbor, Ireland), the crude-oil tanker Ocean Lady hit the fishing vessel Bridget Carmel in the early morning hours. The FV suffered damage to its topside and derrick. In Sweden at Tjorn in the Bohusian archipelago, some bunker oil spilled after the bulker Golden Trader collided with the Belgian trawler Vidar. Off Pulau Tioman in Malaysia, the smallish chemical tanker Cendanawati sank after being in a collision with the smallish asphalt tanker Cosmic. One master lost his ship and suffered head and neck injuries. In the Kiel Canal in Germany near the Brunsbuttel locks, the tanker John Essberger collided with the German dredger Wilhelm Krûger. The dredger suffered severe water ingress and needed a prompt pump-out.
Ordinarily, pulling a 3,000-ton Coast Guard training ship off a pier is routine work for two tugs, even when waves are 3 meters high and the wind is blowing 10 meters per second. But the 19-ton tug Kita Maru No. 12 capsized while undocking the Miura at Wajima Port in Japan and both tug men died.
Off Jakarta, the FSO (Floating Storage, and Offloading) vessel Lentera Bangsa caught fire and one man was missing. The converted tanker stored crude oil from the Widuri field of Java Sea until shuttle tankers could take the oil ashore to be processed. The damaged FSO was towed away to be repaired and the product tanker Galunggung took its place so production could resume.
At a Chittagong shipbreaking yard in Bangladesh, a worker died in a hospital after large steel plate fell on him. In the Philippines at Subic, at least five workers were killed and eight seriously injured when a 42-ton ramp collapsed. It had provided access to the British-flagged vehicle carrier Tombarra, which was undergoing repairs.
In Alaska, a Coast Guard chopper flew 345 miles to Sand Point, refueled, and headed out to the tanker Murray Star more than 500 miles southwest of Kodiak. There, the helicopter hoisted an unconscious 47-year-old man and flew back to Sand Point.
At Darwin, a container crane was seriously damaged by another crane in strong winds last January. Three months after repairs were completed, the repaired crane smashed into a crawler crane, twanging its cables with considerable ill effect but hurting no one. Elsewhere in Australia, Port Kembla was down to one unrestricted marine pilot and two restricted pilots due to sickness, injury, and annual leave. As a result, there was a stretch when no vessels were alongside and six others waited at anchor. In northwestern Germany on the Hunte River, the self-propelled barge Janine had steering problems at Neuenhuntorf and ended up with its bow on one bank and its stern on the other bank. When the tide went out, the ship broke in half and dumped its cargo of 1,100 tons of ore.
Gray Fleets
The US Navy failed to note what other US federal agencies were approving and now the service must accommodate encroachment by commercial wind turbines into the 47,000 acres of air space of its Boardman Bombing Range in Oregon.
Anybody viewing the flight deck of an aircraft carrier must wonder at its vastness. It looks big enough to house a major sports event. And such will happen in November when the basketball teams of North Carolina and Michigan State compete in a purpose-built, 7,000-person stadium on the carrier USS Carl Vinson, all at no cost to the government.
Iran will respond to the global arrogance of the forces of imperialism by having a strong naval presence near the US sea borders, probably in the Gulf of Mexico. So announced a top Iranian naval officer. But how this would be done has fascinated many. Iran has three inactive destroyers and its several light frigates have a maximum range of 5,000 nautical miles so refueling for a return voyage would be a problem, possibly solved by a cooperative Venezuela. By the way, US officials did not anticipate any port visits by the Iranians.
France withdrew its only aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, from Libyan operations so the ship could start planned autumn maintenance. Once it enters maintenance, neither Britain nor France will have an operational aircraft carrier.
The Royal Malaysian Navy’s fast attack craft KD Pari nearly sank when one of its shafts pulled out. Fast work got the warship near a jetty, where it did sink. It was soon raised with the use of lifting bags. And the same navy has been a major contributor to the anti-piracy efforts by acquiring a small container ship, the Bunga Mas 5, and converting it into an inexpensive naval auxiliary. Recently, this impromptu warship drove off skiffs approaching the tanker Eagle Stealth in the Strait of Bab-al-Manden.
The firefighting vessel PGK-638, a minor member of Russia’s Caspian navy. collided with the Russian tanker Grigoriy Bugrov in the Volga-Caspian canal. The tanker received a large hole above its waterline but both vessels stayed afloat.
White Fleets
The Hurtigruten is the non-stop stream of about ten semi-cruise ships that serve the remote communities along the coast of Norway. Its Nordlys was about to arrive at Alesund when fire broke in the engine spaces, a fire that killed two and severely burned another two. The ship limped into Alesund, where its 262 passengers debarked and shore-based fire services boarded for what proved to be a difficult fight. At one point, the ship took on a severe list but was finally stabilized to where cars and passenger luggage could be unloaded. A few days later, fleetmate Nordnorge allided with the pier at Bâtsfjord. A hole was punched in the ferry’s hull well above the waterline. The municipality apologized for defects in equipment that let it jut several feet from the pier.
On the Danube, the river cruiseship Primadonna ran aground at low speed and all 150 passengers were evacuated to a nearby hotel.
Those That Go Back and Forth
A member of the British team in the Rugby World Cup took it particularly hard that his team was eliminated in the quarter finals by a French team that had lost two straight times. Perhaps to cool off, he jumped off a ferry in Auckland Harbour and swam to shore. Police warned him about his “disorderly behavior” and the Rugby Football Union fined him £3,000 ($4,660). He agreed that “it was a silly thing” before flying back to the UK.
In the Likoni Channel at Mombasa, the 1,550-passenger ferry Kwale collided with the freighter Sea Wind and then narrowly missed another vessel. Minor injuries to some passengers and the ships, and the ferry was withdrawn from service. In the Philippines, after the Weesam Express 6 had engine problems, the Coast Guard removed all crew and passengers about three hours later – the local Coast Guard had just received the Maritime Industry Authority’s suspension order stopping operation of the company’s five vessels because the Weesam Express 8 ran aground earlier in the month, an accident that left 208 passengers stranded for some time. (Its captain blamed a non-operational lighthouse.)
In Indonesia in eastern Java on the Barito River, the ro/pax ferry Marine Nusantara collided with the tug Pualuat Tiga 330/22 and that killed to least three of the 443 passengers and injured another 113 people. (Indonesia has the greatest number of tugs in the world, seconded by the US.) Elsewhere in the same country, fire broke out on the docked ferry Kirana IX at Surabaya and a resulting panic killed at least eight people and injured scores more. The fire was in a truck loaded with onions and, although badly scorched, it remained drivable.
Residents on Coochiemudlo Island, a small island near Brisbane in Queensland, Australia, depend on barges to carry vehicles back and forth. Last month, both the Sirenia and Megamia failed seaworthiness tests and a smaller barge, the Kooringai Trader, was hurriedly brought in to provide interim daytime service. “Everything that could go wrong has. When it rains, it pours and I can tell you it’s been bucketing down,” explained the ferry company spokeswoman. Also near Brisbane, the ferry Jumpipin ran upon a sand bar near Garden Island and it took about two hours to transfer 98 passengers onto another ferry for the remainder of their trip to the Redland Bay mainland. (The ferry’s name may be a misprint as a Google search failed to bring it up. But jumpinpin is a word of aboriginal origin that refers to the sweetened roots of the wynnum (breadfruit) tree or possibly the pandarus tree.)
Legal Matters
Malaysian authorities spotted the small product tanker Yong An anchored illegally in Malaysian waters. Compounding that illegality, the vessel was flying the Malaysian flag upside down. The master could face up to two years in prison if it can be proven that he deliberately flew the flag that way. (The Malaysian flag is remarkably similar to the US flag and has an unmistakable up” side.)
The owners and operators of the containership Cosco Busan that rammed a pier of the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge in 2007 and dumped much oil have agreed to a civil settlement. They will pay $44.4 million, $18.8 million of which is for lost human uses of the shoreline and Bay.
Four Somalis were sentenced to life in a US prison for their involvement in the hijacking of the sail yacht Quest in the Indian Ocean. The four Americans on the Quest were killed during the hijacking.
Nature
On the face of it, the news report simply stated that the fishing vessel Antonio 23 was overwhelmed by waves and sank while at the Payaw Artificial Reef in the West Philippine Sea and three fishermen were saved by the tanker Mahogany while another 15 were missing. But research showed a certain redundancy in the reef’s name because payaw is the native word for an artificial reef. Such reefs are not the usual collection of deposited junk on the sea bottom that attracts fish and divers. Rather, a payaw is a double-layered bamboo raft under which fish tend to gather to the ultimate benefit of fishermen.
The world’s largest sanctuary for sharks was created by the Republic of the Marshall Islands. No commercial shark fishing is allowed in 768,547 square miles of the Central Pacific, an area about four times that of California.
Heavy rains flood Bangkok and it would be nice if floodwaters passed through the city before the next high tide. One politician tried something novel. He had eight 400-hp tugs tie to a bridge span and then drop back downstream There, they operated at full power for a day. He claimed that flow in the Noi River increased by 57%.
Imports
In one week, Columbian police seized two drug-carrier submarines. The larger one, probably belonging to the guerilla group FARC, can carry ten tons and operate five meters deep for up to ten days. Authorities thought the sub had been used to carry drugs from Columbia to Central America, a transit point for shipments to the US.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Pirates boarded many ships, crews resisted in various ways, and quite often the pirates gave up and left. The crew of the tanker Northern Bell activated its Ship Security Alert System and successfully stayed in the (presumably locked) engineroom. The Pacific Express made evasive maneuvers and its anti-piracy measures thwarted several boarding attempts. As they departed, pirates fired several rockets rounds into the ship and it caught fire. Eventually, the Italian destroyer Andrea Doria came to the rescue and the ship made it to Mombasa. Among the fire losses were seventeen school buses. And in the same general area off Mombasa, anti-piracy measures kept the geared bulker An Ning Jiang from being boarded.
But in the Gulf of Aden, pirates attacked the French catamaran Tribal Kat, killed the owner and dumped his body overboard, and took off with his wife. Forces from the Spanish amphibious warship Galicia rescued her and seven pirates were detained.
Elsewhere, violence was at lower levels. In Sumatra, robbers boarded the tanker Fairchem Birdie in the Dumai Inner Anchorage, threatened a guard, and escaped with some ship’s stores. In Indonesia, robbers boarded the tugboat GM Shine and escaped with the crew’s personal belongings and the ship’s GPS. They disconnected all electronics before departing.
Off Nigeria, the 8,000-ton tanker Kemepade went missing from the Lagos anchorage. About a week later, the ship was found in a shipyard in Ghana with its IMO number removed.
In a move that dismayed many, Spain OK’d use of high-caliber weapons (such as tripod-mounted 12.7-mm heavy machine guns) by non-military vessels at risk from Somali pirates. The move was obviously aimed at protecting the Spanish commercial fishing fleet operating out of the Seychelles. About the same time, Egypt banned carriage of arms through the Suez Canal, and sensitive coastal ports may follow suit.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
Here’s how accidents happen. It was the master’s birthday and maybe everyone celebrated too much but the second mate ran the partly loaded container ship Rena onto Astrolabe Reef, a well-charted and visible danger off the New Zealand port of Tauranga, at 17.8 knots in the early morning. Reportedly, he spotted a radar beacon some twenty miles away that was near the pilot station and he aimed the ship for the beacon without checking a chart for possible obstacles such as Astrolabe Reef. (One is reminded of the stranding of HMS Nottingham at Lord Howe Island in the Tasman because somebody left a divider atop the chart symbol for Wolf Rock.) Soon, the fore part of the ship was hard aground and heavy seas progressively crushed the ship’s double bottom, breaking pipes that leaked bunker oil. The ship’s list increased and containers started breaking away. Then the hull split from one side, probably under the hull, and up the other side. As I write this, the list is 22°, the stern section is wagging like the tail of a dog but may now rest on the bottom, and salvage workers are fighting waves of bad weather in their efforts to remove more oil.
The 104,271-gt bulker BW Odel loaded a cargo of iron ore in Brazil, destination China. But back in May at Mauritius, water was observed pooling on top of the cargo. That could have led to liquefaction of the cargo and that could produce excessive and possibly fatal listing. Due to its deep draft, the ship could not enter Port Louis at Mauritius and must go somewhere before the cyclone season starts. (As this column is written, the ship was still near Port Louis.)
A report stated that the three-masted sail training vessel Concordia was overwhelmed and sank off Brazil last year due to inexperience and lack of action by the ship’s officers. The master claimed that the vessel was hit by a microburst, but the Canadian board decided it was an ordinary squall. All 64 students and staff were rescued well offshore after spending forty hours in a life raft.
The Fleet Air Arm’s Westland Wessex helicopter, XT468, that rescued troops from the fire-stricken landing ship Sir Galahad and went to the aid of the also-fire-stricken, helicopter-carrying merchantman Atlantic Conveyor during the Falklands War was sold to be used as a background prop for laser tag games. When the chopper’s history was learned, it was promoted to become a venue for children’s lunches.
Efforts to differentiate Somali fishermen from Somali pirates continue. The fishermen will be registered and will wear uniforms and carry ID cards.
A company in Sweden discovered that medetomidine, an exotic pharmaceutical usually used to sedate aggressive dogs and immobilize wild cassowary from New Guinea, causes barnacle larvae to go frantic. When small doses are added to bottom paint, the drug is not fatal to the larvae. It just jazzes them enough so that they start swimming whenever they settle on anything and that prevents barnacles from sticking to the bottoms of ships.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Other Shores - October 2011
The number of containers lost at sea is far lower than many believe. It is now estimated that about 350 get overboard each year, rather than the widely accepted figure of 3,000 to 4,000.
Insurers are beginning to seriously worry about what would happen if a tsunami or a hurricane met up with thousands of containers just unloaded or about to be loaded on a super-large container ship. The ship can escape by sailing but what happens to all those stacks of boxes?
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In the Houston Ship Channel, the 274-meter tanker Naticina and the barge MMI 3024 being pushed by the towboat Alliance collided. A ballast tank on the tanker was breached but none of the barge’s 20,000 barrels of xylene (nasty stuff!) spilled.
The 1977-built, 6,000-hp salvage tug Leopard grounded and partly sank at St Vincent, Porto Grande, near the beach of Galé. (This apparently detailed location may be in the Cape Verde islands off Africa.) A tug failed to unground the bigger tug so it now needs salvaging. In the British Virgin Islands and late at night, the feeder container ship Tropic Sun ran up on rocks near the historic Wreck of the RMS Rhone Park, which was immediately closed to divers and other visitors. The ship was leaving Tortola for St Maarten and was refloated three days later. Recent floods brought much silt down the Mississippi and keeping the river navigable is a problem. The Hong Kong-flagged, coal-carrying bulker Jin Rui went aground at Mile 4 Above Head of the Passes, (this is about 24 miles from the Gulf of Mexico). The master reported hitting “sludge” when the ship’s forward progress started slowing.
A Pakistani dhow carrying petroleum products from Sharjah to Somalia caught fire and seven died while nine others were rescued.
Off Mexico’s Gulf coast, after Tropical Storm Nate disabled the liftboat Trinity II, ten crewmembers climbed into a small rigid-foam life raft after their high-tech raft blew away. Six survived. (A liftboat can lower legs to the sea floor and then elevate itself above the water level. This one was being used as a recording vessel and provided accommodation for the crew, and it was in waters about 25 feet (8 meters) deep.) At Philadelphia, two longshoremen died within eight days. A yard horse (a stubby tractor used for moving containers within a yard) backed into one man and the other fell on a ship while unloading cargo. At Shanghai, a cleaning lady was decapitated when a runaway barge climbed over five smaller vessels and onto a pier. At Manila in the Philippines, a shipping company radio operator finally succeeded. He jumped into the bay but was rescued. He did it again and was rescued again. After a third rescue, fellow employees made him promise not to try again. He promised but walked towards the barge Palawan and jumped from it. The fourth time worked. And the whole sorry process took less than one hour.
In Alaskan waters, the Coast Guard oceangoing buoy tender USCGC Spar small-boated a crewmember off the 82-foot fishing vessel Maverick and carried him more than 200 miles to St Paul Island where he could be flown to Anchorage for further medical care. Maverick is a crab-fishing vessel that is a star on the TV series ‘Deadliest Catch.' Near Saipan in far-warmer waters, the US Coast Guard rescued three fishermen. In Micronesian waters, one expects outrigger canoes and paddles but these three were in the 23-foot fiberglass commercial fishing boat Norma when it took on water and went under. They climbed into their life raft, triggered their EPIRB, and calmly asked for air support. A Coast Guard helicopter spotted a large white cooler and a small rigid-foam life raft bouncing around in 10-foot seas and all three fishermen were hoisted to safety.
At Port Adelaide in Australia, the livestock carrier Al Messilah was declared unseaworthy and its cargo of 67,000 sheep eventually ended upon the Al Shuwaikh, which then headed for Qatar. And Britain’s biggest oil port, Sullom Voe, was forced to close when employee cutbacks meant no vessel traffic services were available because one employee had called in sick and no replacement was still on the payroll.
Gray Fleets
The US Navy relieved the skipper of the destroyer The Sullivans of his command after he mistook a fishing boat for a towed gunnery target off North Carolina. Luckily, the warship’s gunnery proficiency was not yet up to hitting the FV. But a three-admiral panel ruled that the former commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise had committed misconduct and had demonstrated substandard performance when he showed raunchy movies but the panel decided he could continue his long Navy career.
In a nighttime training exercise that involved boarding a moving ship, a 37-year-old Royal Marine died at Portsmouth. Although attached to the vessel by a safety line, he had failed to secure the crotch strap of his utility vest and it rode up and strangled him. Fatigue was thought to be a factor.
Canada’s Conservative government announced that the navy and air force, known for more than three decades as the Maritime Command and Air Command, would revert to their earlier names of Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force and the announcement greatly surprised many and pleased those who loved those two services. Gone are the days when every military member wore the same green uniform and admirals were generals. Canada’s Land Force Command is now known as the (non-royal) Canadian Army.
The British government is continuing to play “on again, off again” politics with the two big aircraft carriers it is having built. Maybe it won’t necessary after all to mothball one carrier as soon as it is finished.
In April but the news was released only recently, HMS Iron Duke was approached by a speedboat, possibly operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, in the Persian Gulf. When the vessel and its two occupants were uncomfortably close, a machine gun on the frigate sprayed the water to one side of the skiff. It quickly veered away with a farewell wave, possibly cheerful, from one occupant. Months later and off the Libyan coast, the frigate fired starshells to illuminate attacks by other NATO forces. The Royal Navy’s three other representatives off Libya, the destroyer HMS Liverpool and helicopters from the assault ship HMS Ocean, also mounted attacks while the minehunter HMS Bangor concentrated on humanitarian tasks.
One of most-expensive sea battles for the Royal Navy was World War One’s battle of the Isle of May although no enemy warships were involved. Twenty miles off Fife Ness on Scotland’s east coast during night-time fleet exercises, a series of collisions killed 270 men within 75 minutes, sank the submarines K17 and K4, and damaged the submarines K6, K7, K14, K22, and the light cruiser Fearless. (The reader really owes it to himself to read up on this pseudo-battle, perhaps at Wikipedia under “battle at May Island.”) Although the K-class subs were operating on the surface that night, they had been designed to accompany the fleet at speed, only submerging when necessary. The problem was that they were steam-powered and submergence meant killing the oil-fueled fires under the boilers, blowing off steam, stowing two funnels, and closing all openings. This took time, and the subs were stifling hot and extremely clumsy to boot. Twenty-seven subs were built (including M-class variants armed with 12-inch guns). None were lost to enemy action but seven succumbed to various causes including several collisions. Now the two sunken subs from the “battle” have been surveyed for the first time because they are war graves in the middle of a windfarm.
White Fleets
A North Korean firm tried running a cruise from China to scenic Mount Kumgang near the South Korea border. The Chinese passengers liked the cruise but not the ship, a 1970’s Japanese veteran named b i. Cabins were musty, food was served on trays, and there were no showers during the 21-hour trip. A grand finale to this first voyage was when the ship rammed the dock at the North Korean port of Rason, shattering a few yards of concrete. Tugs could have helped dock the ship but the port has no tugs yet.
On the Danube River, the river cruise boat b i was battered by a cargo ship just south of Passau, Germany. Damage was considerable but nobody was hurt and passengers were transferred to another long, low, two-decked cruise ship, the b i.
In Alaska, a Coast Guard chopper hoisted a 70-year-old man off the Statendam. He was exhibiting symptoms of congestive heart failure.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Nearly 200 people died in Tanzania after the overloaded ferry Spice Islanders capsized. At least 192 bodies were recovered, while more than 600 passengers survived the accident. The disaster, following on a 2006 capsizing of an overloaded vessel, brought immediate condemnation from survivors and others who feel the ferries were being operated without regard to safety. The Spice Islanders was bound for the island of Pemba in the Indian Ocean, near the island of Zanzibar, the site of the 2006 accident.
At least eleven people, including nine schoolchildren, died when an overloaded ferry capsized in a river in southern China. "It was so crowded we had trouble breathing," one survivor told the paper, adding that she had seen a half-erased notice on the boat saying it was only licensed to carry 32 passengers. Local authorities said 45 people, including two crewmen, were aboard the boat when it became ensnared in a cable and tipped over. But witnesses said there were 92 schoolchildren on the ferry, and one blogger claimed to have counted as many as 63 bodies in the river.
In the Philippines, the fast ferry Express 1 caught fire and the 70 persons on board were safely transferred to a competitor’s ferry, the Sea Jet, which had departed Cebu 35 minutes later. The Express 1 then sank. Off South Korea, the southbound Seolbong caught fire and many passengers jumped overboard before being rescued. No deaths, though. And in New Zealand, another fast ferry caught fire in an engineroom. The Jet Raider was between Auckland and Waiheke Island when the fire started. The 316 passengers were transferred to another ferry, automatic fire extinguishers did their thing, and firemen checked for surviving hot spots with thermal-imaging equipment.
At Nanaimo in British Columbia, you drive onto a ferry by using a curving trestle but it was unusable after a paving truck loaded with asphalt for repaving the passenger walkway broke through the railing and ended up upside-down and submerged. The driver escaped without serious injuries. He had been told where to drive but drove elsewhere and that collapsed the trestle.
A distraught French-speaking woman jumped off the Statue of Liberty ferry Lady Liberty while it was still moored at Battery Park in New York City. She quickly changed her mind, grabbing a life ring thrown to her and waiting for the ferry’s recue boat.
Legal Matters
The Panama Canal Authority ruled that it would no longer allow transit of the Canal by single-hull oil tankers over 600 tons deadweight and under 5,000 tons after December 31, 2012. In the meanwhile, such tankers will be assigned “extraordinary” (PCA language) tug assistance at all locks and through Culebra Cut, at the owner’s expense, of course. “Single-hull” includes single side/single bottom, single side/double bottom, or double side/ single bottom. Other tankers may also be furnished compulsory and extraordinary tug assistance as the Canal prepares for the day when tugs will take all vessels into and through its new set of large locks.
On the River Cam, the irascible owner of a 72-foot barge didn’t like the boat races and repeatedly obstructed them, colliding with some boats, and addressing indecent language at others. He told a judge that he was merely protecting the River’s famed swans, which belong to the Queen, but his ill-temper will cost him about £7,000 in court costs. That sentence posed one small problem. He explained, “I haven’t got the money and only receive £90 in benefits a week. I have no idea where I would get it from.” (The swans need little protection. In fact, one evil bird dubbed "Mr. Asbo" has repeatedly attacked river users including eight-oared shells, went after a father and daughter in a dinghy, and even capsized a canoeist. One suggestion was to clip the feathers on one wing so Mr. Asbo would be unbalanced while attacking.)
In New Zealand, the sailing yacht Classique ignored danger blasts of a horn and skimmed close across the bow of the ferry Seaway II, trusting that the ferry would give way. It did, slowing rapidly and going into reverse, and there was no contact. In court, the yachtie insisted that he had deliberately ignored the international collision-prevention laws, boldly asserting that a customary body of law existed that allowed him to use his own experience and judgment to prevent a collision. The court disagreed and he was fined $4,000 plus costs of another $1,356.
Nature
In this age of global warming, unusual cold weather has been killing some coral reefs in Florida. In January of last year, water temperatures dipped to 51°F (11°C) whereas coral is not usually found in waters below 60°F (16°C). Scientists surveying the US’s only barrier reef, which stretches from Martin County to Key West, found mortality rates far above the rates found after warm-water events such as those that caused coral bleaching in 2005, with rates reached forty percent for some species of coral.
Metal-Bashing
The new British Columbia ship-docking tug Shuswap features two life raft canisters on the roof of the wheelhouse. Each is connected to an arm that can swing out to deploy the raft at water level and close to the tug’s side. The arms fit snugly against the wheelhouse sides and can drop down into slots built in the wheelhouse railings. Credit veteran designer A. G. McIlwain for this clever, and possibly lifesaving, idea. (Al is an old-time designer who still draws vessel plans by hand but his ideas are very contemporary.)
A Russian court seized an almost-finished floating nuclear power station. Oh it’s safe enough but the builder is in bankruptcy and the undelivered barge unit is a $340-million asset of the yard.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Pirates released seven Danish yachtsmen, hijacked in February in the Indian Ocean while sailing their 43-foot yacht Ing. Reportedly, a $3 million ransom was dropped on the bulk carrier Dover where the Danes were being held hostage. They were given a small boat with an outboard engine and set free. A few miles away, a Danish warship was waiting to pick them up. The Danish family consisted of two adults, three children, and two deckhands. Reportedly, the ransom would have been waived if one pirate could have married the 13-year-old daughter.
The chemical/oil tanker Fairchem Bogey was seized by pirates while anchored at the Omani port of Salalah, two miles off the coast and well inside Omani territorial waters. An attack so close to a port is unusual for Somali pirates, although they have been driven back to waters around the Gulf of Aden and coast of Oman because of the ongoing Indian Ocean monsoon. The hijacking is the latest in a series of attacks against oil tankers. That sector may now be specifically targeted because ransoms are much-higher-than-average for oil and gas carriers.
The Somali businessman who negotiated possible ransoming of four US citizens held hostage on the high seas (they were later killed on their yacht Quest by the pirates) and arranged for the ransom paid for the German-owned bulker Marida Marguerite is as much a pirate as any skiff operator with an AK-47 and a boarding ladder. So argued US prosecutors and the Somalian was indicted on 15 counts by a US federal grand jury. (His cut of the Marguerite ransom was about $30,000 to $50,000.)
Odd Bits
A Hollywood personage has been in the UK filming a TV series featuring his barge, the Princess Matilda. He and his wife were on the River Medway, a river they knew well, but they were overtired and bedazzled by lights on shore and they turned the wrong way. A RNLI crew receiving training in their boathouse overheard radio discussions about the couple’s bewilderment and launched a lifeboat for a successful rescue.
The 100-foot monohull maxi sailboat Rambler 10, valued at somewhere between $10 and 14 million, was leading its division in the prestigious 608-mile Fastnet Race when its canting keel dropped off. The boat immediately flipped, dumping the crew of 21 in the water for several hours. The vessel’s EPIRB failed to work (but it did start some ten hours later!) and it was a crewmember’s personal emergency position indicating beacon that alerted Irish and British rescuers. The mastless, keeless vessel was towed to Bantry Bay and righted after several attempts. The mast was located on the seabed and it, sail bags, and personal possessions were later retrieved by divers.
The US has several large icebreakers but they are often out of service or are committed elsewhere so the National Science Foundation has to rent an icebreaker for about $8 million to keep channels open to its research stations in the Antarctic such as that at McMurdo Sound. Last year, it was the Swedish icebreaker Oden. Starting at the end of December, it will be the Russian breaker Vladimir Ignatyuk. This vessel was originally constructed as the Arctic Kalvik in Victoria, BC in 1983, and was sold by Gulf Canada to Murmansk Shipping in 2003. A similar sister vessel, the Terry Fox, is now a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker.
Feet keep washing ashore on the West Coast, mostly in British Columbia, but authorities are not particularly concerned. Eight feet have been found in the Vancouver area since 2007, with another three on Washington beaches. DNA tests showed that two came from the same woman, four were from known missing persons, and none could be demonstrated to be result of foul play. Most of the feet were wearing some kind of shoe, usually a sneaker or running shoe, and the footwear provided flotation for the feet. Authorities surmised that region’s many bridges may have inspired suicides and noted that feet probably became separated from legs much as corpses on land fall apart due to decomposition and the actions of scavengers.
Head-Shakers
An Australian Navy seaman claimed the Navy failed to detect that she was pregnant when she enlisted and that medical staff ignored her when she told them on three occasions that she had missed her period. She wants the Navy to help support her child.
The Finnish 28-metre excursion boat King routinely carries passengers around Helsinki harbor but it ran aground because the master was stuck in a bathroom due to a jammed door. Minor injuries to some of 54 passengers and cosmetic damage to the vessel and, worst of all, the Finnish Coast Guard was investigating whether the master’s actions were criminal!
Insurers are beginning to seriously worry about what would happen if a tsunami or a hurricane met up with thousands of containers just unloaded or about to be loaded on a super-large container ship. The ship can escape by sailing but what happens to all those stacks of boxes?
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In the Houston Ship Channel, the 274-meter tanker Naticina and the barge MMI 3024 being pushed by the towboat Alliance collided. A ballast tank on the tanker was breached but none of the barge’s 20,000 barrels of xylene (nasty stuff!) spilled.
The 1977-built, 6,000-hp salvage tug Leopard grounded and partly sank at St Vincent, Porto Grande, near the beach of Galé. (This apparently detailed location may be in the Cape Verde islands off Africa.) A tug failed to unground the bigger tug so it now needs salvaging. In the British Virgin Islands and late at night, the feeder container ship Tropic Sun ran up on rocks near the historic Wreck of the RMS Rhone Park, which was immediately closed to divers and other visitors. The ship was leaving Tortola for St Maarten and was refloated three days later. Recent floods brought much silt down the Mississippi and keeping the river navigable is a problem. The Hong Kong-flagged, coal-carrying bulker Jin Rui went aground at Mile 4 Above Head of the Passes, (this is about 24 miles from the Gulf of Mexico). The master reported hitting “sludge” when the ship’s forward progress started slowing.
A Pakistani dhow carrying petroleum products from Sharjah to Somalia caught fire and seven died while nine others were rescued.
Off Mexico’s Gulf coast, after Tropical Storm Nate disabled the liftboat Trinity II, ten crewmembers climbed into a small rigid-foam life raft after their high-tech raft blew away. Six survived. (A liftboat can lower legs to the sea floor and then elevate itself above the water level. This one was being used as a recording vessel and provided accommodation for the crew, and it was in waters about 25 feet (8 meters) deep.) At Philadelphia, two longshoremen died within eight days. A yard horse (a stubby tractor used for moving containers within a yard) backed into one man and the other fell on a ship while unloading cargo. At Shanghai, a cleaning lady was decapitated when a runaway barge climbed over five smaller vessels and onto a pier. At Manila in the Philippines, a shipping company radio operator finally succeeded. He jumped into the bay but was rescued. He did it again and was rescued again. After a third rescue, fellow employees made him promise not to try again. He promised but walked towards the barge Palawan and jumped from it. The fourth time worked. And the whole sorry process took less than one hour.
In Alaskan waters, the Coast Guard oceangoing buoy tender USCGC Spar small-boated a crewmember off the 82-foot fishing vessel Maverick and carried him more than 200 miles to St Paul Island where he could be flown to Anchorage for further medical care. Maverick is a crab-fishing vessel that is a star on the TV series ‘Deadliest Catch.' Near Saipan in far-warmer waters, the US Coast Guard rescued three fishermen. In Micronesian waters, one expects outrigger canoes and paddles but these three were in the 23-foot fiberglass commercial fishing boat Norma when it took on water and went under. They climbed into their life raft, triggered their EPIRB, and calmly asked for air support. A Coast Guard helicopter spotted a large white cooler and a small rigid-foam life raft bouncing around in 10-foot seas and all three fishermen were hoisted to safety.
At Port Adelaide in Australia, the livestock carrier Al Messilah was declared unseaworthy and its cargo of 67,000 sheep eventually ended upon the Al Shuwaikh, which then headed for Qatar. And Britain’s biggest oil port, Sullom Voe, was forced to close when employee cutbacks meant no vessel traffic services were available because one employee had called in sick and no replacement was still on the payroll.
Gray Fleets
The US Navy relieved the skipper of the destroyer The Sullivans of his command after he mistook a fishing boat for a towed gunnery target off North Carolina. Luckily, the warship’s gunnery proficiency was not yet up to hitting the FV. But a three-admiral panel ruled that the former commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise had committed misconduct and had demonstrated substandard performance when he showed raunchy movies but the panel decided he could continue his long Navy career.
In a nighttime training exercise that involved boarding a moving ship, a 37-year-old Royal Marine died at Portsmouth. Although attached to the vessel by a safety line, he had failed to secure the crotch strap of his utility vest and it rode up and strangled him. Fatigue was thought to be a factor.
Canada’s Conservative government announced that the navy and air force, known for more than three decades as the Maritime Command and Air Command, would revert to their earlier names of Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force and the announcement greatly surprised many and pleased those who loved those two services. Gone are the days when every military member wore the same green uniform and admirals were generals. Canada’s Land Force Command is now known as the (non-royal) Canadian Army.
The British government is continuing to play “on again, off again” politics with the two big aircraft carriers it is having built. Maybe it won’t necessary after all to mothball one carrier as soon as it is finished.
In April but the news was released only recently, HMS Iron Duke was approached by a speedboat, possibly operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, in the Persian Gulf. When the vessel and its two occupants were uncomfortably close, a machine gun on the frigate sprayed the water to one side of the skiff. It quickly veered away with a farewell wave, possibly cheerful, from one occupant. Months later and off the Libyan coast, the frigate fired starshells to illuminate attacks by other NATO forces. The Royal Navy’s three other representatives off Libya, the destroyer HMS Liverpool and helicopters from the assault ship HMS Ocean, also mounted attacks while the minehunter HMS Bangor concentrated on humanitarian tasks.
One of most-expensive sea battles for the Royal Navy was World War One’s battle of the Isle of May although no enemy warships were involved. Twenty miles off Fife Ness on Scotland’s east coast during night-time fleet exercises, a series of collisions killed 270 men within 75 minutes, sank the submarines K17 and K4, and damaged the submarines K6, K7, K14, K22, and the light cruiser Fearless. (The reader really owes it to himself to read up on this pseudo-battle, perhaps at Wikipedia under “battle at May Island.”) Although the K-class subs were operating on the surface that night, they had been designed to accompany the fleet at speed, only submerging when necessary. The problem was that they were steam-powered and submergence meant killing the oil-fueled fires under the boilers, blowing off steam, stowing two funnels, and closing all openings. This took time, and the subs were stifling hot and extremely clumsy to boot. Twenty-seven subs were built (including M-class variants armed with 12-inch guns). None were lost to enemy action but seven succumbed to various causes including several collisions. Now the two sunken subs from the “battle” have been surveyed for the first time because they are war graves in the middle of a windfarm.
White Fleets
A North Korean firm tried running a cruise from China to scenic Mount Kumgang near the South Korea border. The Chinese passengers liked the cruise but not the ship, a 1970’s Japanese veteran named b i. Cabins were musty, food was served on trays, and there were no showers during the 21-hour trip. A grand finale to this first voyage was when the ship rammed the dock at the North Korean port of Rason, shattering a few yards of concrete. Tugs could have helped dock the ship but the port has no tugs yet.
On the Danube River, the river cruise boat b i was battered by a cargo ship just south of Passau, Germany. Damage was considerable but nobody was hurt and passengers were transferred to another long, low, two-decked cruise ship, the b i.
In Alaska, a Coast Guard chopper hoisted a 70-year-old man off the Statendam. He was exhibiting symptoms of congestive heart failure.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Nearly 200 people died in Tanzania after the overloaded ferry Spice Islanders capsized. At least 192 bodies were recovered, while more than 600 passengers survived the accident. The disaster, following on a 2006 capsizing of an overloaded vessel, brought immediate condemnation from survivors and others who feel the ferries were being operated without regard to safety. The Spice Islanders was bound for the island of Pemba in the Indian Ocean, near the island of Zanzibar, the site of the 2006 accident.
At least eleven people, including nine schoolchildren, died when an overloaded ferry capsized in a river in southern China. "It was so crowded we had trouble breathing," one survivor told the paper, adding that she had seen a half-erased notice on the boat saying it was only licensed to carry 32 passengers. Local authorities said 45 people, including two crewmen, were aboard the boat when it became ensnared in a cable and tipped over. But witnesses said there were 92 schoolchildren on the ferry, and one blogger claimed to have counted as many as 63 bodies in the river.
In the Philippines, the fast ferry Express 1 caught fire and the 70 persons on board were safely transferred to a competitor’s ferry, the Sea Jet, which had departed Cebu 35 minutes later. The Express 1 then sank. Off South Korea, the southbound Seolbong caught fire and many passengers jumped overboard before being rescued. No deaths, though. And in New Zealand, another fast ferry caught fire in an engineroom. The Jet Raider was between Auckland and Waiheke Island when the fire started. The 316 passengers were transferred to another ferry, automatic fire extinguishers did their thing, and firemen checked for surviving hot spots with thermal-imaging equipment.
At Nanaimo in British Columbia, you drive onto a ferry by using a curving trestle but it was unusable after a paving truck loaded with asphalt for repaving the passenger walkway broke through the railing and ended up upside-down and submerged. The driver escaped without serious injuries. He had been told where to drive but drove elsewhere and that collapsed the trestle.
A distraught French-speaking woman jumped off the Statue of Liberty ferry Lady Liberty while it was still moored at Battery Park in New York City. She quickly changed her mind, grabbing a life ring thrown to her and waiting for the ferry’s recue boat.
Legal Matters
The Panama Canal Authority ruled that it would no longer allow transit of the Canal by single-hull oil tankers over 600 tons deadweight and under 5,000 tons after December 31, 2012. In the meanwhile, such tankers will be assigned “extraordinary” (PCA language) tug assistance at all locks and through Culebra Cut, at the owner’s expense, of course. “Single-hull” includes single side/single bottom, single side/double bottom, or double side/ single bottom. Other tankers may also be furnished compulsory and extraordinary tug assistance as the Canal prepares for the day when tugs will take all vessels into and through its new set of large locks.
On the River Cam, the irascible owner of a 72-foot barge didn’t like the boat races and repeatedly obstructed them, colliding with some boats, and addressing indecent language at others. He told a judge that he was merely protecting the River’s famed swans, which belong to the Queen, but his ill-temper will cost him about £7,000 in court costs. That sentence posed one small problem. He explained, “I haven’t got the money and only receive £90 in benefits a week. I have no idea where I would get it from.” (The swans need little protection. In fact, one evil bird dubbed "Mr. Asbo" has repeatedly attacked river users including eight-oared shells, went after a father and daughter in a dinghy, and even capsized a canoeist. One suggestion was to clip the feathers on one wing so Mr. Asbo would be unbalanced while attacking.)
In New Zealand, the sailing yacht Classique ignored danger blasts of a horn and skimmed close across the bow of the ferry Seaway II, trusting that the ferry would give way. It did, slowing rapidly and going into reverse, and there was no contact. In court, the yachtie insisted that he had deliberately ignored the international collision-prevention laws, boldly asserting that a customary body of law existed that allowed him to use his own experience and judgment to prevent a collision. The court disagreed and he was fined $4,000 plus costs of another $1,356.
Nature
In this age of global warming, unusual cold weather has been killing some coral reefs in Florida. In January of last year, water temperatures dipped to 51°F (11°C) whereas coral is not usually found in waters below 60°F (16°C). Scientists surveying the US’s only barrier reef, which stretches from Martin County to Key West, found mortality rates far above the rates found after warm-water events such as those that caused coral bleaching in 2005, with rates reached forty percent for some species of coral.
Metal-Bashing
The new British Columbia ship-docking tug Shuswap features two life raft canisters on the roof of the wheelhouse. Each is connected to an arm that can swing out to deploy the raft at water level and close to the tug’s side. The arms fit snugly against the wheelhouse sides and can drop down into slots built in the wheelhouse railings. Credit veteran designer A. G. McIlwain for this clever, and possibly lifesaving, idea. (Al is an old-time designer who still draws vessel plans by hand but his ideas are very contemporary.)
A Russian court seized an almost-finished floating nuclear power station. Oh it’s safe enough but the builder is in bankruptcy and the undelivered barge unit is a $340-million asset of the yard.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Pirates released seven Danish yachtsmen, hijacked in February in the Indian Ocean while sailing their 43-foot yacht Ing. Reportedly, a $3 million ransom was dropped on the bulk carrier Dover where the Danes were being held hostage. They were given a small boat with an outboard engine and set free. A few miles away, a Danish warship was waiting to pick them up. The Danish family consisted of two adults, three children, and two deckhands. Reportedly, the ransom would have been waived if one pirate could have married the 13-year-old daughter.
The chemical/oil tanker Fairchem Bogey was seized by pirates while anchored at the Omani port of Salalah, two miles off the coast and well inside Omani territorial waters. An attack so close to a port is unusual for Somali pirates, although they have been driven back to waters around the Gulf of Aden and coast of Oman because of the ongoing Indian Ocean monsoon. The hijacking is the latest in a series of attacks against oil tankers. That sector may now be specifically targeted because ransoms are much-higher-than-average for oil and gas carriers.
The Somali businessman who negotiated possible ransoming of four US citizens held hostage on the high seas (they were later killed on their yacht Quest by the pirates) and arranged for the ransom paid for the German-owned bulker Marida Marguerite is as much a pirate as any skiff operator with an AK-47 and a boarding ladder. So argued US prosecutors and the Somalian was indicted on 15 counts by a US federal grand jury. (His cut of the Marguerite ransom was about $30,000 to $50,000.)
Odd Bits
A Hollywood personage has been in the UK filming a TV series featuring his barge, the Princess Matilda. He and his wife were on the River Medway, a river they knew well, but they were overtired and bedazzled by lights on shore and they turned the wrong way. A RNLI crew receiving training in their boathouse overheard radio discussions about the couple’s bewilderment and launched a lifeboat for a successful rescue.
The 100-foot monohull maxi sailboat Rambler 10, valued at somewhere between $10 and 14 million, was leading its division in the prestigious 608-mile Fastnet Race when its canting keel dropped off. The boat immediately flipped, dumping the crew of 21 in the water for several hours. The vessel’s EPIRB failed to work (but it did start some ten hours later!) and it was a crewmember’s personal emergency position indicating beacon that alerted Irish and British rescuers. The mastless, keeless vessel was towed to Bantry Bay and righted after several attempts. The mast was located on the seabed and it, sail bags, and personal possessions were later retrieved by divers.
The US has several large icebreakers but they are often out of service or are committed elsewhere so the National Science Foundation has to rent an icebreaker for about $8 million to keep channels open to its research stations in the Antarctic such as that at McMurdo Sound. Last year, it was the Swedish icebreaker Oden. Starting at the end of December, it will be the Russian breaker Vladimir Ignatyuk. This vessel was originally constructed as the Arctic Kalvik in Victoria, BC in 1983, and was sold by Gulf Canada to Murmansk Shipping in 2003. A similar sister vessel, the Terry Fox, is now a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker.
Feet keep washing ashore on the West Coast, mostly in British Columbia, but authorities are not particularly concerned. Eight feet have been found in the Vancouver area since 2007, with another three on Washington beaches. DNA tests showed that two came from the same woman, four were from known missing persons, and none could be demonstrated to be result of foul play. Most of the feet were wearing some kind of shoe, usually a sneaker or running shoe, and the footwear provided flotation for the feet. Authorities surmised that region’s many bridges may have inspired suicides and noted that feet probably became separated from legs much as corpses on land fall apart due to decomposition and the actions of scavengers.
Head-Shakers
An Australian Navy seaman claimed the Navy failed to detect that she was pregnant when she enlisted and that medical staff ignored her when she told them on three occasions that she had missed her period. She wants the Navy to help support her child.
The Finnish 28-metre excursion boat King routinely carries passengers around Helsinki harbor but it ran aground because the master was stuck in a bathroom due to a jammed door. Minor injuries to some of 54 passengers and cosmetic damage to the vessel and, worst of all, the Finnish Coast Guard was investigating whether the master’s actions were criminal!
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Other Shores -September 2011
Other Shores
US crude oil imports in the year’s first half fell to the lowest monthly average (8.8 million barrels per day) since 2000.
Traditionally, this is the busiest time of year for container ships but rates are down 9.3 percent since April due to the lessened demand for consumer goods for the back-to-school and holiday seasons. Last year at this time, rates surged 56 percent.
DNV, one of the major classification societies, sponsored a summer study by students, who concluded that major advances in technology, improved standards, and increased Arctic research are needed. About 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered petroleum resources are in the Arctic. (The contradiction inherent in that word “undiscovered” bothers me.)
What happened to the surface oil slick from that massive Gulf of Mexico spill more than a year ago? A report revealed that microbes residing within the surface oil slick ate the oil five times more effectively than microbes outside the slick. Not only that, but the wee beasties did not seem to require much in the way of necessary nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, elements scarce in the spilled oil. In addition, the microbes’ respiration produced carbon dioxide and energy but they did not seem to use the energy – certainly not for replication! Scientists are puzzled but it’s reassuring when unexpected friends show up to help us humans.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In India, traditionally inefficient and lax Mumbia officials have stopped fooling around! They arrested the master and chief engineer of the Rak Carrier after the coal-carrying bulker sank some twenty miles offshore because “they were directly responsible for the vessel” and pollution from its bunkers was feared. (There was a spill, but that is not news in that part of the world.) In reaction to the sinking, the Gujarat Maritime Board, a state authority responsible for 1,600 km of coastline and several ports including Mumbia, banned all ships over 25 years of age. A floating drydock capsized and sank, reported Suez Canal authorities, adding that the two vessels in the dry dock had been raised. In Thailand’s Udom Harbor, the freighter Unison Vego was trying to anchor when its engine stopped. Momentum carried the vessel into the moored Ocean Tower, which slowly sank. It carried heavy machinery and some was salvaged as the ship settled lower and lower but most went under.
Near St Just (it’s in Cornwall), the container ship Karin Schepers ran onto the beach east of the Pendeen lighthouse but freed itself off before a rescue helicopter arrived.
The 3,225-dwt freighter Salmo managed to hit the quay at Brake in the Lower Saxony region of Germany. The master was fined 1000 euros and the vessel was detained during an investigation.
(Wordplay about a possible cause of the accident and port’s name is permissible.) In southern Philippines waters, the Bulk Carrier 1 (probably a bulk carrier) sank after being in violent contact with the HS Puccini. Two engineers of the bulker died when trapped below. On the Rhine River, travel was messed-up for some time. A gravel-carrying barge sank between St. Goar and Bingen and that blocked the river. Then a second aggregate-carrying barge ran aground near Trechtinghausen, luckily outside of shipping lanes. A third barge, this one carrying ethanol, drifted out of the channel while waiting for the first barge to be removed and it too went aground.
(Wordplay about a possible cause of the accident and port’s name is permissible.) In southern Philippines waters, the Bulk Carrier 1 (probably a bulk carrier) sank after being in violent contact with the HS Puccini. Two engineers of the bulker died when trapped below. On the Rhine River, travel was messed-up for some time. A gravel-carrying barge sank between St. Goar and Bingen and that blocked the river. Then a second aggregate-carrying barge ran aground near Trechtinghausen, luckily outside of shipping lanes. A third barge, this one carrying ethanol, drifted out of the channel while waiting for the first barge to be removed and it too went aground.
While near Port Georgetown (this Port Georgetown may be in Guyana), a crewmember on the car carrier Global Leader died when a rescue boat collapsed onto him. Another man was seriously hurt.
Six hundred miles south New Zealand the Australian-owned, New Zealand-chartered fishing vessel Janas, longlining for the Patagonian toothfish, had engine problems. Emergency repairs failed so the Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis came to the rescue. It towed the FV to remote Macquarie Island where better repairs were made in the lee of the island. Then a female crewperson on the icebreaker had severe stomach pains so two New Zealand-based helicopters flew out nearly 500 km and got the woman to the Dunedin Hospital for a probable appendectomy.
At the Black Sea port of Constantza, the bulker FGM Europe caught fire while under repair. The bridge and accommodations took a beating.
A SWAT team of police boarded the product tanker Al Mahboobah off the Portuguese coast after the master radioed that his crew had mutinied and threatened to kill him. The SWAT team took the ship into Lisbon to sort out what had happened.
The LPG tanker DP Proteus lost its propeller off Vietnam and started drifting toward a reef. The local Vietnamese tug Phu My 03 was dispatched, as was the deep-sea tug Pacific Hickory from Singapore, and the similar-sized tanker DP Azalea was chartered to stand by. The Phu My 03 was towing the vessel clear of the reef when the Pacific Hickory arrived and took over. The tow headed for Shanghai, but entry there was denied (perhaps due to the tanker’s dangerous cargo) and so the tow headed for South Korea. All to replace a lost propeller! (The Pacific Hickory is one of my favorite tugs. Formerly the Irving Miami and based in eastern Canada, the big Dominican-flagged tug pops up in almost any part of the world, almost always towing some large object.)
Gray Fleets
The Australian Navy, unfortunately, managed to keep itself in the headlines. A RHIB overturned while transferring personnel from the patrol boat HMAS Maitland to the frigate HMAS Darwin and five members of the Defence Force Remuneration Tribunal needed hospitalization. And sex reared its ugly head once again on the supply ship HMAS Success when a female crewmember claimed she had been ambushed in a storeroom and sexually assaulted. She reported the incident to Navy officials and then went ashore and told Sydney police. The assault came only months after a report had revealed the existence of a predatory culture of sexual misconduct fueled by alcohol and drugs on the same ship.
Canada had its own share of naval problems. The submarine HMCS Cornerbrook struck the bottom while on an advanced submarine officer training exercise. It was Canada’s only operational member of Canada’s four submarines at the time. Repairs to sister-sub HMCS Windsor in 2010 alone cost almost three times the budgeted C$17 million – bad hull welds, broken torpedo tubes, a faulty rudder, and acoustical tiles that kept falling off. And the Navy also spent thousands trying to keep pigeons from roosting in the long-idled sub.
A female officer will command a Royal Navy warship for the first time. Promoted to Commander, she will take command of the frigate HMS Portland next April after commanding the minehunters HMS Pembroke, HMS Ramsey, and HMS Penzance.
The Chinese Navy’s first aircraft carrier, formerly the Soviet carrier Varyag, went to sea for a short trial. Unlike the practice in the US Navy, where an aircraft carrier’s skipper is never an aviator, the first commanding officer of the yet-as-unnamed carrier is Li Xiaoyan, a top-rated naval flyer. Elsewhere, the former Soviet carrier Kiev is nearing completion as a luxury hotel that is expected to open later this year. Progress is at the internal-decorations stage. Pre-hotel, the carrier, moored at a theme park, was rated as attraction 33 of 158 attractions in or near Tianjin.
The US Navy has asked industry to come up with a large unmanned submarine able to operate in the open sea or in coastal waters and harbors on missions lasting more than seventy days. The missions, of course, involve gathering intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. This LDUUV (Large Displacement Unmanned Underwater Vehicle) would be pier-launched and recovered (“door to door,” as it were) and would perform over-the horizon sensor missions in coastal waters and harbors. The program has two phases. In the first, hardware and software must be developed for missions lasting up to thirty days at depths from 100 to 400 feet. The Navy may provide a UUV prototype.
In the second phase, missions would last more than seventy days without human interaction. The UUV must avoid all vessels in the area, detect stationary and moving objects and avoid them, detect and identify surface vessels and their intent, and avoid all kinds of fishing nets and gear including monofilament lines and twine nets. The program may take five years.
A company press release announced that the US Navy had lifted the veil of secrecy from its Ghost. It is a super-cavitating combination aircraft/boat that flies through an artificial underwater gaseous environment with 900 times less friction than water. The stealth craft was built at no cost to the government and the company expects it will have a great impact in many nautical matters.
White Fleets
Bookings during the upcoming Rugby World Cup competition in New Zealand are disappointing operators of several cruise ships. For example, the Rhapsody of the Seas has resorted to selling half-price tickets (to New Zealand residents only) that combine accommodations, meals, entertainment, and a voyage around the North Island between matches.
At Key West, while trying to dock, the Carnival Fantasy managed to bump moored fleetmate Carnival Imagination. Cosmetic damage only. (Since one ship was immobile, it was, strictly speaking, an allision, not a collision.)
One doesn’t think of large waves on the Volga River but the river system does incorporate large lakes in many places. And it was large waves that reportedly caused the multi-decked river cruise ship Bulgaria to sink in 66 feet of water. That cost 122 people (including 28 children) their lives in Russia’s worst maritime disaster since 1986. When the vessel was raised, investigators surmised that one engine may have failed because the steering wheel was found to be turned hard right and one engine had been asked to deliver full power. The accident had immediate repercussions. A criminal case was launched against the captains of the freighters Dunaysky 6 and Arbat for failing to take part in the rescue, a check-up of cruise ships found out that 90 percent failed to meet basic safety requirements and so twenty-three vessels were banned from operating as passenger ships, and prosecutors initiated sixty-six administrative cases against vessel owners.
Top of Form
Only three weeks later, and infuriating Russian bureaucracy at the highest levels about the shocking state of that nation’s standards of maritime safety, the excursion boat Lastochka (Swallow) ran into a moored barge on the Moscow River. The allision killed nine partyers. The operator, who was also killed, had been fined three times this year for operating an overloaded vessel.
Those That Go Back and Forth
The British Columbia ferry Burrard Beaver struck the dock at Vancouver. The ferry was a half-boat length away when it lost power and steering and then veered to starboard and slammed into the dock. A nearby tug was able to get the ferry to its berth and there were no injuries to the 215 passengers. The Turkish ferry Ishan Alyanak sank at Izmir after the vessel struck the pier. The ferry with 250 passengers was approaching the pier when the rudder failed, resulting in the allision. There may have been some panic on board but everyone reached the pier safely. (A report stated that a fire in the stern section might have led to the rudder failure.)
In New Zealand, the Marlborough Sounds ferry Straitsman had to stop and anchor for a couple of hours while repairs were made to a fuel pump. The fifty passengers on board may have enjoyed the pause and it is certain that the freight and vehicles didn’t care either way.
In India’s Goa region, the ferry on the Kirianpani-Aronda route broke down so hundreds of market-goers had to use a motorized canoe carrying only ten to thirteen at a time. In the Philippines, the ro/pax ferry Asia Malaysia sank off Calabasa Island after cargo shifted to one side in high winds and waves. All 107 passengers and 44 crewmembers were saved. The Government promptly suspended all operations by the ferry owners’ vessels. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a ferry carrying at least 200 passengers on the Tshuapa River sank after colliding with a wooden cargo vessel. Both craft were operating without lights and the cargo boat was not allowed to operate at night. At least 80 died.
Nature
The Russians have two Arctic white beluga whales in captivity somewhere and wanted them to become used to humans swimming with them. One problem was that the whales shied away from contact with white diving suits so a 36-year-old Russian woman scientist named Natalie Davis Senke volunteered for the familiarization job. Naked, the yoga expert dove into water just above freezing and stayed under for up to ten minutes, thanks to her practice of doing rigorous meditation and breath-control exercises. The whales seemed to enjoy her company as she swam among them.
The operator of the Great Lake’s last steam-powered ferry, the Badger, asked officials in Michigan and Wisconsin to support its plea for an additional five-year exemption from the federal ban on dumping coal ash into Lake Michigan. The company is exploring the use of compressed natural gas.
Metal-Bashing
Progress is being made in the UK on construction of two large aircraft carriers. The AMT Trader, one of the world’s largest barges, carried a 9,000-ton section of the future Queen Elizabeth from a Glasgow-area shipyard at Govan around Scotland to the Edinburgh–area yard at Rosyth, where it will be mated with other sections as they arrive or are constructed. For those interested in comparisons, that single chunk is heavier than one of the Royal Navy’s new Type 45 destroyers.
A report surmised that amalgamating the naval shipbuilding programs of Germany and France could create the biggest industrial partnership since armament-giant EADS was formed in 2000. The thinking was that Thyssen-Krupp, Germany’s largest steelmaker, would combine nicely with France’s naval shipyard DCNS. But ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems quickly squelched the idea, stating that it is not planning a joint venture with the French shipyards group, nor are there any plans for a merger or other partnership or alliance with French shipyards. (ThyssenKrupp recently cancelled a deal with Abu Dhabi MAR to set up a joint venture to sell naval surface ships to the Middle East and North Africa, blaming changes in the political landscape.)
Owners of supertankers have been torn between making some money in these hard times by scrapping their older tankers or keeping them in service although rates have dropped so low that some owners are effectively paying clients $1,037 dollars a day.
The over-aged (built 1974) product tanker Phoenix was slowly making its way towards a scrapping yard in India when its engine failed and it anchored somewhere off South Africa. Authorities, fearful of a possible pollution event, got a promise from the owner, reportedly a Lagos firm, to send a tug but it never appeared and subsequent phone calls were not answered. That meant that no insurance was available if anything happened so authorities prepared for a judicial sale. As expected, bad weather did arrive and the tanker’s anchor rode snapped. The deep-sea tug Smit Amandla, one the largest tugs in the world, attempted to connect a towline to pull the Phoenix to deeper water, but weather conditions made this impossible. Pushed by waves, the vessel struck bottom some 200 meters from the shore near Christmas Bay, north of Durban. Helicopters airlifted all fifteen of the Indian crew to safety. Three attempts to tow the 538-foot ship off the rocky beach failed and work shifted to removing the oil on board.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Think of Libya and Gaddafi, rebels, and oil probably come to mind. The Libyan tanker Cartagena belonging to a government-owned tanker company was anchored on Hurd’s Bank just outside of Malta’s territorial waters when a rebel-manned tugboat approached and captured the tanker and its cargo of 70,000 tons of gasoline. A Maltese Armed Forces patrol boat was nearby but took no action. Back in March, rebels similarly captured another Libyan-owned tanker.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
Many Viking ships succumbed to the cruelties of a sea voyage (witness the folk song “Sir Patrick Spens” and its “half o’er, half o’er to Aberdour lies guid Sir Patrick Spens wi’ the Scotch lairds at his feet” – yes, I know he was a Scot but he was sailing on a mission to his king’s liege lord in Norway and I suspect his vessel was Viking-like). Replicas of Viking ships also sink. The 2009-built Norwegian longship Dragens Vinge (as might be expected, that translates as the wing of the dragon) went under fifty miles east of Shetland. But its sailors had advantages their ancestors lacked. Modern technology, in the form of an EPIRB, lifeboats, helicopters and a liferaft, helped save the seven pseudo-Vikings. Weather at the time was force 7 to gale force 8. Replicas of Viking ships are surprisingly common. An entry in Wikipedia lists thirty-three and the list does not include the late Dragens Vinge.
In Australia, two young buckos cavorted around on a jetski until they chose to go around the back side of Flinders Island because a tugboat towing a big ship was blocking their way. They ran onto unseen rocks and were swept onto the island as their jetski was washed off the rocks and out to sea. Luckily, one man had grabbed his cellphone from a compartment on the jetski. His call brought a rescue helicopter. The mobile was an iPhone in a watertight plastic bag.
When Osama bin Laden’s body was flown out to the carrier USS Carl Vinson, officials wanted to make sure the body bag held the right body. The bag was unzipped and photos were taken but no ruler was available to measure the 6’4” corpse. So a six-foot-tall SEAL lay besides the corpse. Reports stated that the volunteer was about four inches shorter than he who had not volunteered.
Has anyone noticed that the first races of the America’s Cup World Series are being held somewhere off Portugal? Does anyone care? For those that do care, there are eight boats from seven nations – the US, New Zealand, Sweden, China, South Korea, Italy, and two from France.) Next races in the Series will be held in the United Kingdom, and then at San Francisco. Later venues are to be announced. Then comes the Louis Vuitton Cup series in 2013 to determine the challenger. It will race the defending champion, the US’s Oracle, off Newport, Rhode Island in 2013 to decide which nation will keep the Cup for a while.
While racing off the Isle of Wight, the yacht Atlanta of Chester ignored multiple provisions of the Rules of the Road and an oncoming 869-foot large orange object. It bounced off the bulbous bow of the tanker Hanne Knutsen and then the tanker’s port anchor hooked the yacht’s hot-pink spinnaker and that pulled down the yacht’s mast as the yacht ground along the tanker’s side. The yacht was the give-way vessel but many have wryly noted that some yachties seem to feel that their racing always gives them precedence over any other vessel.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Other Shores - August 2011
Wallet-restraint by US consumers has kept US import volume flat, but experts expect a rise by summer’s end when retailers build up inventories.
Will LNG shipping rates rise? At least one shipping company thinks so. It turned down a one-year charter at $125,000 a day of its newbuild LNG carrier Stena Crystal Sky, preferring a daily rate of $110,000 over only 210 days.
If you own a capesize bulker hauling iron ore from Australia to China, you have been enjoying the record rate of more than $8 per ton.
Oil giant Shell applied to US regulators for permission to drill six wells in the Chukchi Sea. Permission was granted, perhaps because polar bears were recently re-categorized as merely “threatened” rather than “endangered.”
More than forty percent of about 600 Dutch and British mariners have personally experienced bullying, harassment, or discrimination at work within the last five years. Less than half felt they could make a complaint.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
As usual, there were collisions and allisions: The container ships CCNI Rimac and CSAV Petorca collided at Shanghai and a fire started on the Rimac when water reacted with inflammable goods in a container. The crew was evacuated and the ship was moved outside the port while authorities looked for twenty-six of its containers that had fallen into the sea.
Ships ran aground: While being towed to a scrapping beach at Alang, the cargo vessel Wisdom broke free and ended up in Mumbai’s Jubal Beach. After three attempts, it was freed by two powerful tugs. In Indonesia, the crew of 28 manning the bulker Sunny Partners were rescued by a tug after it ran aground while on a voyage with a cargo of bauxite. In Indonesia again, the container ship Al Rawday ran aground near the Rock Island Chain at Sambu Batam and the chief engineer had a fatal heart attack during the incident. The ship had just left Malaysia’s Port Klang.
Fires and explosions took a toll: While discharging cargo at Luanda, fire broke out on the UAL Antwerp, probably in a tank of kerosene. Due to the firefighters’ extensive efforts, the ship took on so much water that it was beached to keep it from sinking. The cooling unit on a Dutch semi-trailer burst into flame on the ro/ro ferry Schleswig-Holstein en route from Puttgarden to Rodby but a deckhand on routine patrol spotted the fire and extinguished it. The container ship APL Chiwan suffered from main-engine camshaft problems off the coast of China but they were fixed. Two days later, an engine fire disabled the ship. A tug was called for a 100-mile tow to Hong Kong while onboard generators continued to power the coolers on refrigerated containers.
Unusual things happened: Inland sand pits often use floating dredges and the Robert R Woodington lost its cutterhead and ladder when an underwater landslide occurred. What to do? Hire a marine salvage company to recover the head, now 100 feet deep and covered by more than 70 feet of sand and clay mix. The successful recovery team included five divers, a sectional barge with a crane, and airlift and jetting equipment. At Algeciras in Spain, the 509-TEU feeder ship Deneb flopped on its starboard side at a wharf for unknown reasons. In Israel, the bulker Avramit spilled oil on the coral beach between Marina and the border of a coral reserve. The oil was quickly pumped up and the Gulf of Eilat was spared further pollution. In Rotterdam’s Caland Canal, the bunker tanker Vialis embarrassed itself by breaking in half while refueling the chemical/oil tanker Marida Mimosa. At Beirut, a shore crane unloading the Laguna collapsed across the Darya, seriously damaging that ship. Both are small cargo ships.
Humans were rescued: Although the vessel owner said there was no emergency, the master of the small tanker Pavit disagreed and used e-mail to ask for help. As a result, Falmouth Coastguard in the UK coordinated the removal of thirteen Indian crewmen off the vessel, which had been drifting for several days about 120 miles off Oman with mechanical problems and a crew growing increasingly seasick. A helicopter from the frigate HMS St Albans made 27 trips to transfer the Pavit’s crew to the Indian tanker Jag Pushpa, which agreed to repatriate the men to India. Off Long Island, a Coast Guard small boat took a sick sailor off the USS Oak Hill (LSD-51) after he was disabled by abdominal pains. In Alaska near Valdez a Coast Guard chopper took the chief engineer off the 150-foot tug Sea Voyager. He was also suffering from abdominal pains. Another Alaska-based helicopter took a fisherman off the 50-foot fishing vessel Heidi Linea. He had bad back pains from a fall on the FV.
Gray Fleets
Thou shalt lead a pure life. The US Navy has dismissed at least 29 commanding officers in the last two years. Included were nine commanding officers for sexual harassment or inappropriate relationships in the last 18 months. Three others were dismissed for alcohol offenses and two others for personal misconduct. And the Navy is currently investigating reports of hazing on the submarine USS Tennessee. Meanwhile, in Alaska, details were released on why the commanding officer of the Coast Guard patrol boat USCGC Anacapa was relieved of his command earlier this year. He had tried to get the vessel underway while intoxicated.
Soviet warships operated openly off the Virginia coast. They were part of a two-week-long international exercise originally designed to lessen Cold War tensions. Other participating nations were France, the UK, and the US.
The British destroyer HMS Liverpool has been having an eventful tour off Libya in Operation Unified Protection. In May it was under attack by forty rockets and her 4.5-inch main gun returned fire on the rocket battery near Misrata – the first time the main guns of a British warship have been fired in anger since Iraq in 2003. Then it used its 4.5-inch gun again, this time to thwart an attempt by four Libyan boats (three rigid hulls and one small boat) to disrupt shipping in the Gulf of Sirte. At least one boat was destroyed.
The Philippines will no longer buy second-hand naval equipment from the US but might lease relatively new US equipment rather than wait for surplus material to become available. Announced object of the new policy? To make the Philippines into a strong US ally. (The Philippines still uses WW II-vintage ex-US destroyers.) That nation also rebranded the South China Sea as the West Philippine Sea, thus mimicking the US’s recent renaming of the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf.
Want to buy some surplus military and naval stuff? Australia is selling up to 24 ships, 180 aircraft, 600 armored vehicles, 12,000 other vehicles, and so on. The proceeds will, hopefully, help pay for a massive $61 billion planned upgrade of the Ozzie defense forces.
Where better way to train boarding teams than on a WW II-vintage museum steamship? Florida Coast Guardsmen used the SS American Victory as a training arena while it was moored at The American Victory Ship Mariners Memorial Museum at Tampa.
China is hell-bent on getting aircraft carriers. Photos showed concrete replicas of a carrier superstructure and a jump-jet flight deck, both far inland. The half-built ex-Soviet carrier Varyag, which a Chinese businessman bought with the announced goal of converting it into a floating casino, was taken over by the government and it will become China's first aircraft carrier. And several Chinese businessmen have put in bids for the retired British carrier Ark Royal, with the announced intentions of converting it into a floating showcase for high-technology items. (Two other ex-Soviet carriers, the Kiev and Minsk, are now parts of Chinese military theme parks.
Last year, the US Navy acquired 59,000 Chinese-made microchips, each counterfeit and each equipped with a “back door” that could allow nasty tricks such as admitting signals to shut-off the chip.
Women will be allowed to man Royal Navy subs now that fears that fumes might affect fetuses carried by pregnant submariners have been allayed. Other nations allowing female subbies are the US, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.
A Royal Navy commander failed to notify the education authority that he had separated from his wife of twenty years and thus he was able to illegally accept nearly £75,000 to send his two children to a boarding school.
It won’t help US unemployment figures shoreside but about 3,000 US Navy sailors will be released as surplus to decreasing needs. They will get no severance package and no retirement since most will not have served long enough to qualify.
White Fleets
The 122,400-ton cruise ship Celebrity Silhouette was floated-out at an inland German shipyard and needed to be taken to the North Sea Dutch port of Eemshaven for completion. The 26-mile route involved a narrow, winding river, several very tight spots with less than five feet of clearance, and passage through a railroad bridge that was too narrow for the vessel. (A crane on a barge created just enough room by removing the bridge’s center span and moving it out of the way.) And the ship had to be moved backwards. Two tugs, one at each end of the cruise ship, slowly towed the vessel with little fuss and great precision, and the voyage was safely made. Why not? The demanding routine was familiar since the Silhouette was the fourth of its class to be built at the German yard.
Small events can cause major problems. The elderly (1952) cruise ship Philippines (ex-Augustus) had a fire in its stack while moored at Manila. The blaze was quickly quelled and an investigation revealed that the fire originated in the DC generator in the stack and was caused by someone closing ventilation flaps. That allowed heat to build up inside the funnel until ignition was reached.
Those cruise ships that can’t fit under the Sydney Harbor Bridge have been using the one-cruise-ship berth at the Circular Quay but it really isn’t a cruise-ship terminal. Australian authorities are considering use of the nearby navy base at Garden Island even though it is busy with navy activities.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Patronage of a new East River ferry service in New York City that linked Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn (three of the City’s five boroughs) was pleasingly high because it was free. Then a ticket started costing $4 and patronage dropped to one half, Officials, however, were pleased with that number. It was higher than they had expected.
The Alaskan ferry Malaspina has a bow lookout on duty at all times. The ferry was near the eastern shore of Taiya Island and approaching Skagway when the bow lookout, in what was probably the quietest spot on the vessel, heard a faint call for help. All hands including the 45 passengers started searching the shore, a searchlight finally illuminated an injured man, and he was taken onboard. He was bleeding from multiple gashes, had two large swollen areas on his body, and was semi-conscious and dry-heaving. He also had no memory of what had happened (he probably had been hiking and had fallen down a cliff into the water and managed to pull himself ashore). When spotted, he was preparing to re-enter the water and swim toward the Malaspina.
High winds and heavy seas capsized a ferry in a bay west of Haiti’s capital and seven people went missing. The boat was transporting charcoal, bananas, and other goods to Archaie, a coastal town thirty miles northwest of Port au Prince. In Bangladesh, the Madinar Alo capsized in the Sitalakhya River and at least a dozen of more than 100 passengers died. In Indonesia ten people including two children died when their canoe sank in the Bengawan River in East Java. They were simply trying to get to their village on the other bank. At Charlotte Amalie, in the US Virgin Islands, the 89-foot fast catamaran ferry Royal Miss Belmar ran up high and dry on a rocky point. That crash injured five, including a baby, of the 102 people aboard.
Those that carried fireworks onto a Washington State ferry around the date of the Fourth of July may have noted that explosives-sniffing dogs were active at the ferry terminal. They also learned that carrying legal fireworks onto the ferry was OK.
Legal Matters
The Chinese master of the bulker Full City is lucky and one might say he beat the current trend of criminalizing mariners for accidents. A Norwegian appeals court overturned a lower-court decision that he must serve mandatory jail time and instead substituted a suspended sentence. The second mate, also sentenced to jail, was acquitted by the appeals court. (The Full City ran aground off Telemark during a summer storm and the grounding released oil that became the worst oil spill in Norwegian history.)
A Macedonian court jailed two men for a year because of a boating accident on Lake Ohrid in 2009 in which fifteen Bulgarian tourists died. Their offenses were allowing overcrowding and issuing false safety certificates.
Nature
Researchers searching for the Pacific Ocean’s proverbial Great Garbage Patch of floating plastic, a patch reported as being twice the size of Texas and somewhere between California and Japan, found it hard to find and far less dense than reported. Scientists often could not see much plastic from the deck of their research vessel. “The amount of plastic out there isn’t trivial but the patch is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size,” reported one scientist. And the patch is not growing exponentially, as was earlier reported.
In New Zealand, a young humpback whale swam into a Tory Channel mussel-farming operation and became so entangled that it became exhausted. The mussel-farmers moved a barge alongside the whale and it was utterly passive during the 45 minutes it took to cut the whale free with the help of a crane on the barge.
A massive underwater landslide 200 miles off Cornwall caused a minor but measurable tsunami along the UK’s south coast. Wave heights were measured as being between 05 and 0.8 meters.
The North Atlantic island of Rockall is exceedingly unattractive to most people, being 82-feet wide, 101-feet long, and 68-feet high and 187 miles from the nearest land, and the highest waves in the world (95 feet) were measured nearby. Nevertheless, a Yorkshireman plans to spend a night on the island to replace a brass plaque left there in 1955 and re-establish Britain’s ownership of the island. (There is a four-way dispute between the UK, Ireland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands over ownership.) By the way, his name is Strangeway.
Metal Bashing
The 1960-built tanker Wenjiang was launched as the British Curlew for BP Tanker Co. It was shelled and abandoned in 1980 during the Iran/Iraq war while at Basrah. Apparently it stayed afloat and managed to end up Bandar Abbas in Iran. Someone decided that nobody really owned the tanker, took over ownership, a tug appeared, and the tow headed for Pakistan and scrapping. The real owners are unhappy.
China’s largest shipyard will expand into green recycling by erecting the world’s largest dismantling facility. It should be capable of dismantling about 75 ships a year that range in size from about 50,000 dwt to a VLCC-like 300,000 dwt.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Due to the monsoon season, Somali pirates left open waters and concentrated their activities in the southern Red Sea and off the coast of Oman. Somali fishermen reminded everyone that they too carry AK-47s but just for self-defense against the real pirates. (If a fishing skiff’s equipment includes a boarding ladder and several RPG’s, it’s probably a pirate vessel.) And Somali pirates did something unusual: they rescued nineteen crewmembers from the cargo vessel Orna after it caught fire. No word whether they were held for ransom.
Odd Bits
Prince William and his new bride visited Canada and their progression has been much more sedate than the last time Canada was visited (in 1786) by another Royal Navy officer and heir to the throne with the name of William. That William, later King William IV, could be a rousterer (his several visits to Halifax while a junior officer are still prominent parts of local history) and he fathered several illegitimate children, including ten by one actress/mistress. (He would have married her but descendants of George II were forbidden to marry unless they obtained the reigning monarch's consent.)
Last summer, Canadian government searchers discovered the Arctic exploration ship HMS Investigator, which sank in 1854 off Banks Island. This summer, the same people hope to find HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, the heart of Sir John Franklin’s abortive 1854 expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. The vessels are Canada’s only national historic sites with no known location. Noted one searcher, Even if they are not found, “next time the team will know where not to look.”
A major problem for shipping companies and port operators is that shippers too often mislabel the weight or contents of containers, and that practice has resulted in a number of accidents. (When the MSC Napoli was grounded, it was found that the declared weights for 137 of the 600 shipping containers on its deck differed from actual weights by more than three tons.) The major shipping companies are organizing a Cargo Incident Notifications Network called Cinsnet (perhaps it would be better labeled as Sinsnet?) to help identify both potentially dangerous containers and industry-wide trends.
The following may tell readers something about the so-called “warrior complex.” The Navy SEALS that killed Osama bin Laden referred to him as “Geronimo” while those insiders at the Pentagon and the CIA preferred “Cakebread.”
Coal from Indonesia has been catching fire while being carried to China so one insurance company issued a simple checklist. Coals are ranked from anthracite, bituminous, and sub-bituminous down to lignite (aka brown coal). Indonesia mostly exports the lower-ranked coals, which tend to self-ignite. Shipments often have a high moisture content, which is a no-no.
Upon hearing an electronic emergency signal one night, British coastguard authorities launched a lifeboat and searched for three hours some four miles off the Welsh coast before it was realized that the signal had been transmitted by a standard electronic device in a BMW parked on the ferry European Endeavour inbound from Dublin. This Emergency Telematics anti-theft, send-help device is fitted to many new BMW and Volvo vehicles.
Per international agreement, the longer a vessel, the lower must be the pitch of its horn. If longer than 200 meters, its horn must issue a sound between 70 and 200 Hertz. For lengths between 75 and 200 meters, the sound should be between 130 and 350 Hz, and between 20 and 75 meters, the pitch must be an almost squeaky 250-700 Hz. (To establish a baseline here, A above middle C is normally 440 Hz but is sometimes set at 432 Hz for a “warmer” orchestral tone.)
Head-Shakers
Since many persons refuse to believe the US Government’s announcement that Osama Bin Laden is dead, an underseas explorer and treasure hunter will search for the body and, if successful, he announced he will obtain DNA and other evidence.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Other Shores - July 2011
Is it Fiji or Tonga that owns the remote Minerva Reefs (two submerged atolls named after the wrecked whaleship Minerva)? The question became important when two Tongan patrol boats drove off a lone Fijian patrol boat. Any conflict will be limited; tiny Fiji has 3,500 soldiers, no air force, and nine patrol boats and the tinier Tonga has 500 soldiers, one maritime-patrol airplane, and three patrol boats plus a royal yacht. (The quarrel is really over Tonga’s providing refuge to a fleeing dissenter, a member of a prominent Fijian family.)
Danish shipping giant Maersk is deep into the green scene. Its latest environmental policy is to reduce to a minimum the amount of illegally logged tropical hardwoods in the floors of its shipping containers.
Shipping companies are trying to ensure that the mega-container ships on order will have an adequate supply of containers by trying to fix ten-year charters for feeder ships of about 1,100-teu capacity.
At one point during the month, the transpacific rate per loaded 40-foot container was down to $1,932.
Increasing production in the US of shale gas and oil as a result of fracking (fracturing the shale layers in which gas and oil are trapped) should reduce by 5% the average ton-miles of oil cargo shipped, especially from the Middle East to the US. Attention in the Middle East became focused on the Asian market. And major flooding along the Mississippi River drastically cut coal shipments southward and that affected bulker traffic in the Gulf of Mexico.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In Columbia, the bulker Chios Wind ran aground in the River Magdalena and that blocked access to the port of Barranquila for five days. As a result, at least seven ships were diverted to the nearby ports of Santa Maria and Cartagena. The German-owned deep-sea salvage tug Uranus finally arrived and pulled out the harbor’s cork.
Ships collided: At night, the container ship Euros London collided with and sank the 165-foot pogy fishing boat Sandy Point about eight miles south of Gulfport, Mississippi and three of its crew of sixteen died. Worldwide, shore installations took a beating. In New Zealand, the container ship Maersk Dabou punched a large hole in its side when it hit the Beach Street Wharf at Port Chalmers. In the UK at Littlehampton, the dredger Arco Dee lost control in high winds and its superstructure scraped a concrete wall. No holes this time. At Odessa, the container ship RHL Fidelitas lost its ability to reverse and slammed into a pilot boat and the wharf while trying to dock. The pilot boat sank and the pier needed extensive repairs. And at Karmoy in Norway, so much gravel was unloaded from the Nyyfjeli that the pier collapsed.
In Thailand at Laem Chabang, the container ship MOL Aqua had a fire and explosion in a cargo hold as it was berthing. In Sweden at Trollhatten, fire broke out in a load of scrap cars on the cargo/container ship Rebecca Rousing. A port crane lifted off the scrap to allow access to the fire, and it was extinguished but then broke out again.
At a Singapore shipyard, a welder and a nearby worker were killed when fumes exploded in a tank on a barge. The tank had been painted a few days earlier. At Port Manatee in Florida, a dockworker died when he lost his footing and fell about 25 feet down a shaft between a load and the side of a ship. An overloaded crane collapsed at a Vietnamese shipyard, killing two South Korean workers and injuring two others. At Mexico’s Veracruz, three crewmembers of a Greek-flagged cargo ship loading maize died of asphyxiation when the door to a cargo hold accidentally swung shut and trapped them inside. (The bulker was probably the Chios Destiny.)
Alaskan Coast Guard helicopters found the bodies of five clam diggers on mudflats southwest of Kalgin Island in Cook Inlet. They had been digging for razor clams and what happened to their twenty-foot skiff was unclear. At Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick the ro/ro ferry Grand Manan V failed to reach its dock, hitting a nearby ledge. Its bow then swung around and hit the dock. About 100 passengers and eighteen crewmen were helped ashore from the ferry in its awkward perch on the ledges. Failure of one engine to go into reverse was the probable cause of the accident. An injured sailor was brought into Bermuda for treatment of serious burns to his hands after an accident on board the container ship Washington Express. He was picked up by the pilot boat at Five Fathom Hole off St David’s and the container ship continued on its way from Germany to Charleston, South Carolina.
Somewhere in the Bering Sea, a Coast Guard C-130 helped a Coast Guard vessel by dropping enough spare parts onto the cutter Bertholf to enable repair of its helicopter. In India, the product tanker Pratibha Neera gave Vishakhapatnam Port authorities a major scare when it developed a severe list while loading. A problem regulating the loading-compensating ballast was the probable cause.
Gray Fleets
Two officers and two others of the Indian Navy died when a floodgate collapsed at the naval dockyard at Visakhapatnam on that nation’s East Coast. In New York City for Fleet Week, a US Marine was struck and killed by a car about 200 yards from his ship, the helicopter carrier USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7).
A lieutenant commander on the Royal Navy frigate HMS Richmond was sent home from anti-piracy patrolling because of a seven-month affair with a leading seaman (a female). His father is a Rear Admiral and former head of naval training. The commanding officer of the US Navy’s Blue Angels flight team was relieved of his command at his request. He had led the team into a lower-than-planned maneuver during an air show at Lynchburg, Virginia. In Alaska, the commanding officer of the USCGC Anacapa was temporarily relieved of his command after superiors lost confidence in his ability to command. The vessel is a 110-foot patrol boat.
The Royal Australian Navy apologized to Britain, Malaysia, Singapore, and New Zealand because the submarine HMAS Decaineux, which was to play the enemy submarine during anti-submarine Exercise Bersama Shield in the South China Sea, couldn’t make it. The sub had to sit out the exercise in Singapore with “propulsion problems.” Making matters worse for the Ozzies was the discovery that just before the exercise the navy newspaper Navy News had written an imaginative and complimentary article on the sub’s daring performance in the exercise. High brass were not amused.
What does a nation do when it gets rid of its carrier-based aircraft but wants have a few carrier-trained fliers? It sheds its national pride and looks for alternative schemes. Since the UK has deleted its Harrier aircraft and its last aircraft carrier, naval fliers will serve on American carriers and be trained to fly F-18s, a plane the UK does not plan to operate. The flyers will form the basic training cadre when the Royal Navy once again has naval jet aircraft (probably a variant of the US Joint Strike Fighter F-35) sometime in the next decade. And thirty Royal Navy fliers will serve on the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle as soon as they learn enough French in a Parisian school. They will then join the air wing of the Charles de Gaulle for three years to gain experience flying French Rafale jets.
The French are also looking for win-win options. That nation has the one aircraft carrier while the UK has none but has two 60,000-ton biggies ’abuilding, although one will be put into storage as soon as it is completed. As a win-win option, French naval authorities have been pondering cooperative schemes in which that second carrier might fly the tricolor at times. As a French admiral explained, “It would be useful to each have a national carrier [and] then have an extra carrier – not as expensive and for training uses [only] – for UK and French use.”
For his 90th birthday the Duke of Edinburgh was made the Lord High Admiral of the Royal Navy. Her Majesty had held the office of the titular head of the Navy since 1964 but passed it on to her husband as he celebrated his ninth decade. The office dates from the 14th century.
White Fleets
At Gibraltar, a sullage* tank on the North Mole exploded and that triggered a string of frantic activities. The first was to rescue the two men who had been welding on the tank’s top. They were badly burned and one had life-threatening burns. Also needing help were twelve passengers (mostly minor burns and one fracture) on the cruise ship Independence of the Seas, which was moored near the burning tank and the ship’s master then hurriedly took his ship to sea, leaving two passengers behind. Three tugs operated by a local company were among the first-responders. Two tugs set to work to help vacate the area of vessels - including fuel-laden bunker barges - before starting to spray the tanks adjacent to the fire to help cool them down.
Meanwhile, the tug Egerton, crewed by off-duty employees who had run down to the port to offer their assistance, took on the task of moving a barge named Slop 107 that was docked next to the exploded tank and carrying fluids similar to what was in the burning tank. When the Egerton arrived at the scene, its crew found the company’s tug Sun Swale up against the quay next to the fuel barge, spraying water on the tanks on land. Getting the barge underway was not easy; Slop 1707 was tied up to two bollards and the initial plan was for someone to approach along the quay and cut the ropes, allowing Egerton to tow it away.
But the fire intensified and it became too hot and too risky for land-based personnel to help.
So the master of the Egerton pushed the barge against the quay, allowing two brothers to jump across and release the ropes. They were sprayed with water by the crew on the Sun Swale to give them some protection from the heat.
(*Sullage is usually defined as being gray water, the wastewater generated from domestic activities such as laundry, dishwashing, and bathing. In this case, sullage meant a mixture of oil and water. Sullage is not to be confused with ullage, the unused space in a nearly filled tank.)
The MSC Opera had to be towed to Sweden after an engineroom blast cause a massive power failure in the Baltic Sea. Readers know what “no power” means – no toilets, lights, air conditioning, or hot food – in short, much like steerage class was a century ago. At Copenhagen while leaving port, the Costa Magica, with a pilot on board, ran onto a sand bar without harming a single passenger. A tug pulled the ship free the same day.
A woman with symptoms of a stroke was heli-evacuated by an Alaska-based Coast Guard chopper from the Celebrity Millennium.
In the state of Washington at Woodinville, a tour bus carrying 46 passengers from the Sapphire Princess had mechanical problems. First, it ran across the community’s award-winning traffic circle, made it around the next traffic circle but not the third, and finally hit two cars along the way before being stopped by two large boulders. No one in the bus was hurt.
Norway was not kind to some cruise ships. While boarding passengers at Bergen, Norway, the Costa Deliziosa broke free, tearing off two bollards and a large chunk of the wharf. Fifty feet of the pier were destroyed and walkways plunged into the sea. After some cleaning up, the final one hundred passengers were boarded and the ship departed towards Geiranger. (140-180 cruise ships visit the beautiful fjord there during the four-month cruise season.) And at Kristiansand, the Oriana acquired a large dent in her stern after colliding with the dockside in Norway. The vessel was beginning to maneuver away from the quayside when a combination of high winds and fierce tidal conditions resulted in Oriana’s stern striking the corner of the solid stone dock, damaging a water pipe and a fiber-optic cable. Nobody was hurt and the ship was able to head to Southampton with 1,800 passengers on board.
In 2009, a woman slipped on a pool deck on the Carnival Pride and suffered a fractured kneecap and that required at least six surgeries. She sued, claiming that the cruise company knew the deck was slippery by nature and knew of other falls on the Pride and other ships in its fleet. She also claimed that she will need one or two complete knee replacements in the future. A US judge awarded her a total of exactly $2,998,155.70.
Those That Go Back and Forth
In Scotland, the £25 million ferry Finlaggan was the first new large ferry in the Calmac fleet in ten years and the first new ferry to serve Islay in forty years but the new vessel broke down with engine problems that cancelled its inaugural voyage. The problem was an “unexplained component failure of the port engine.”
The Leonora Christina, one of the world’s largest high-speed ferries at 371 feet (113 meters), 1,400 passengers, and 357 cars, allided with a freshwater supply vessel at the entrance of the Suez Canal. The damage was not serious enough to stop the vessel continuing through the Suez Canal on its delivery voyage but it will arrive in Denmark with a depressing depression in its side.
The old (1965) ferry Grand Manan V made an unconventional and unsuccessful landing at its wharf at Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick. It hit a ledge and then its bow swung around and hit the pier. About 100 passengers and eighteen crewmen had to be helped off the ferry from its awkward perch on the ledge. Loss of the ability to reverse one engine was the probable cause.
On Vancouver Island at Swartz Bay, a man committed suicide by driving his pickup truck at high speed through a barrier, down a lane leading to a loading ramp, and off the ferry’s ramp and into the water.
In Indonesia, at least 27 people died when a passenger ferry capsized off Indonesia’s Borneo but more than 70 people were rescued. The ferry was carrying four crewmembers and more than 100 passengers when it capsized and sank about two hours after the ship departed from Tanjung Dewa.
Legal Matters
In an unpublished decision, a US Appeals Court confirmed that the manufacturers of a recre
ational vessel and its engine were liable for injuries if a propeller blade cut and severely injured a swimmer.
Imports
Refugees fleeing the recent “Arab Spring” series of revolts and overthrown rulers increased the already-massive illegal-immigration problem for other nations. Typical was the 100-foot fishing vessel Wave. With high hopes for better lives for those onboard, it set out from Tripoli in Libya with maybe 850 refugees from Mali, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh but ran aground and capsized off the Tunisian coast. Rescue forces were able to save 578 men, women, and children, and the reader can do the remaining arithmetic. The survivors were sent to a refugee camp at Ras Ajdir near the Libyan border.
Nature
Hydrophone-using scientists located some rare right whales in a region off Greenland where they were thought to be extinct.
Southern California has the world’s first hybrid tugs, the purpose-built Carolyn Dorothy, and a converted sister, the Campbell Foss. European designers have been developing hybrid designs too and the Dutch tug RT Adriaan will be retrofitted with basically similar hybrid systems that combine main diesels engines, electric motors, and batteries. All three tugs basically use electric power except for tasks (high-speed transits or ship assist) that require more power, and that is when the main engines are started and used.
Metal-Bashing
She may look like an oversized, over-specified shrimp trawler but an as-yet-unnamed vessel and a 2009-delivered sister named Poncho will trawl for old tires, scrap metal, and any other scrap at the sites of decommissioned oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. US laws require that such sites be left clean enough to allow the typical Gulf shrimp boat to safely use its trawls.
Shell has decided to go ahead with construction of the world’s first Floating Liquefied Natural Gas facility. This “vessel” will process gas from offshore fields and cool it into liquefied natural gas. The FLNG facility will be immense, at 1,600 feet long and a displacement of about 600,000 tons (about six times the largest aircraft carrier). Some 260,000 tons of that displacement will be steel (as the Australian press release parochially notes, that is about five times the steel used in the Sydney Bridge). A South Korean yard will build what will be the world’s largest floating offshore facility.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
In 2010, Somalian pirates attacked 4,185 seafarers with firearms and rocket-propelled grenades; 342 seafarers were rescued from citadels (ships’ reinforced security rooms); 1,090 seafarers were taken hostage; 516 seafarers were used as human shields; and as many as 488 seafarers were subjected to abuse or torture. Currently, more than 400 mariners are held captive along with more than twenty vessels. Piracy increases the cost of international commerce by $12 billion a year.
Piracy Somalia style, is big business with the actual pirates getting only pennies of each ransom dollar. There is even an actual stock exchange (at Harardheere and established ‘way back in 2009) that may list more than seventy entities that sell shares in pirate activities. As one participant bragged, “We’ve made piracy a community activity.” Somalia also has five banks eager and able to launder pirate money. Perhaps international sanctions are needed to complement the busy but relatively ineffective patrols by the warships of many nations?
Odd Bits and Head Shakers
The Felicity Tenacity, carrying 23,500 tons of propane, ran a gauntlet of vessel abuse during the recent Japanese tsunami. First, it broke free and rammed into the bulker China Steel Integrity, and was then battered in turn by numerous smaller boats and tugs before it hit a jetty, which opened a gash in its side. The vessel started taking on water into the engineroom but soon ran aground. It was repeatedly freed and then trapped again as tides came and went, and that sequence damaged and bent the rudder. The ship remained at anchor for at least two weeks before its dangerous cargo was discharged and the ship could limp to a repair yard.
NOAA’s Office of Coastal Survey now uses Twitter to keep customers abreast of critical chart corrections and new chart editions. See www.twitter.com/nauticalcharts.
In May, the bulker Double Prosperity, which departed Australia for India with 65,351 metric tons of coal, ran aground on Bacud reef that runs along Sarangani Bay in the Philippines. The ship’s captain admitted to officials that he had moved his ship closer to the mainland merely to establish solid cellphone signals.
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