Industry experts urged faster vessel scrappings as one solution to the overbuilding that has led to excess ships and low charter prices.
Large product tankers face competition from newbuild aframax crude-oil tankers with their clean tanks.
VLCC sailing speeds remained slow in the fourth quarter of 2011 due to high bunker prices.
New Zealand’s Ports of Auckland made a “best and final offer” to striking dockworkers. It was rejected.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
The Turkish-flagged freighter Dogu Haslaman issued a distress signal from international waters between the Greek islands of Samos and Chios. The skipper of the half-sunk ship refused assistance from Greek authorities, saying he would wait for Turkish rescuers. (Greece and neighboring Turkey are at odds over Aegean Sea boundaries – including who has jurisdiction in search and rescue operations.) The 12-strong crew was picked up by another Turkish cargo ship. The offshore supply vessel Int'l Hunter capsized and sank 30 miles southeast of the Sabine Jetties in Port Arthur, Texas, after striking a submerged object. Four crewmembers and three passengers quickly abandoned ship. The Chinese cargo ship Changda 216 capsized off the northern Philippine province of Cagayan, killing two but thirteen others were rescued. Off Molasses Key in the Florida Keys, the 25-foot dive boat Get Wet started sinking. Two of the eight passengers were trapped in the cabin, both were unconscious when rescued, and one couldn’t be revived. The Cambodian-flagged fishing vessel Ginga sank in Russia’s La Perouse Strait, which lies between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. Three bodies were found while “two trawlers, a Russian helicopter, a rescue vessel, two steamboats, and a Japanese maritime safety department ship” searched for five possible survivors. The vessel could have been poaching in the waters on the Russian-Japanese maritime border. The crew of Russian drilling rig Kolskaya was waiting for a helicopter rescue when the rig capsized in a fierce storm about 125 miles off Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East. More than fifty of the 67 people on board died. (Only twenty should have been on board.) The rig was being towed by a tug and an icebreaker. (The rig wasn’t supposed to be towed in wintertime.) Somewhere northeast of Luzon Island, the bulker Vinalines Queen went missing on Christmas Day. One seaman was found on a raft six days later. The ship was carrying 54,400 tons of nickel ore, a known ship-killer when wet, from the Indonesian port of Morowaii to China. The ship’s owner hired ships and a helicopter to extend the initial four-day search by governmental agencies.
In spite of having a Ukrainian pilot on board, the Turkish bulker Gökay-K ran aground in the northern part of the Kerch Strait when the vessel’s draft exceeded the channel’s depth by 7.5 meters. Two tugs soon freed it. The Maltese-registered cargo ship TK Bremen ran aground off the coast of Brittany in high winds and torrential rain. The vessel, built in 1982, was too badly damaged to be towed off and the owners were given until April 6 to “deconstruct” the ship and restore the beach at Morbihan.
Thucydides (471-400 BC) supposedly wrote, “A collision at sea can ruin your entire day” and that truism is valid: Thick fog was blamed for the collision of the chemical tanker Charleston and the empty bulker Harvest Sun in the Houston Ship Channel just north of the Texas City Dike. The fog was so thick that Coast Guard investigators were unable to get to the scene. (A photo showed that the bow of a tanker was invisible from the bridge, and the fog persisted for days.) The container ship Hyundai Confidence “came in contact” with the coal-carrying bulk carrier Pacific Carrier 17.7 miles southwest of the South Korean island of Yokjido. Both heavily damaged ships remained stuck together while salvors figured out what to do next.
The Russian fishing vessel Sparta radioed for help after it was holed by ice in the Antarctic’s Ross Sea while fishing for Antarctic toothfish. The 48-metre vessel had a 30-centimeter hole in the hull 1.5 meters below the waterline and was taking on water and listing 13 degrees. It landed many of its crew of thirty-two onto the ice while efforts were made to pump out the incoming water. A RNZAF Hercules dropped pumps, fuel, and supplies after two seven-hour flights from New Zealand, and other vessels made efforts to reach the sinking vessel. The New Zealand vessel San Aspiring pulled out after its crew determined the more-than-470 nautical mile journey was too dangerous. The Norwegian vessel Sel Jevaer was only nineteen miles away but was hemmed in by ice and unable to proceed. Sparta's sister ship Chiyo Maru No. 3 slowly made its way toward the stricken vessel but remained days away and finally gave up. The Sparta’s owners chartered the big South Korean icebreaker Araon, which happened to be in a South Island port in New Zealand, and it reached the Sparta a week later, appropriately enough, on Christmas Day. A cement box inside the hull and an outside metal patch made the Sparta seaworthy, and it followed the Araon through 100 miles of ice floes to the open sea.
Three crewmembers of the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker Vaygach were killed and another was injured in an accommodations-area fire. The shallow-draft ship has 50,000 HP and is designed to break ice in rivers and estuaries. The vessel was “moored in the estuary of the Yenisei River near the village Karaul, located on the Taimyr Peninsula in the Krasnoyarsk Krai” and an extensive research revealed only that a krai is “a federal subject of Russia.” Got that?
The Dutch tug RT Leader was towing the barge H-332 laden with three used container cranes from Amsterdam to Rotterdam when one of the towering 300-ton cranes toppled into the main shipping channel from Rotterdam to Scandinavia. About a metre of the crane was above water but the new navigation hazard was buoyed-off anyhow. In heavy weather, the freighter Ostee lost two mobile homes overboard while voyaging from Hull to Gdansk so it headed for Den Helder and its anchorage to tighten lashings on three other mobile homes. In Holland’s Friesland province, the skipper of the inland container ship Fides, carrying 100 empty containers, misjudged how high water was in the Princess Margriet Canal. Several containers hit the underside of the Borgum Bridge and folded up. One container was left dangling after Fides forced its way through.
Gray Fleets
China’s homebuilt subs are loud. The subs, except for a dozen Russian-made subs, can be detected as far away as twenty-five miles in what is known as the “first convergence zone,” a ring where outward-bound sound waves pack close together. The subs include the two Jin-class ballistic-missile subs that are in service; both are louder than Russian Delta III-class submarines produced three decades ago.
The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard at Kittery, Maine sent about 350 skilled workers to its San Diego detachment and they completed an extensive Pre-Inactivation Restricted Availability on the nuclear submarine San Francisco (SSN-711) in 56,000 man-days instead of a scheduled 63,000-plus man-days, thereby saving the Navy $2.45 million. (The work consisted of alternations, repairs, maintenance and testing.)
After futilely using a helicopter and tugboats to battle a towering fire in wooden scaffolding over the Russian Delta IV missile submarine Yekaterinburg, naval authorities put out the fire by partially submerging the sub. Nine people were injured fighting the fire but there was no radiation leak. (The sub launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from the Barents Sea firing range as recently as July.)
Shortages of skilled manpower have been affecting the operational performance (particularly by its submarines) of the Royal Australian Navy so it plans to recruit surplus Royal Navy personnel. The Senior Service will eliminate 5,000 jobs, reducing its numbers to just 30,000 as part of a plan to slash the UK’s defense budget and many have the skills Australia needs. (In an interesting size comparison, the US Coast Guard had approximately 42,000 men and women on active duty, 7,500 reservists, 30,000 auxiliary members, and 7,700 full-time civilian employees as of August 2009.)
And New Zealand’s Navy is also attempting to recruit ex-Royal Navy specialists. However, submariners need not apply because New Zealand doesn’t operate subs.
The Royal Australian Navy broke a glass ceiling when it created its first female admiral. She joined the navy in 1991 as a lieutenant and is the first female sailor to take on the job of Australian Defense Force’s surgeon-general.
A retired Navy commander was sentenced to 3-1/2 years in prison for faking an injury in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon. He was awarded a Purple Heart and Meritorious Service Medal after he claimed he was injured by falling debris as he raced back into the Pentagon to help his fellow comrades. He also received $331,000 in compensation for claimed constant pain in his neck, headaches, weakness, and numbness in his left hand and elbow but, two months after the attack, he ran the New York Marathon.
Pink warships? The US Navy’s Type 2/3 Low Solar Absorbance haze gray paint often weathers to pink so the service will use a more expensive, trickier-to-apply, but better-weathering Type 5 polysiloxane paint.
White Fleets
Passengers on the cruise ship Costa Deliziosa may have thought they were about to start a round-the-world cruise from Savona, Italy but the first stop was in drydock No. 8 at the Chantier Naval de Marseille shipyard because of a major but unspecified technical problem. Many of the 2,000 passengers stayed onboard after port authority had hurriedly positioned gangways around the 320-meter drydock and arranged parking areas for tour buses and taxis. The Bahamas Celebration had an engineroom fire that was extinguished in due course but the fire left air quality so poor that the Freeport-to-Palm Beach cruise was canceled. The MSC Poesia ran aground at Port Lucaya near Freeport. Five tugs freed the vessel.
Those That Go Back and Forth
In eastern Indonesia, a wooden ferry carrying people home for the Christmas holidays sank in stormy weather. Most of the 100 passengers were rescued. At Singapore, a lorry driver was eating lunch with a colleague in the cab of his 10-ton vehicle when it started rolling off a barge. His friend jumped out to safety but he died when the lorry plunged into the sea.
Due to a propeller-pitch problem, the British Columbia ferry Coastal Inspiration rammed the dock at Duke Point at five knots, badly damaging the lower vehicle ramp. The ferry then transferred to Departure Bay so passengers and vehicles could get ashore. It will take several months to repair the dock and at least one month to fix the bow of the Coastal Inspiration because a new hinge has to be made in Germany, where the ship was built.
In Kenya at Lamu, a policeman tried to prevent an overloaded small ferry from leaving but was talked out of it by the ferry operator. Soon after, in the dark of night, the ferry collided with a vessel loaded with oil drums. At least 23 of 82 passengers died. A new water ambulance equipped with first aid facilities and oxygen tanks, a gift from an international donor, remained moored throughout the rescue – the government had provided no funds for fuel or an operator. (The worst ferry disaster was in 1987 when 4,386 men, women and children lost their lives in a huge fireball that enveloped the Philippine ferry Dona Paz after it collided with the coastal tanker Vector in the Sibuan Sea.)
A Seattle man made deliberate arrangements before jumping off the ferry Cathlamet as it ping-ponged between Clinton and Mukilteo. He mailed his house key to his parents and left his laptop computer in the apartment before quietly stepping off the ferry into the night. Passengers took flashlights and helped in an unsuccessful search.
Passengers boarded the Blue Puttees for a voyage from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland but bad weather kept the ferry in port and people on board for two days. The ferry company provided free meals and shuttles for passengers who wanted to disembark for a few hours and explore North Sydney.
Because the US Coast Guard recently raised the weight of the average adult passenger to 185 pounds from 160 pounds, the legal carrying capacity of a 2,000-passenger ferry will drop by about 250 people.
Who will harvest and process Florida’s crops in the coming years? A ferry service, starting later this year, between Tampa and the peninsula of Yucatan in Mexico, may help attract migrant workers. Currently, they are bused from Mexico to Florida, a trip taking between two and three days that costs an average of $220 per passenger. A ferry could make the 500-mile trip from the Yucatan to Tampa in about 28 hours at a cost of $190 per passenger.
In Hong Kong, popular demand meant a larger ferry was put into service to carry mourners wanting to scatter cremation ashes at sea near the West Lamma Channel or Tung Lung Channel. The free trips are operated twice a month and a funeral director is on board to assist the relatives organize memorial tributes.
Legal Matters
Federal agents were waiting when the tanker Sanko Venture docked at Corpus Christi, Texas. Two stowaways jumped overboard but were captured and agents found 94 pounds of cocaine and more than five pounds of heroin in two nylon bags.
Imports
Finnish authorities were surprised to find 160 tons of explosives mismarked as fireworks and surface-to-air missiles on the British-flagged cargo ship Thor Liberty. The ship had left the German port of Emden and stopped at Kotka in Finland to pick up a cargo of anchor chains before heading to Shanghai. The cargo was 69 legal (but improperly marked and packed) surplus German-owned Patriot missiles being sent to South Korea.
A boat carrying more than 250 people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey was heading to Australia in search of a better life but more than 200 passengers went missing when “the boat became unsteady 20 miles (32 kilometers) off Java's southern coast, people started panicking, causing it to sway violently back and forth, until finally, it capsized.” Forty-nine people were rescued, including two children, aged 8 and 10, who were found clinging to debris. Survivors said an unidentified group loaded them onto four buses and brought them to a port, promising to get them to Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Indonesian authorities arrested seven people in connection with the sinking and were questioning four others on suspicion that they helped organize the boat journey, Also questioned were three soldiers accused of receiving payment for connecting the migrants with boat owners.
Nature
Are you a scientist who wants to collect data in deep water but can’t afford the necessary mooring? There’s now a mooring-free boat-shaped buoy with a small sail. The buoy can station-keep a position within two miles in spite of rather severe weather. It can also be programmed to sail a 1,000-kilometer predefined course.
Back in May, a barge carrying 2,400 tons of brown sugar hit a bridge in Ayutthaya, Thailand and sank. The melting sugar created an oxygen-depriving pollution that killed millions of fish being raised in submerged baskets.
The geared-bulker Tycoon went ashore on West Australia’s Christmas Island. It ended up broken in half in the surf and broadside to the dock used to unload most of the island’s fresh food and supplies. The ship’s bunker oil endangered local sea birds such as the Brown Booby, Brown Noddy, Abbotts Booby, and Frigate Bird. The rare Abbott’s Booby does not breed anywhere else.
Further news on those surprising microbes that ate much of the oil BP spilled last year in the Gulf of Mexico: The presence of much gas (mainly methane, propane, and ethane) and cold temperatures (the little bugs prefer it to be cold!) were keys to their rapid consumption of the plume. Among unknowns to be studied is how this affected the oil spill.
Metal-Bashing
Indian ship-scrappers bought two double-hull VLCCs for $38 million.
A Japanese shipyard worker in Drydock No. 5 at Yokosuka Naval Base died following an accident involving a US destroyer’s anchor.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
In Bangladesh in Bhola province, ten pirates wounded in a gunfight with police were later beaten to death by a mob after police recovered the body of an abducted fisherman.
In the Gulf of Aden, the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker Nordic Apollo radioed that it was under attack by pirates in a small skiff and another vessel reported "suspicious activity by a skiff." A helicopter from destroyer USS Pinckney confirmed that a skiff was carrying the telltale equipment of modern pirates including several ladders, weapons, and fuel containers and the suspected pirates were seen attempting to cover their weapons with blankets and throwing the ladders overboard. As a boarding team approached, they ditched five AK-47 rifles, one rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and three RPG rounds. In the skiff were nine pirate suspects, "one grappling hook, 36 barrels of fuel, and 75 and 45 horsepower outboard engines." The American sailors deep-sixed one of the outboards – to keep the skiff from getting up enough speed to think of coming alongside another merchant ship – but left its crew enough fuel and water to return to shore.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
The mast of his 32-foot sailboat cracked and so the solo American sailor activated his EPIRB, thus ending his seventh attempt to round Cape Horn. He was 84 years old. (The Chilean Navy located him and arranged for the Japanese bulker White Kingdom to pick him up.)
Five hundred feet from its destination, a 130-foot-long 950,000-pound cylinder fell off a barge into 120 feet of water. The cylinder, about 12 feet in diameter and worth several million dollars, was on its way to BP's Cherry Point refinery in northern Puget Sound where it was to be a reactor to create low-sulfur diesel. Two large barge-mounted cranes lifted the cylinder, apparently still OK, and it was delivered to the refinery.
What may be the world’s oldest purpose-built aircraft carrier has been at the Fleet Air Arm’s museum at RNAS Yeovilton for careful restoration and preservation. The 1918 Thorneycroft Seaplane Lighter. once numbered H21, was one of fifty such barges ordered during World War I. Thorneycroft used H21 for years as a cargo barge before it was discarded to rust away on a bank of the River Thames. Towed by a destroyer, each 58-foot barge had a high-speed ship-shaped bow and a stern ramp that allowed launching for water takeoff and subsequent recovery of a Curtis H12 flying boat. Alternatively, a wooden flight deck allowed a Sopwith Camel fighter to take off. It either landed ashore or was ditched.
Technology developed to spot periscopes breaking the surface and missiles skimming across wave tops is now being used by British helicopters to detect Afghan camel trains, pickup trucks, and insurgents on foot dozens of miles away. Drug traffickers and Taliban terrorists are the main targets.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Other Shores - January 2012
Egypt reversed its ban on weapons and armed security guards on ships because it might have an adverse effect on Suez Canal traffic.
Asian nations are stiffening their posture toward an expansive-minded China. Starting in 2012, 2,500 US Marines and aircraft will operate out of the northern Australian city of Darwin, ready to respond quickly to any humanitarian and security issue in Southeast Asia; the United States and Singapore are in the final negotiating stages of an agreement to base some of the US Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ships at the Changi Naval Base; and Vietnam offered use of its Vietnam war-era, US-built Cam Ranh Bay port for provisioning and repairs. And there is a strong possibility that the US and Australia will share military facilities on Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. China, worried that the United States is caging it in, immediately questioned whether strengthening military alliances in the region was appropriate when economic woes should place a premium on cooperation.
Crude oil produced in the US Midwest has tended to pile-up at Cushing, Oklahoma. Now, a major pipeline operator will reverse the flow in a line so oil flows from Cushing to Gulf Coast refineries, and another company plans to build its own pipeline from Cushing to the US Gulf by early 2012. (This pipeline would be part of the longer Keystone XL pipeline that will run from Alberta, Canada, to the US Gulf as soon as environmentalists fail to delay its construction any longer.) The improved supply of crude to Gulf Coast refineries will mean that fewer VLCC voyages from the Middle East will be needed and should also improve the prices paid for West Texas crude, the US benchmark, which have been lower than prices for the North Sea’s Brent crude, the international benchmark. Already, exports on product tankers are up 27% from last year.
A Canadian government forecast stated the current 1.7 million barrels per day of oil will increase to 5 million bpd by 2035. Much of this could be available for export overseas and might require the equivalent of five Suezmax tankers every day.
The US and Canada possess very large resources of shale-based liquefied natural gas and that could mean that the two countries may become a major gas exporter (after Qatar, Australia and Indonesia) by 2020 and that would probably mean the addition of more than 100 additional LNG carriers to the global fleet.
Aframax tankers owners in the Mediterranean are hoping that resumption of crude-oil exports from Libya will mean that, once again, daily earnings can exceed vessel operating costs.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
The South Korean freighter Bright Ruby sank off Xisha Islands in the South China Sea and six of 21 crewmembers went missing. The ship was carrying 16,000 tons of rolled steel from Singapore to the city of Rizhao in east China's Shandong province.
The bulker Alfa Dragon stranded itself on the island of Brac in Croatia while trying to pass through the Seagate of Split. It was carrying a crew of fourteen and 3,150 tons of salt. The fully loaded container ship Cafer Dede ran aground on Syros Island, a Greek island in the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea. Divers found very little hull damage, perhaps because the ship was ice-classed. Transfer of containers to a lighter started eight days after the grounding. In the Philippines at Nato Port, Carmarines Sur, the small freighter Jeric Jay was at anchor when large waves and a strong current strong-armed the vessel into shallow water. A Coast Guard detachment secured the Jeric Jay to a coconut tree to prevent further damage.
In Germany, the container ships Kovera and Ida collided in dense fog off Holtenau on Kiel Roads. Both ships were significantly damaged but no spills. Off Newfoundland, the supply vessel Maersk Detector struck one of the eight columns that support the semi-submersible drilling rig GSF Grand Banks. The resulting four to five-metre gash that covered about 20 per cent of the column's circumference accelerated preparations towards a scheduled 60-day maintenance period in January.
At Cape Town, an ammonia-caused fire on the fish factory Dongsan burned for about a week.
In the UK, two Russian seamen were airlifted to safety by an RAF helicopter co-piloted by Prince William (aka the Duke of Cambridge) after their vessel, the limestone-carrying Swanland, went down in the Irish Sea about 10 miles west of the Llyn Peninsula. The ship was hit by an "enormous wave" in the early hours of the morning and broke in half. An Alaska-based Coast Guard helicopter medevaced a crewman who had lost a finger from the container ship Mare Phoenicium. Did that sound dreadfully routine? The Mare Phoenicium was 575 miles away from the Coast Guard Cutter Sherman at the time of the call. The chopper, which was forward-deployed aboard the Sherman, pre-staged to Cold Bay (it’s part way out the Aleutian island chain) and once the container ship was within range, left for the vessel and arrived about an hour later. Probably the same chopper also medevaced a crewman suffering from abdominal pain from the bulk carrier Shagangfirst Power and flew him 72 miles to Cold Bay. But choppers aren’t always the solution. The bulk carrier Navios Ulysses had a crewman suffering from abdominal pain and the vessel was out of range of medevac aircraft. The Coast Guard cutter Rush met the Navios Ulysses 713 miles southwest of Kodiak and transferred the patient by small boat. Weather conditions on scene were 30-knot winds and 12-foot seas.
At Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a mariner on the cement-carrying barge St Mary’s Challenge was killed when his arm became caught in a moving conveyor belt and was severed at the shoulder. He was troubleshooting a hydraulic leak and had asked that the engine be turned off and then restarted. A log entry showed that it was restarted before he made the request for a restart.
The Singapore reflagged Morning Cedar, a vehicle carrier carrying packaged timber, became disabled off Tanaga Island, Alaska when the freighter’s rudder became stuck hard to starboard due to a hydraulic leak that the crew was unable to repair. A Coast Guard airplane was ready to deliver an emergency towing system but the vessel was able to maneuver away from the island by using a combination of main propulsion and bow thrusters. Technicians were flown to the ship as it drifted. In Brazil, the iron ore-carrier Vale Beijing, one of the world’s largest vessels, was being loaded at Ponta da Madeira when the hull cracked and the ship started sinking. Six tugs towed it offshore while pumps kept it afloat. The ship, delivered last September, must be fixed while afloat since the port has no unloading facilities and the ship’s engine must not be used.
Gray Fleets
The US Navy will discharge 28 sailors from USS Ronald Reagan for using the marijuana-mimicking synthetic drug Spice. They are in addition to 64 others, also from the Third Fleet, who were recently discharged for illegal drug use.
HMCS Vancouver will remain in the Mediterranean until early 2012, when she will be relieved by HMCS Charlottetown, all so Canada can maintain a presence in the Mediterranean Sea as part of Operation Active Endeavour, the NATO counter-terrorism effort in the region. HMCS Charlottetown will be equipped with a leased ScanEagle, a small reconnaissance drone capable of staying airborne for 20 hours while carrying an infrared camera and a radar system.
Naval forces off Libya apparently didn’t fear attacks by Libyan aircraft because the frigate HMS Westminster carried only four (two salvos) air-defense Seawolf missiles. Or maybe that was because the UK was short of weapons and warships due to the recent deep cuts in defense spending; about the same time it was revealed that the Royal Navy didn’t have a single warship to defend British waters during the month of October.
The US Navy and Marine Corps will buy all of Britain’s decommissioned Harrier jet fighters and will pay $50 million for the spare parts alone. It is not clear whether the 72 aircraft will be flown or cannibalized for additional parts. (Other users of Harrier aircraft are the Italian navy, the Spanish navy, and Thailand, which bought several Harriers for use on its aircraft carrier HTMS Chakri Naruebet.)
Russian naval ships will soon be outfitted with British-made furniture and Russian mariners are reported to be excited about living in the resulting high-quality conditions.
White Fleets
A cruise company terminated all parasailing shore excursions in the Caribbean after an accident in the Virgin Islands killed a 60-year-old female passenger from the Celebrity Eclipse and seriously injured her daughter. Squalls and wind gusts may have been factors in the accident.
Health officials boarded the Veendam after it docked at Rio de Janeiro because 72 of its 1,800 passengers and seven crewmembers had been sickened by a mystery illness during the passage from Valparaiso. Also aboard was a dead woman, who probably did not die because of the mystery illness but of natural causes.
In North Moscow, fire raced rough the river cruise vessel Sergey Abramov. Two passengers went to a hospital and a crewman was missing.
Frequent announcements on the Carnival Inspiration gave passengers a good idea as to the identity of the man who had just jumped overboard, leaving a note behind. His wife had recently died.
Two American women tried to import more than $400,000 worth of cannabis resin into Bermuda. They arrived on the Carnival Fantasy with 2.7 kgs (6 lbs.) of drugs strapped to their bodies.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Two Rottweilers were found dead in their owner's four-wheel drive vehicle in the Spirit of Tasmania's car hold when that ferry arrived at Devonport after an overnight voyage from Melbourne. The ferry line claimed the dogs died of carbon monoxide poisoning and said it had wanted to put them in the ship's kennels but the owner declined and instead signed an indemnity form to allow the dogs to travel in the car. They were to have taken part in a herding competition. (Surprised by that last bit? The rottweiler can trace his roots back to the drover dogs in Germany and still has the instincts to herd animals.)
Early-morning ferry travelers had to wait outside the Swartz Bay ferry terminal in British Columbia while a Mountie shot a 50-kilogram male cougar that had found its way inside. On the UK’s west coast, the Isle of Manx ferry Ben-my-Chree (“girl of my heart”) was berthing at Heysham in Lincolnshire in strong winds when it collided with a link-span. The allision left the vessel with a hole in its hull above the water line and stranded hundreds of passengers. At Picton in New Zealand, a strong northwest gust caused the recently rebuilt Interislander ferry Aratetere to swing away from its berth. That pulled a bollard from the quay. The chunk of metal slammed into the ferry’s bow, causing a sizable dent, and dropped to the bottom of the harbor. Having two mooring lines on the bollard may have overloaded it. In British Columbia, a hard landing at Departure Bay damaged both the Queen of Coquitlam and a wing wall that guides the ferry into the dock but no one was injured.
The Norwegian-flagged vehicular ferry Rauma lost power during a run from Aukra and Hollingsholmen and ran aground on rocks on the wrong side of the pier at Hollingsholmen. The ferry Nordmøre was taken from another run as a substitute ferry but first it pulled the Rauma to a dock. The next day and at the same landing, the vehicular ramp fell down while Nordmøre was unloading. A young couple’s car went into the drink and they were injured. In Finland, the newbuild passenger ro/ro Spirit of France broke its moorings in bad weather at the shipyard in Rauma and came to rest against a rocky breakwater. (The ferry was to have gone into cross-Channel service in September.)
In the Philippines, the Super Ferry 1 ran aground near Ditaytay Island between Coron and Puerto Princesa in Palawan. In Massachusetts at Hyannis, the ro/pax ferry Eagle struck the parked standby ferry Sankaty and suffered a large hole. The Sankaty took its passengers to Nantucket.
Typical of Third World ferry operations, it had room for only one vehicle but it was carrying an auto and a lorry. The engine broke down a few minutes after departure from somewhere in Borneo and then the ferry capsized. The eleven passengers jumped into the river and most swam to safety but search and rescue teams recovered the body of a 14-year-old boy some three kilometers downstream. The body had crocodile bite marks. His mother also drowned.
Legal Matters
Shipping agency Sea Star Line LLC agreed to plead guilty and pay a $14.2 million criminal fine for its role in a conspiracy to fix rates and surcharges for transportation of freight between the continental United States and Puerto Rico from as early as May 2002 until at least April 2008. A federal grand jury also returned an indictment against the former president of Sea Star Line for his role in the conspiracy. Horizon Lines LLC was also sentenced to pay a $15 million criminal fine, and five former executives from both Sea Star Line and Horizon Lines were sentenced to pay a total of nearly $85,000 in criminal fines. They will also collectively serve more than 11 years in prison.
Nature
The bulker Universe Forest was quarantined at Vladivostok after chetyrehpyatnistoy weevils (probably the wheat weevil) were found in grain, rice, beans, barley, and corn flakes in the vessel's food storeroom and pantry. The foodstuffs had originated in China.
Falling levels of water on the Rhine River triggered an extraordinary demand for truck and rail transport of grain. Sadly, these alternative means of transport could not replace the barge shipments. And silt and sand, probably swept down the Missouri River during its recent flooding, blocked the Mississippi near St Louis for several days until hurried dredging allowed re-opening of the River to a pile-up of waiting barges.
The US Navy successfully completed the largest-scale demonstration to date of alternative fuels. Its Self Defense Test Ship (the decommissioned Spruance-class destroyer Paul F. Foster, reconfigured into an unmanned test platform) made a 17-hour, remotely controlled voyage from San Diego to the Naval Surface Warfare Center Port Hueneme using a 50-50 blend of algae-derived, hydro-processed algal oil and a standard petroleum fuel.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Three Russian warships appeared in Syrian waters, probably as a protest against sanctions imposed by the US, sanctions Russia dismissed as “exterritorial” and “unacceptable and violating international law.” A news item added that the warships could “protect strategic and national security interests and prevent war.” There are more than 100,000 Russian citizens in Syria and Russia is obligated to protect these citizens from any sort of military aggression by the United States.
A Kurdish rebel carrying explosives hijacked the Turkish ferry Kartepe and forced it to anchor off the port town of Silivri, west of Istanbul. About twelve hours later, while police conducted lengthy negotiations with the lone hijacker, Turkish commandos in civilian clothes slipped onto the vessel and posed as hostages before fatally shooting the hijacker and freeing 18 passengers plus four crew and two trainees.
An anticipated surge in Somalian piracy attacks failed to materialize, perhaps because the monsoon season lasted longer than usual or perhaps because of increased measures by shipowners and crews, more proactive military tactics, and international initiatives in Somalia. Three naval coalitions have eighteen warships on anti-piracy duties and there are additional warships of navies acting independently. The pirates appear to have far fewer mother ships. There are now just 10 hijacked ships, few of which could be used as pirate mother ships, whereas last January there were as many as 32 potential mother ships.
A Dutch shipowner reflagged his vessels that transit pirate-infested waters after the Dutch justice minister made it clear he has no intention of allowing armed guards on vessels flying the Dutch flag.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
Even US Coast Guard reports can be detail-inconsistent. For example, the Egyptian bulker Edfu briefly lost propulsion as it was crossing the Columbia River bar after leaving Astoria. The ship dropped both of its anchors, then regained propulsion. The Coast Guard ordered the vessel to hire tugboats to escort it on its trip from Astoria to Tacoma for inspection and repairs. A Coast Guard report noted that the bulker was missing both required anchors. Yet, only a month earlier, the Edfu lost power nine miles west of Cape Disappointment and anchored in an effort to keep the vessel from drifting to shore. At that time, the Coast Guard said carrier had only one anchor. In between these two exciting moments, a Coast Guard 47-foot motor lifeboat had transported an injured crewman with a ruptured left eye to Astoria while the Edfu was anchored in the Columbia River (number of anchors used not given.).
Much of the US’s corn and soybeans feed Asian cattle and hogs or are turned into food products. Traditionally, the grain would have been barged at some point but intermodal (truck/train/ship) transfer of grain in cargo containers is increasingly popular. One reason is that a bargeload of grain is 55,000-60,000 bushels but a cargo container holds only 1,000 bushels. Customers are willing to pay a premium (maybe 20 cents per bushel) for the containerized loads that are easier to distribute to end-users. Also containerized are high-protein corn cakes, a byproduct of ethanol production. The wet mash is dried so it will not spoil during transport and the resulting DDG, or dried distillers grain, is then mixed with bean meal and corn and made into cakes that will end up as cattle feed overseas.
The Russian icebreaking tanker Renda will attempt an emergency wintertime fuel delivery to Nome, Alaska, after difficult winter conditions turned back a barge carrying the city's last regularly scheduled fuel delivery. Nome, a city of about 3,600, lacks outside road access and depends on ships and aircraft for supplies, and fuel prices already average about $5.40 for a gallon of gasoline. The tanker has made progress through five feet of ice but the US Coast Guard ‘s polar icebreaker USCGC Healy will help if necessary.
The UK’s Ministry of Defense announced it will shed 11,400 members of the Royal Navy, Army, and Royal Air Force by 2015. The department will also dump 30,000 civilians over the next decade but the first batch must be volunteer retirees – in explanation, the MOD’s permanent secretary suggested that, unlike service personnel, civil servants are harder to sack because they have “flexible skills.”
When 1,330 tons of oil in the grounded tanker Petriana was pumped overside in a futile effort to free the ship, a press report glowingly described "a film of great beauty, radiating all the colours of the rainbow." But that was then – the tanker ran aground at Australia’s Port Phillip Bay in thick fog in 1903.
Asian nations are stiffening their posture toward an expansive-minded China. Starting in 2012, 2,500 US Marines and aircraft will operate out of the northern Australian city of Darwin, ready to respond quickly to any humanitarian and security issue in Southeast Asia; the United States and Singapore are in the final negotiating stages of an agreement to base some of the US Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ships at the Changi Naval Base; and Vietnam offered use of its Vietnam war-era, US-built Cam Ranh Bay port for provisioning and repairs. And there is a strong possibility that the US and Australia will share military facilities on Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. China, worried that the United States is caging it in, immediately questioned whether strengthening military alliances in the region was appropriate when economic woes should place a premium on cooperation.
Crude oil produced in the US Midwest has tended to pile-up at Cushing, Oklahoma. Now, a major pipeline operator will reverse the flow in a line so oil flows from Cushing to Gulf Coast refineries, and another company plans to build its own pipeline from Cushing to the US Gulf by early 2012. (This pipeline would be part of the longer Keystone XL pipeline that will run from Alberta, Canada, to the US Gulf as soon as environmentalists fail to delay its construction any longer.) The improved supply of crude to Gulf Coast refineries will mean that fewer VLCC voyages from the Middle East will be needed and should also improve the prices paid for West Texas crude, the US benchmark, which have been lower than prices for the North Sea’s Brent crude, the international benchmark. Already, exports on product tankers are up 27% from last year.
A Canadian government forecast stated the current 1.7 million barrels per day of oil will increase to 5 million bpd by 2035. Much of this could be available for export overseas and might require the equivalent of five Suezmax tankers every day.
The US and Canada possess very large resources of shale-based liquefied natural gas and that could mean that the two countries may become a major gas exporter (after Qatar, Australia and Indonesia) by 2020 and that would probably mean the addition of more than 100 additional LNG carriers to the global fleet.
Aframax tankers owners in the Mediterranean are hoping that resumption of crude-oil exports from Libya will mean that, once again, daily earnings can exceed vessel operating costs.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
The South Korean freighter Bright Ruby sank off Xisha Islands in the South China Sea and six of 21 crewmembers went missing. The ship was carrying 16,000 tons of rolled steel from Singapore to the city of Rizhao in east China's Shandong province.
The bulker Alfa Dragon stranded itself on the island of Brac in Croatia while trying to pass through the Seagate of Split. It was carrying a crew of fourteen and 3,150 tons of salt. The fully loaded container ship Cafer Dede ran aground on Syros Island, a Greek island in the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea. Divers found very little hull damage, perhaps because the ship was ice-classed. Transfer of containers to a lighter started eight days after the grounding. In the Philippines at Nato Port, Carmarines Sur, the small freighter Jeric Jay was at anchor when large waves and a strong current strong-armed the vessel into shallow water. A Coast Guard detachment secured the Jeric Jay to a coconut tree to prevent further damage.
In Germany, the container ships Kovera and Ida collided in dense fog off Holtenau on Kiel Roads. Both ships were significantly damaged but no spills. Off Newfoundland, the supply vessel Maersk Detector struck one of the eight columns that support the semi-submersible drilling rig GSF Grand Banks. The resulting four to five-metre gash that covered about 20 per cent of the column's circumference accelerated preparations towards a scheduled 60-day maintenance period in January.
At Cape Town, an ammonia-caused fire on the fish factory Dongsan burned for about a week.
In the UK, two Russian seamen were airlifted to safety by an RAF helicopter co-piloted by Prince William (aka the Duke of Cambridge) after their vessel, the limestone-carrying Swanland, went down in the Irish Sea about 10 miles west of the Llyn Peninsula. The ship was hit by an "enormous wave" in the early hours of the morning and broke in half. An Alaska-based Coast Guard helicopter medevaced a crewman who had lost a finger from the container ship Mare Phoenicium. Did that sound dreadfully routine? The Mare Phoenicium was 575 miles away from the Coast Guard Cutter Sherman at the time of the call. The chopper, which was forward-deployed aboard the Sherman, pre-staged to Cold Bay (it’s part way out the Aleutian island chain) and once the container ship was within range, left for the vessel and arrived about an hour later. Probably the same chopper also medevaced a crewman suffering from abdominal pain from the bulk carrier Shagangfirst Power and flew him 72 miles to Cold Bay. But choppers aren’t always the solution. The bulk carrier Navios Ulysses had a crewman suffering from abdominal pain and the vessel was out of range of medevac aircraft. The Coast Guard cutter Rush met the Navios Ulysses 713 miles southwest of Kodiak and transferred the patient by small boat. Weather conditions on scene were 30-knot winds and 12-foot seas.
At Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a mariner on the cement-carrying barge St Mary’s Challenge was killed when his arm became caught in a moving conveyor belt and was severed at the shoulder. He was troubleshooting a hydraulic leak and had asked that the engine be turned off and then restarted. A log entry showed that it was restarted before he made the request for a restart.
The Singapore reflagged Morning Cedar, a vehicle carrier carrying packaged timber, became disabled off Tanaga Island, Alaska when the freighter’s rudder became stuck hard to starboard due to a hydraulic leak that the crew was unable to repair. A Coast Guard airplane was ready to deliver an emergency towing system but the vessel was able to maneuver away from the island by using a combination of main propulsion and bow thrusters. Technicians were flown to the ship as it drifted. In Brazil, the iron ore-carrier Vale Beijing, one of the world’s largest vessels, was being loaded at Ponta da Madeira when the hull cracked and the ship started sinking. Six tugs towed it offshore while pumps kept it afloat. The ship, delivered last September, must be fixed while afloat since the port has no unloading facilities and the ship’s engine must not be used.
Gray Fleets
The US Navy will discharge 28 sailors from USS Ronald Reagan for using the marijuana-mimicking synthetic drug Spice. They are in addition to 64 others, also from the Third Fleet, who were recently discharged for illegal drug use.
HMCS Vancouver will remain in the Mediterranean until early 2012, when she will be relieved by HMCS Charlottetown, all so Canada can maintain a presence in the Mediterranean Sea as part of Operation Active Endeavour, the NATO counter-terrorism effort in the region. HMCS Charlottetown will be equipped with a leased ScanEagle, a small reconnaissance drone capable of staying airborne for 20 hours while carrying an infrared camera and a radar system.
Naval forces off Libya apparently didn’t fear attacks by Libyan aircraft because the frigate HMS Westminster carried only four (two salvos) air-defense Seawolf missiles. Or maybe that was because the UK was short of weapons and warships due to the recent deep cuts in defense spending; about the same time it was revealed that the Royal Navy didn’t have a single warship to defend British waters during the month of October.
The US Navy and Marine Corps will buy all of Britain’s decommissioned Harrier jet fighters and will pay $50 million for the spare parts alone. It is not clear whether the 72 aircraft will be flown or cannibalized for additional parts. (Other users of Harrier aircraft are the Italian navy, the Spanish navy, and Thailand, which bought several Harriers for use on its aircraft carrier HTMS Chakri Naruebet.)
Russian naval ships will soon be outfitted with British-made furniture and Russian mariners are reported to be excited about living in the resulting high-quality conditions.
White Fleets
A cruise company terminated all parasailing shore excursions in the Caribbean after an accident in the Virgin Islands killed a 60-year-old female passenger from the Celebrity Eclipse and seriously injured her daughter. Squalls and wind gusts may have been factors in the accident.
Health officials boarded the Veendam after it docked at Rio de Janeiro because 72 of its 1,800 passengers and seven crewmembers had been sickened by a mystery illness during the passage from Valparaiso. Also aboard was a dead woman, who probably did not die because of the mystery illness but of natural causes.
In North Moscow, fire raced rough the river cruise vessel Sergey Abramov. Two passengers went to a hospital and a crewman was missing.
Frequent announcements on the Carnival Inspiration gave passengers a good idea as to the identity of the man who had just jumped overboard, leaving a note behind. His wife had recently died.
Two American women tried to import more than $400,000 worth of cannabis resin into Bermuda. They arrived on the Carnival Fantasy with 2.7 kgs (6 lbs.) of drugs strapped to their bodies.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Two Rottweilers were found dead in their owner's four-wheel drive vehicle in the Spirit of Tasmania's car hold when that ferry arrived at Devonport after an overnight voyage from Melbourne. The ferry line claimed the dogs died of carbon monoxide poisoning and said it had wanted to put them in the ship's kennels but the owner declined and instead signed an indemnity form to allow the dogs to travel in the car. They were to have taken part in a herding competition. (Surprised by that last bit? The rottweiler can trace his roots back to the drover dogs in Germany and still has the instincts to herd animals.)
Early-morning ferry travelers had to wait outside the Swartz Bay ferry terminal in British Columbia while a Mountie shot a 50-kilogram male cougar that had found its way inside. On the UK’s west coast, the Isle of Manx ferry Ben-my-Chree (“girl of my heart”) was berthing at Heysham in Lincolnshire in strong winds when it collided with a link-span. The allision left the vessel with a hole in its hull above the water line and stranded hundreds of passengers. At Picton in New Zealand, a strong northwest gust caused the recently rebuilt Interislander ferry Aratetere to swing away from its berth. That pulled a bollard from the quay. The chunk of metal slammed into the ferry’s bow, causing a sizable dent, and dropped to the bottom of the harbor. Having two mooring lines on the bollard may have overloaded it. In British Columbia, a hard landing at Departure Bay damaged both the Queen of Coquitlam and a wing wall that guides the ferry into the dock but no one was injured.
The Norwegian-flagged vehicular ferry Rauma lost power during a run from Aukra and Hollingsholmen and ran aground on rocks on the wrong side of the pier at Hollingsholmen. The ferry Nordmøre was taken from another run as a substitute ferry but first it pulled the Rauma to a dock. The next day and at the same landing, the vehicular ramp fell down while Nordmøre was unloading. A young couple’s car went into the drink and they were injured. In Finland, the newbuild passenger ro/ro Spirit of France broke its moorings in bad weather at the shipyard in Rauma and came to rest against a rocky breakwater. (The ferry was to have gone into cross-Channel service in September.)
In the Philippines, the Super Ferry 1 ran aground near Ditaytay Island between Coron and Puerto Princesa in Palawan. In Massachusetts at Hyannis, the ro/pax ferry Eagle struck the parked standby ferry Sankaty and suffered a large hole. The Sankaty took its passengers to Nantucket.
Typical of Third World ferry operations, it had room for only one vehicle but it was carrying an auto and a lorry. The engine broke down a few minutes after departure from somewhere in Borneo and then the ferry capsized. The eleven passengers jumped into the river and most swam to safety but search and rescue teams recovered the body of a 14-year-old boy some three kilometers downstream. The body had crocodile bite marks. His mother also drowned.
Legal Matters
Shipping agency Sea Star Line LLC agreed to plead guilty and pay a $14.2 million criminal fine for its role in a conspiracy to fix rates and surcharges for transportation of freight between the continental United States and Puerto Rico from as early as May 2002 until at least April 2008. A federal grand jury also returned an indictment against the former president of Sea Star Line for his role in the conspiracy. Horizon Lines LLC was also sentenced to pay a $15 million criminal fine, and five former executives from both Sea Star Line and Horizon Lines were sentenced to pay a total of nearly $85,000 in criminal fines. They will also collectively serve more than 11 years in prison.
Nature
The bulker Universe Forest was quarantined at Vladivostok after chetyrehpyatnistoy weevils (probably the wheat weevil) were found in grain, rice, beans, barley, and corn flakes in the vessel's food storeroom and pantry. The foodstuffs had originated in China.
Falling levels of water on the Rhine River triggered an extraordinary demand for truck and rail transport of grain. Sadly, these alternative means of transport could not replace the barge shipments. And silt and sand, probably swept down the Missouri River during its recent flooding, blocked the Mississippi near St Louis for several days until hurried dredging allowed re-opening of the River to a pile-up of waiting barges.
The US Navy successfully completed the largest-scale demonstration to date of alternative fuels. Its Self Defense Test Ship (the decommissioned Spruance-class destroyer Paul F. Foster, reconfigured into an unmanned test platform) made a 17-hour, remotely controlled voyage from San Diego to the Naval Surface Warfare Center Port Hueneme using a 50-50 blend of algae-derived, hydro-processed algal oil and a standard petroleum fuel.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Three Russian warships appeared in Syrian waters, probably as a protest against sanctions imposed by the US, sanctions Russia dismissed as “exterritorial” and “unacceptable and violating international law.” A news item added that the warships could “protect strategic and national security interests and prevent war.” There are more than 100,000 Russian citizens in Syria and Russia is obligated to protect these citizens from any sort of military aggression by the United States.
A Kurdish rebel carrying explosives hijacked the Turkish ferry Kartepe and forced it to anchor off the port town of Silivri, west of Istanbul. About twelve hours later, while police conducted lengthy negotiations with the lone hijacker, Turkish commandos in civilian clothes slipped onto the vessel and posed as hostages before fatally shooting the hijacker and freeing 18 passengers plus four crew and two trainees.
An anticipated surge in Somalian piracy attacks failed to materialize, perhaps because the monsoon season lasted longer than usual or perhaps because of increased measures by shipowners and crews, more proactive military tactics, and international initiatives in Somalia. Three naval coalitions have eighteen warships on anti-piracy duties and there are additional warships of navies acting independently. The pirates appear to have far fewer mother ships. There are now just 10 hijacked ships, few of which could be used as pirate mother ships, whereas last January there were as many as 32 potential mother ships.
A Dutch shipowner reflagged his vessels that transit pirate-infested waters after the Dutch justice minister made it clear he has no intention of allowing armed guards on vessels flying the Dutch flag.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
Even US Coast Guard reports can be detail-inconsistent. For example, the Egyptian bulker Edfu briefly lost propulsion as it was crossing the Columbia River bar after leaving Astoria. The ship dropped both of its anchors, then regained propulsion. The Coast Guard ordered the vessel to hire tugboats to escort it on its trip from Astoria to Tacoma for inspection and repairs. A Coast Guard report noted that the bulker was missing both required anchors. Yet, only a month earlier, the Edfu lost power nine miles west of Cape Disappointment and anchored in an effort to keep the vessel from drifting to shore. At that time, the Coast Guard said carrier had only one anchor. In between these two exciting moments, a Coast Guard 47-foot motor lifeboat had transported an injured crewman with a ruptured left eye to Astoria while the Edfu was anchored in the Columbia River (number of anchors used not given.).
Much of the US’s corn and soybeans feed Asian cattle and hogs or are turned into food products. Traditionally, the grain would have been barged at some point but intermodal (truck/train/ship) transfer of grain in cargo containers is increasingly popular. One reason is that a bargeload of grain is 55,000-60,000 bushels but a cargo container holds only 1,000 bushels. Customers are willing to pay a premium (maybe 20 cents per bushel) for the containerized loads that are easier to distribute to end-users. Also containerized are high-protein corn cakes, a byproduct of ethanol production. The wet mash is dried so it will not spoil during transport and the resulting DDG, or dried distillers grain, is then mixed with bean meal and corn and made into cakes that will end up as cattle feed overseas.
The Russian icebreaking tanker Renda will attempt an emergency wintertime fuel delivery to Nome, Alaska, after difficult winter conditions turned back a barge carrying the city's last regularly scheduled fuel delivery. Nome, a city of about 3,600, lacks outside road access and depends on ships and aircraft for supplies, and fuel prices already average about $5.40 for a gallon of gasoline. The tanker has made progress through five feet of ice but the US Coast Guard ‘s polar icebreaker USCGC Healy will help if necessary.
The UK’s Ministry of Defense announced it will shed 11,400 members of the Royal Navy, Army, and Royal Air Force by 2015. The department will also dump 30,000 civilians over the next decade but the first batch must be volunteer retirees – in explanation, the MOD’s permanent secretary suggested that, unlike service personnel, civil servants are harder to sack because they have “flexible skills.”
When 1,330 tons of oil in the grounded tanker Petriana was pumped overside in a futile effort to free the ship, a press report glowingly described "a film of great beauty, radiating all the colours of the rainbow." But that was then – the tanker ran aground at Australia’s Port Phillip Bay in thick fog in 1903.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Other Shores - December 2011
Operating a US-flagged vessel in foreign commerce in 2010 was 2.7 times dearer than operating a foreign-flagged equivalent, and US-flag crewing costs were more than five times as expensive.
Shipping giant AP Moller-Maersk will use more armed guards on tankers passing through the Gulf of Aden but has “no immediate plans” to extend the policy to its container ships.
Anti-piracy efforts increasingly are focusing on tracing the flow of ransom money. There is growing evidence that it is being invested in the economies of surrounding nations (such as financing a real-estate boom in Kenya). But efforts to trace serial numbers of ransom bills have been thwarted at least twice when Danish authorities lost lists of such numbers.
Mozambique is in the process of becoming the world’s last big source of coal, and now the East African country may become a major supplier of natural gas. An Italian company announced that it had discovered a large offshore gas field. The gas is of unusually high quality and an unusually high percentage of it should be recoverable. Shortly after, the company announced that the field is about 50% larger than originally thought.
In the third quarter, South Korean yards received about half of the total global shipbuilding orders. (For figure freaks, that was 2.5-million gross tons for the period from July to September, about 50% of the 4.9m gt of total global orders.)
The People’s Liberation Army’s 584-foot-long (178-meter-long) hospital ship Peace Ark and more than 100 medical volunteers extended China’s “doctor diplomacy” into the Caribbean at Jamaica.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In the Persian Gulf, the oil-service vessel Koosha 1 sank due to a combination of bad weather and overloading. Rescue teams saved sixty people but thirteen divers were trapped in a decompression chamber. Bodies of six were found in the sunken vessel. (Had they tried to escape from the chamber?)
The Finnish fishing vessel Florence collided with the container ship Amazon at night and in dense fog. The crew of the Amazon noticed the collision but regarded the impact as mild, perhaps some flotsam rather than another vessel. The FV sank inside of one minute but an automatic alarm system (an EPIRB?) alerted Finnish and Estonian authorities. Rescuers found the fishermen because they were vigorously blowing the whistles on their lifejackets. In New Zealand’s Queen Charlotte Sound in misty conditions, the 8.5 meter government-owned catamaran workboat Waitohi and an 8.5 metre Herschoff sailboat collided. The sailboat couldn’t sink completely because fittings near the top of its mast caught the catamaran’s safety railing. Because the container ship MSC Nederland ran into the chemical tanker Elka Apollon at the Bayport Ship Channel and Houston Ship Channel intersection near light 75, three containers ended up on the tanker’s deck.
A few miles inshore from where salvors were removing bunker oil from the stranded Rena off Tauranga and figuring out how to remove the remaining containers, the small container ship Schelde Trader lost power and drifted onto rocks despite dropping an anchor. The ship managed to get itself off and was towed further out to sea while experts assessed it for damage before it resumed its voyage to Noumea.
In India at Chicalim in Goa, a worker died and two others were seriously injured when paint solvents exploded on newbuild barge Shantam 3884. The blast was so powerful that the dead man’s body was blown onto the roof of the nearby St Anthony's chapel. Although emergency services were quick to respond, the fire department was late in learning about the incident and arrived an hour after the explosion. Because explosions in compressors used by refrigerated containers have killed at least three maintenance men, hundreds of reefer units have been quarantined. Common to all explosions is that the units were serviced in Vietnam during 2011.
At Diliskelesi (it’s in Turkey), while the Chief Mate was supervising the docking of the chemical tanker Chemstar Yasu, a “maneuvering rope” snapped and hit him. He later died in a local hospital. In Louisiana at Garyville, a worker dismantling a Mississippi River barge was killed when a piece of the deck fell on him. Four Bangladeshi workers died and two others were ill after inhaling toxic gas while dismantling a vessel at a shipbreaking yard in the Chittagong region. All six fell unconscious while working inside a compartment. Their deaths came just days after two other laborers were killed in a similar incident at another local yard, and at a third local scrapping yard, a worker died when he fell from a ship.
Gray Fleets
Sixty-four sailors will be discharged from the US Navy for using or distributing drugs, mostly the designer drug Spice. They were assigned to the nuclear submarine USS San Francisco, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, and a floating dry dock. Spice is a synthetic drug that mimics the effects of marijuana. Six sailors also used cocaine and one was found to have used methamphetamines.
Bad apples have a way of being discovered. The former commanding officer of the destroyer USS Momsen will spend three years in jail after being court-martialed on charges stemming from incidents involving a junior female officer and an enlisted woman. He was charged with (hang on) one count of rape, two counts of aggravated sexual assault, two counts of abusive sexual contact, one count of sodomy, two counts of maltreatment, three counts of conduct unbecoming an officer, and four counts of violating general orders.
After years of controversy over which California city would get it, the US Navy transferred title to the battleship USS Iowa to a Los Angeles group. The Pacific Battleship Center plans to operate the ship as an interactive museum at Berth 87.
The Ghana Armed Forces will use four new patrol boats built in China against the country’s recalcitrant fishermen, who have decided to fight naval personnel over fisheries regulations. (A recent clash was over the seizure of generators used in floodlight fishing.) Secondary duties, of course, will be to ensure the safety of the country’s territorial integrity, provide safe sea passage to legitimate traffic, and combat illegal activities such as drug trafficking, piracy, and pair trawling.
The Iran’s Revolutionary Guards increasingly aggressive navy has 20,000 personnel and a large fleet suitable for waging the sort of asymmetric warfare it favors. It is larger than Iran’s traditional navy with its 18,000 sailors.
The Royal Australian Navy patrol boat HMAS Broome was preparing to berth at the Papua New Guinea town of Alotau when word was received that the container vessel Vega Fynen had lost engine power and was drifting toward a reef. The warship raced 146 nautical miles at best speed to rendezvous with the 13,000-ton vessel and was able to slowly pull the vessel away from immediate danger.
Thanks to night-vision goggles and the keen eyes of a midshipman, the offshore patrol boat HMS Mersey rescued a Dutch yachtsman floating in a partially inflated and unlit life raft a couple of miles from the remains of his burning yacht. He had been sailing alone from Lowestoft to his native Holland
White Fleets
The cruise ship Norwegian Gem rescued five sailors from the sailboat Sanctuary about 256 miles northeast of Bermuda. The Queen Mary 2 experienced a fire in a gas turbine exhaust while ten miles east of Cape North, Nova Scotia in rough weather. No injuries, no pollution. Then passengers reported that the ship twice came to a complete stop for a short period while crossing the Atlantic. At Calvi in Corsica, divers had to cut the Mein Schiff 2’s anchor chain after it became jammed between rocks.
When a young man jumped from the 11th deck of the Celebrity Equinox, he hit a lifeboat’s rigging. He was dead when recovered about half an hour later. While the Maasdam was docked at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, an elderly man was reported missing by his wife. Soon after, a lobster fisherman found a body floating in Northumberland Strait. When the Norwegian Dawn docked at Boston after a cruise to Bermuda, it was carrying the bodies of two recently deceased people. An elderly woman had died of natural causes. The cause of a young man’s death was unknown but it was not considered to be a homicide.
Those That Go Back and Forth
At the Greek port of Piraeus near Athens, unionized seafarers called off an eight-day strike against the government's austerity drive but continued to block some ferry departures. That hampered passenger travel to the Greek islands and left some islands dangerously low on food, fuel, and medical supplies.
The British-flagged ro/pax Hafnia Seaways had a fire on board while en route to Cuxhaven. The fire started in the ship’s sauna and damage was serious enough to require a replacement ferry. Off Albania, the Turkish merchant ship Reina 1 sank in two minutes, taking with it eight sailors, after colliding with the car ferry Ankara. When fire broke out as the Jordanian ferry Pella was some 15 nautical miles from the Jordanian port of Aqaba and headed for the Egyptian port of Nuweiba, 1,230 passengers were told to get into life rafts. One passenger died when he jumped into the sea.
The Algerian-flagged ro/pax Tassili II was forced to return to Oran with more than 2,500/438 (take your pick) passengers and 300/208 (take your pick) vehicles on board due to damage suffered by striking a wharf/rock (take your pick). Passengers refused to get off, demanding to be transported to Marseille, and they spent the night on board before being forced to leave the ship the next morning.
At Hong Kong, three elderly people were seriously hurt and seventy-three others were injured when a high-speed, double-deck catamaran ferry hit a mooring dolphin. The captain explained that he was trying to avoid a light buoy on the portside of the vessel and when he spotted the unlit dolphin on the starboard side, it was too late. The starboard side of the ferry's bow was badly holed, leaving the interior framing exposed, but the vessel took on no water. A helicopter took the most-seriously injured patients to hospitals on Hong Kong Island. In Denmark at Rønne, the Leonora Christina hit one of the two towers that control the vehicle ramp. The ferry suffered a hole that was quickly patched with a steel plate but the tower suffered more. However, the ferry could still carry vehicles but only cars. At Auckland, the Devonport-bound Kea suffered a hole when it somehow backed into the berthed ferry Harbour Cat, punching a hole in that vessel. One person described the contact as “a bit of a crunch.” One minor injury.
After an eyewitness informed police that the Kiel Canal ferry Memel was being operated in an unsafe manner, police found the ferry’s captain under the influence of alcohol and his coffee cup filled with red wine.
Nature
Tsunami debris from Japan's March magnitude 9.0 quake earthquake will reach Hawaii in two years and the West Coast of North America in three years. Based on what has already been encountered by ships at sea, the debris may include floating TV sets, fridges, and other home appliances.
Legal Matters
A US federal judge sentenced a female company administrator to 38 months in prison for her role in selling counterfeit electronic circuits from China and Hong Kong. She conspired with the company's late owner to advertise the circuits as name-brand, trademark-protected integrated circuits and they sold hundreds of thousands of them to the US Navy, defense contractors, and others over a three-year period.
A US defense attorney claimed that the US government is waging a sophisticated sort of piracy in its pursuit of “magic pipe” offenders. He identified the environmental-crimes section of the US Department of Justice as the “mother ship” and noted that, “The average ransom paid by shipowners in Somalia in 2010 was $2 million and their crews spent an average of nine months in detention. Here in the US, the average criminal fine in magic pipe cases is around $2 million and the government requires seafarers to stay behind for nine to 12 months, and sometimes more. What is the difference?” (Since the late-1990s, the US government has probably raised well over $200m through such fines.)
In partial confirmation of the attorney’s claims, read on. The bulker Gaurav Prem was detained at Mobile, Alabama, after the Coast Guard detected a magic pipe infraction. The ship was allowed to leave after the authorities extracted a surety but 16 (repeat – sixteen) crewmembers had to stay behind at the owner’s expense to assist in the investigation. The owner provided lodging, health coverage and a meal allowance of $40 a day to the men, but their passports had to be surrendered.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
“A pirate’s life is not an easy one,” wrote Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, and his statement is still true. Thirty percent of all Somalian pirates never return from attack missions in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Piracy changes continuously. Pirates are maximizing profits by separating crews from hi-jacked vessels, taking them onshore, and holding them for ransom. And in the southern Red Sea, vessels have been coming under attack by groups of up to a dozen skiffs.
In the Indian Ocean 100 miles off the Somali coast, Royal Marines from the frigate HMS Somerset rescued a group of Pakistani fishermen who had been captured when Somali pirates seized their trawler. The pirates were then transferred to a US warship in the area since British policy is to not take prisoners because they might ask for political asylum. In Indonesian waters, Malaysian forces boarded the tanker Nautica Johor Bahru at night after a group of pirates armed with a pistol and machetes had left along with the crew’s cash, mobile phones, and laptops. The nearby presence of three Royal Malaysia warships may have had something to do with the pirates’ decision to flee. Also recovered was a drifting barge that was being towed by the fishing boat Ever Commender when hijacked. Six armed pirates had left the barge, presumably to hijack a more-powerful towing vessel. The FV with seven crewmembers was located aground but safe. And a Malaysian court sentenced six Indonesians to ten years in jail plus caning for trying to rob a merchant ship near Singapore.
Several kidnap-and-ransom insurers want armed guards on vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, and others insurers are offering discounts of up to 35 percent to those shipowners employing private security firms for voyages in high-risk areas. (For an average vessel valued at $20 million, the starting price for a policy is about $35,000 for a seven-day transit of the Gulf of Aden. With armed guards on board, a discount of 35 percent would represent a saving of $12,250.) But several states, including France, Greece, and Japan, prohibit the use of armed guards on board vessels.
Near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, a Philippine patrol ship (reportedly the World War II-vintage BRP Rizal) spotted a Chinese fishing vessel in Philippine waters near Reed Bank, which the Philippines claims is within its waters. The vessel was towing about 35 smaller boats. A problem with the patrol boat’s steering caused it to become entangled with one of the smaller boats. The Chinese vessel then left, abandoning the smaller boats.
Odd Bits
Back in January, the river tanker Waldhof capsized at a critical pinch point on the River Rhine with the loss of two crew. The accident trapped an estimated 300 barges in the Mainz area of Germany and that cost an estimated €55 million ($75.8 million). Operators hurt the most (about €14 million) due to “involuntary waiting” at up to €4,000 per day per vessel in lost income, while shippers, forwarders and brokers suffered costs of around €26 million, mainly due to having to arrange alternative transport via a shift to other modes or a bypass. The accident also prompted calls for more heavy cranes capable of lifting large Rhine barges.
At Portland, Maine, a fire captain and a firefighter got into trouble when they crashed the fireboat City of Portland IV onto rocks, causing $38,000 of underwater damage. The impact sheared off a propeller shaft and damaged a rudder but the boat was able to return to Portland without aid. To make matters worse, there were twelve civilians, including family members, aboard during what was called “a training exercise.” Back in 2009, the same boat ran aground two months after it was put into service, then sustaining $90,000 worth of damage.
The competence and valor displayed by two shipmasters after the recent Japanese earthquake were recognized by their peers at a recent meeting. The master of the high-sided vehicle carrier Morning Cedar opted to steam out of Onahama Harbor as huge tsunami waves lashed his ship and the docks. He cleared the breakwater and took the ship to safety in the open sea. But that option was not available to the master of the bulker Port of Pegasus. He was on the bridge when a loudspeaker blared a warning in Japanese that nobody on board could understand. But the operator of a crane-like unloader plunged deep into number four hold knew and fled as the tsunami approached. With the unloader still in the ship, the master faced a dilemma: if the ship left the pier, the unloader would be pulled down onto the ship but if the ship departed, it risked being wrecked. When the ship was hit by the first 8-metre wave, all but two mooring lines snapped. For the next 18 hours, the master worked the ship’s propulsion and steering to maneuver the ship, often at full power, in a successful fight against repeated waves and extraordinary currents.
The destroyer HMS Edinburgh was docked at Cape Town near the hotel where the US president’s wife was staying. The Sea Dart missile launchers on the destroyer’s foredeck happened to be pointed at the windows of her suite so, according to reports, the American Secret Service made sure that the missile loads were inert drill rounds.
Head-Shaker
A report revealed how the 280-foot high-speed catamaran ferry Condor Vitesse managed to run down the 30-foot whelk fishing boat Les Marquises south of the Channel Island of Jersey last March. (The whelk fishing boat was cut in half and its skipper was killed although two injured deckhands managed to cling to the hull until rescued 25 minutes later by the ferry.) The ferry was zipping along at 36.9 knots when it entered a thick fog bank. Speed was not reduced, nobody was watching two radars that had been showing the FV for several minutes, and nobody turned on the ferry’s fog signal. (It was thought the engines provided a better warning and, besides, the horn disturbed the officers on watch.) Instead, the bridge team raptly listened to the ferry’s master recount how the slinky movements of sexy actress Halle Berry as Catwoman on TV the night before had given him a bad night's sleep. Then the collision.
Shipping giant AP Moller-Maersk will use more armed guards on tankers passing through the Gulf of Aden but has “no immediate plans” to extend the policy to its container ships.
Anti-piracy efforts increasingly are focusing on tracing the flow of ransom money. There is growing evidence that it is being invested in the economies of surrounding nations (such as financing a real-estate boom in Kenya). But efforts to trace serial numbers of ransom bills have been thwarted at least twice when Danish authorities lost lists of such numbers.
Mozambique is in the process of becoming the world’s last big source of coal, and now the East African country may become a major supplier of natural gas. An Italian company announced that it had discovered a large offshore gas field. The gas is of unusually high quality and an unusually high percentage of it should be recoverable. Shortly after, the company announced that the field is about 50% larger than originally thought.
In the third quarter, South Korean yards received about half of the total global shipbuilding orders. (For figure freaks, that was 2.5-million gross tons for the period from July to September, about 50% of the 4.9m gt of total global orders.)
The People’s Liberation Army’s 584-foot-long (178-meter-long) hospital ship Peace Ark and more than 100 medical volunteers extended China’s “doctor diplomacy” into the Caribbean at Jamaica.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In the Persian Gulf, the oil-service vessel Koosha 1 sank due to a combination of bad weather and overloading. Rescue teams saved sixty people but thirteen divers were trapped in a decompression chamber. Bodies of six were found in the sunken vessel. (Had they tried to escape from the chamber?)
The Finnish fishing vessel Florence collided with the container ship Amazon at night and in dense fog. The crew of the Amazon noticed the collision but regarded the impact as mild, perhaps some flotsam rather than another vessel. The FV sank inside of one minute but an automatic alarm system (an EPIRB?) alerted Finnish and Estonian authorities. Rescuers found the fishermen because they were vigorously blowing the whistles on their lifejackets. In New Zealand’s Queen Charlotte Sound in misty conditions, the 8.5 meter government-owned catamaran workboat Waitohi and an 8.5 metre Herschoff sailboat collided. The sailboat couldn’t sink completely because fittings near the top of its mast caught the catamaran’s safety railing. Because the container ship MSC Nederland ran into the chemical tanker Elka Apollon at the Bayport Ship Channel and Houston Ship Channel intersection near light 75, three containers ended up on the tanker’s deck.
A few miles inshore from where salvors were removing bunker oil from the stranded Rena off Tauranga and figuring out how to remove the remaining containers, the small container ship Schelde Trader lost power and drifted onto rocks despite dropping an anchor. The ship managed to get itself off and was towed further out to sea while experts assessed it for damage before it resumed its voyage to Noumea.
In India at Chicalim in Goa, a worker died and two others were seriously injured when paint solvents exploded on newbuild barge Shantam 3884. The blast was so powerful that the dead man’s body was blown onto the roof of the nearby St Anthony's chapel. Although emergency services were quick to respond, the fire department was late in learning about the incident and arrived an hour after the explosion. Because explosions in compressors used by refrigerated containers have killed at least three maintenance men, hundreds of reefer units have been quarantined. Common to all explosions is that the units were serviced in Vietnam during 2011.
At Diliskelesi (it’s in Turkey), while the Chief Mate was supervising the docking of the chemical tanker Chemstar Yasu, a “maneuvering rope” snapped and hit him. He later died in a local hospital. In Louisiana at Garyville, a worker dismantling a Mississippi River barge was killed when a piece of the deck fell on him. Four Bangladeshi workers died and two others were ill after inhaling toxic gas while dismantling a vessel at a shipbreaking yard in the Chittagong region. All six fell unconscious while working inside a compartment. Their deaths came just days after two other laborers were killed in a similar incident at another local yard, and at a third local scrapping yard, a worker died when he fell from a ship.
Gray Fleets
Sixty-four sailors will be discharged from the US Navy for using or distributing drugs, mostly the designer drug Spice. They were assigned to the nuclear submarine USS San Francisco, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, and a floating dry dock. Spice is a synthetic drug that mimics the effects of marijuana. Six sailors also used cocaine and one was found to have used methamphetamines.
Bad apples have a way of being discovered. The former commanding officer of the destroyer USS Momsen will spend three years in jail after being court-martialed on charges stemming from incidents involving a junior female officer and an enlisted woman. He was charged with (hang on) one count of rape, two counts of aggravated sexual assault, two counts of abusive sexual contact, one count of sodomy, two counts of maltreatment, three counts of conduct unbecoming an officer, and four counts of violating general orders.
After years of controversy over which California city would get it, the US Navy transferred title to the battleship USS Iowa to a Los Angeles group. The Pacific Battleship Center plans to operate the ship as an interactive museum at Berth 87.
The Ghana Armed Forces will use four new patrol boats built in China against the country’s recalcitrant fishermen, who have decided to fight naval personnel over fisheries regulations. (A recent clash was over the seizure of generators used in floodlight fishing.) Secondary duties, of course, will be to ensure the safety of the country’s territorial integrity, provide safe sea passage to legitimate traffic, and combat illegal activities such as drug trafficking, piracy, and pair trawling.
The Iran’s Revolutionary Guards increasingly aggressive navy has 20,000 personnel and a large fleet suitable for waging the sort of asymmetric warfare it favors. It is larger than Iran’s traditional navy with its 18,000 sailors.
The Royal Australian Navy patrol boat HMAS Broome was preparing to berth at the Papua New Guinea town of Alotau when word was received that the container vessel Vega Fynen had lost engine power and was drifting toward a reef. The warship raced 146 nautical miles at best speed to rendezvous with the 13,000-ton vessel and was able to slowly pull the vessel away from immediate danger.
Thanks to night-vision goggles and the keen eyes of a midshipman, the offshore patrol boat HMS Mersey rescued a Dutch yachtsman floating in a partially inflated and unlit life raft a couple of miles from the remains of his burning yacht. He had been sailing alone from Lowestoft to his native Holland
White Fleets
The cruise ship Norwegian Gem rescued five sailors from the sailboat Sanctuary about 256 miles northeast of Bermuda. The Queen Mary 2 experienced a fire in a gas turbine exhaust while ten miles east of Cape North, Nova Scotia in rough weather. No injuries, no pollution. Then passengers reported that the ship twice came to a complete stop for a short period while crossing the Atlantic. At Calvi in Corsica, divers had to cut the Mein Schiff 2’s anchor chain after it became jammed between rocks.
When a young man jumped from the 11th deck of the Celebrity Equinox, he hit a lifeboat’s rigging. He was dead when recovered about half an hour later. While the Maasdam was docked at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, an elderly man was reported missing by his wife. Soon after, a lobster fisherman found a body floating in Northumberland Strait. When the Norwegian Dawn docked at Boston after a cruise to Bermuda, it was carrying the bodies of two recently deceased people. An elderly woman had died of natural causes. The cause of a young man’s death was unknown but it was not considered to be a homicide.
Those That Go Back and Forth
At the Greek port of Piraeus near Athens, unionized seafarers called off an eight-day strike against the government's austerity drive but continued to block some ferry departures. That hampered passenger travel to the Greek islands and left some islands dangerously low on food, fuel, and medical supplies.
The British-flagged ro/pax Hafnia Seaways had a fire on board while en route to Cuxhaven. The fire started in the ship’s sauna and damage was serious enough to require a replacement ferry. Off Albania, the Turkish merchant ship Reina 1 sank in two minutes, taking with it eight sailors, after colliding with the car ferry Ankara. When fire broke out as the Jordanian ferry Pella was some 15 nautical miles from the Jordanian port of Aqaba and headed for the Egyptian port of Nuweiba, 1,230 passengers were told to get into life rafts. One passenger died when he jumped into the sea.
The Algerian-flagged ro/pax Tassili II was forced to return to Oran with more than 2,500/438 (take your pick) passengers and 300/208 (take your pick) vehicles on board due to damage suffered by striking a wharf/rock (take your pick). Passengers refused to get off, demanding to be transported to Marseille, and they spent the night on board before being forced to leave the ship the next morning.
At Hong Kong, three elderly people were seriously hurt and seventy-three others were injured when a high-speed, double-deck catamaran ferry hit a mooring dolphin. The captain explained that he was trying to avoid a light buoy on the portside of the vessel and when he spotted the unlit dolphin on the starboard side, it was too late. The starboard side of the ferry's bow was badly holed, leaving the interior framing exposed, but the vessel took on no water. A helicopter took the most-seriously injured patients to hospitals on Hong Kong Island. In Denmark at Rønne, the Leonora Christina hit one of the two towers that control the vehicle ramp. The ferry suffered a hole that was quickly patched with a steel plate but the tower suffered more. However, the ferry could still carry vehicles but only cars. At Auckland, the Devonport-bound Kea suffered a hole when it somehow backed into the berthed ferry Harbour Cat, punching a hole in that vessel. One person described the contact as “a bit of a crunch.” One minor injury.
After an eyewitness informed police that the Kiel Canal ferry Memel was being operated in an unsafe manner, police found the ferry’s captain under the influence of alcohol and his coffee cup filled with red wine.
Nature
Tsunami debris from Japan's March magnitude 9.0 quake earthquake will reach Hawaii in two years and the West Coast of North America in three years. Based on what has already been encountered by ships at sea, the debris may include floating TV sets, fridges, and other home appliances.
Legal Matters
A US federal judge sentenced a female company administrator to 38 months in prison for her role in selling counterfeit electronic circuits from China and Hong Kong. She conspired with the company's late owner to advertise the circuits as name-brand, trademark-protected integrated circuits and they sold hundreds of thousands of them to the US Navy, defense contractors, and others over a three-year period.
A US defense attorney claimed that the US government is waging a sophisticated sort of piracy in its pursuit of “magic pipe” offenders. He identified the environmental-crimes section of the US Department of Justice as the “mother ship” and noted that, “The average ransom paid by shipowners in Somalia in 2010 was $2 million and their crews spent an average of nine months in detention. Here in the US, the average criminal fine in magic pipe cases is around $2 million and the government requires seafarers to stay behind for nine to 12 months, and sometimes more. What is the difference?” (Since the late-1990s, the US government has probably raised well over $200m through such fines.)
In partial confirmation of the attorney’s claims, read on. The bulker Gaurav Prem was detained at Mobile, Alabama, after the Coast Guard detected a magic pipe infraction. The ship was allowed to leave after the authorities extracted a surety but 16 (repeat – sixteen) crewmembers had to stay behind at the owner’s expense to assist in the investigation. The owner provided lodging, health coverage and a meal allowance of $40 a day to the men, but their passports had to be surrendered.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
“A pirate’s life is not an easy one,” wrote Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, and his statement is still true. Thirty percent of all Somalian pirates never return from attack missions in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Piracy changes continuously. Pirates are maximizing profits by separating crews from hi-jacked vessels, taking them onshore, and holding them for ransom. And in the southern Red Sea, vessels have been coming under attack by groups of up to a dozen skiffs.
In the Indian Ocean 100 miles off the Somali coast, Royal Marines from the frigate HMS Somerset rescued a group of Pakistani fishermen who had been captured when Somali pirates seized their trawler. The pirates were then transferred to a US warship in the area since British policy is to not take prisoners because they might ask for political asylum. In Indonesian waters, Malaysian forces boarded the tanker Nautica Johor Bahru at night after a group of pirates armed with a pistol and machetes had left along with the crew’s cash, mobile phones, and laptops. The nearby presence of three Royal Malaysia warships may have had something to do with the pirates’ decision to flee. Also recovered was a drifting barge that was being towed by the fishing boat Ever Commender when hijacked. Six armed pirates had left the barge, presumably to hijack a more-powerful towing vessel. The FV with seven crewmembers was located aground but safe. And a Malaysian court sentenced six Indonesians to ten years in jail plus caning for trying to rob a merchant ship near Singapore.
Several kidnap-and-ransom insurers want armed guards on vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, and others insurers are offering discounts of up to 35 percent to those shipowners employing private security firms for voyages in high-risk areas. (For an average vessel valued at $20 million, the starting price for a policy is about $35,000 for a seven-day transit of the Gulf of Aden. With armed guards on board, a discount of 35 percent would represent a saving of $12,250.) But several states, including France, Greece, and Japan, prohibit the use of armed guards on board vessels.
Near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, a Philippine patrol ship (reportedly the World War II-vintage BRP Rizal) spotted a Chinese fishing vessel in Philippine waters near Reed Bank, which the Philippines claims is within its waters. The vessel was towing about 35 smaller boats. A problem with the patrol boat’s steering caused it to become entangled with one of the smaller boats. The Chinese vessel then left, abandoning the smaller boats.
Odd Bits
Back in January, the river tanker Waldhof capsized at a critical pinch point on the River Rhine with the loss of two crew. The accident trapped an estimated 300 barges in the Mainz area of Germany and that cost an estimated €55 million ($75.8 million). Operators hurt the most (about €14 million) due to “involuntary waiting” at up to €4,000 per day per vessel in lost income, while shippers, forwarders and brokers suffered costs of around €26 million, mainly due to having to arrange alternative transport via a shift to other modes or a bypass. The accident also prompted calls for more heavy cranes capable of lifting large Rhine barges.
At Portland, Maine, a fire captain and a firefighter got into trouble when they crashed the fireboat City of Portland IV onto rocks, causing $38,000 of underwater damage. The impact sheared off a propeller shaft and damaged a rudder but the boat was able to return to Portland without aid. To make matters worse, there were twelve civilians, including family members, aboard during what was called “a training exercise.” Back in 2009, the same boat ran aground two months after it was put into service, then sustaining $90,000 worth of damage.
The competence and valor displayed by two shipmasters after the recent Japanese earthquake were recognized by their peers at a recent meeting. The master of the high-sided vehicle carrier Morning Cedar opted to steam out of Onahama Harbor as huge tsunami waves lashed his ship and the docks. He cleared the breakwater and took the ship to safety in the open sea. But that option was not available to the master of the bulker Port of Pegasus. He was on the bridge when a loudspeaker blared a warning in Japanese that nobody on board could understand. But the operator of a crane-like unloader plunged deep into number four hold knew and fled as the tsunami approached. With the unloader still in the ship, the master faced a dilemma: if the ship left the pier, the unloader would be pulled down onto the ship but if the ship departed, it risked being wrecked. When the ship was hit by the first 8-metre wave, all but two mooring lines snapped. For the next 18 hours, the master worked the ship’s propulsion and steering to maneuver the ship, often at full power, in a successful fight against repeated waves and extraordinary currents.
The destroyer HMS Edinburgh was docked at Cape Town near the hotel where the US president’s wife was staying. The Sea Dart missile launchers on the destroyer’s foredeck happened to be pointed at the windows of her suite so, according to reports, the American Secret Service made sure that the missile loads were inert drill rounds.
Head-Shaker
A report revealed how the 280-foot high-speed catamaran ferry Condor Vitesse managed to run down the 30-foot whelk fishing boat Les Marquises south of the Channel Island of Jersey last March. (The whelk fishing boat was cut in half and its skipper was killed although two injured deckhands managed to cling to the hull until rescued 25 minutes later by the ferry.) The ferry was zipping along at 36.9 knots when it entered a thick fog bank. Speed was not reduced, nobody was watching two radars that had been showing the FV for several minutes, and nobody turned on the ferry’s fog signal. (It was thought the engines provided a better warning and, besides, the horn disturbed the officers on watch.) Instead, the bridge team raptly listened to the ferry’s master recount how the slinky movements of sexy actress Halle Berry as Catwoman on TV the night before had given him a bad night's sleep. Then the collision.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Other Shores - November 2011
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.
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.
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!
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