Other Shores - February 2013

The Mississippi River was at near-record low levels, and when barge owners said their businesses were at risk if the river got much lower, the US Corps of Engineers claimed it would keep the River open. One way was removing rocks in the channel in Southern Illinois that had been exposed by the low water, and contractors were digging and blasting sixteen hours a day. (Barges slipped by in the other eight hours.)

In sharp contrast, high water on the Rhine River stopped barge traffic between petro-hub Rotterdam and Switzerland and heating-oil shipments piled up.

Marine authorities in Papua New Guinea quickly learned that the Japanese reefer Asian Lily had run aground on the southern end of Kwewata Island near Woodlark on Christmas Eve, and that oil from the vessel was coating the island's shoreline, but the governor of Milne Bay province first heard of the accident from villagers several days later. He was not happy about having been ignored.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

The already-unstable Philippine freighter Ocean Legacy sank itself at a pier in Ormoc on Leyte Island when it swung a heavy container over the pier. An unnamed freighter carrying 4,725 tons of sand began to founder in strong winds off the mouth of the Yangtze and asked for help. It sank somewhere between Nantong, Jiangsu Province and Longkou, Shandong Province but its crew of fifteen were saved. The small tanker Rami Dua partially sank in shallow water between Labuan and Sabahh’s western Menumbok and some of its cargo of 200,000 liters of oil leaked into the sea after its crew of seven had been removed.

In the Philippines, the Zamboanga Ferry ran aground while docking at Dumaguete due to strong winds from Tropical Depression Auring. Rescuers waded into the surf, hoping to attach lines so a forklift on the pier could pull the vessel to deeper water. Meanwhile, rescuers got all passengers, mostly students returning to university, safely ashore using lifeboats. In the Maldives at Male, the container ship Augusts Schulte ran aground. It was just a “routine” grounding and the ship was afloat again in three hours.

Drilling for oil in arctic waters off Alaska isn’t easy and Royal Dutch Shell had enough problems last season that Democratic congressmen wanted an investigation. Take what happened to the highly specialized Kulluk off Kodiak Island. It’s a circular drill platform bearing a drill tower. The hull below is cone-shaped, extends down sixty feet, and is made from three-inch steel-The specially built, very large (361 feet), high-powered (22,000 hp plus) icebreaking anchor-handler Aiviq was towing Kulluk to Seattle for winter modifications and maintenance when the towline parted south of Kodiak Island in bad weather. Then all four engines on the Aiviq stopped working (perhaps due to bad fuel) and the weather worsened. To the rescue came the USCGC Alex Haley, once a Navy salvage ship, but its towline parted and the end wrapped itself around the Haley’s port propeller. Off the Haley went for an unwrapping in a calm-water port. A ton of spare parts (probably filters and fuel injectors) was helicoptered to the Aiviq and soon engineers and flown-in technicians got the engines running again. Several other big tugs and supply ships played roles in the next few days and more towlines parted. Royal Dutch Shell finally decided to let Kulluk go aground where it would do minimum environmental damage. It landed on a sand-and-gravel beach from where it was calmly pulled off by the Aiviq a few days later.

The just-emptied, outbound crude-oil tanker Overseas Reymar struck “a glancing blow” to a tower of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The double-hulled tanker was damaged above the waterline and the bridge’s fendering system, made of timbers with steel backing, was also damaged but the bridge remained open to vehicular traffic. In Fiji, the container ship Westerems experienced engine failure while berthing at Suva and hit the container ship Southern Cross. Both suffered slight damage.

Ferries had a particularly bad month, several violently running into things. A New York fast commuter ferry crashed into its Manhattan pier at considerable speed (about 14 knots, the Coast Guard later estimated) and 85 of 326 passengers, many on their feet ready to disembark, were hurt, two seriously. When transfer from astern to forward failed, the rail ferry Conro Trader rammed the crude-oil tanker SVL Pride, damaging both ships. Damage would have been worse except for a cushioning tug between ferry and tanker. All this happened at Kavkaz Port, a small harbor on the Kerch Strait in Krasnodar Krai, Russia that is the eastern (Russian) terminal of the railroad and car ferry line terminating in the Crimea. At Macau, a TurboJet fast ferry cautiously left its pier at slow speed because visibility was only 0.8 miles but it somehow managed to leave the channel and run into the No. 5 marker buoy, still at slow speed. Taken to a hospital were 26 people and two stayed there for some time. In Norway at Bergen, the ro/pax Vesterålen hit the pier hard after an engine failure. No injuries but the passenger flybridge was crushed, there was other damage to the vessel and the pier, and 3,000 liters of oil started leaking somewhere on the pier.

While waiting to berth at Mumbai, the container ship E.R. Perth had a fire in hold No.7. It radioed for shore help but had the fire out before that help arrived. At Tin-Can Port in Lagos, Nigeria, a barge caught fire at a tank farm and then exploded, and that set a storage tank on fire. Much local excitement but no reports of injuries or deaths!

Off the South Korean port city of Ulsan, the 2,600-ton barge Seokjeong-36, carrying a large crane for pouring cement, capsized, reportedly because of bad weather. Seven died and five more were missing.

In Western Australia at Dampier, a worker’s arm was crushed between a barge and the dock. He was airlifted to a Perth hospital. In Scotland at Wick, a worker had a 30-foot fall while unloading wind turbine parts from a ship. Broken bones but nothing critical. The standby safety rescue vessel Vos Sailor was designed to ride out North Sea storms but then a rogue wave bashed the front of the superstructure some 130 miles from Aberdeen. One man, presumably on watch in the flooded wheelhouse, died of injuries, and the remaining eleven crewmen were winched to safety. (The winchman continued to help after breaking a bone in his foot.) The powerless, deserted ship was later towed to Scotland.

In Alaska, a couple were out in the boondocks, a tree fell on a man, his wife lit off a flare for help, it was spotted by the fishing boat Victory, and a Coast Guard chopper soon arrived and plucked him off a beach. In bad weather, the 64-foot sailboat Paradise was somewhere between Cozumel, Mexico and Houston when the younger male onboard decided his stepfather needed to be evacuated. He had a history of heart disease and was slumped over and unresponsive. A Coast Guard helicopter took the man ashore but his wife remained with her son.

Other things happened.  China banned the use of vessels of less than 5,000 dwt between its coastal provinces and territories, Hong Kong, and Macau. During a barge-to-barge transfer of No. 6 heating oil, a tank on one barge started seeping oil into New York’s Kill Van, the waterway between Staten Island and New Jersey that connects to New York Bay and the Hudson River.

Gray Fleets

 “…quiet submarine technology in China and Iran is improving at a noticeable rate… US ASW capability going backward, the submarine capability of US strategic adversaries [is] going forward, and US Navy capability as a whole [is] in decline,” was the dismal summary by a top Navy official. "We are going to be doing less with less in the future." (But the Navy is rushing to improve its anti-mine capabilities and there’re those electromagnetic railguns, laser weapons, and carrier-borne drones coming soon)

The US Navy received much media attention for its campaign against the so-called “bath salts.” They are designer drugs that mimic cocaine, LSD, and methamphetamine. The drugs physically resemble Epsom salts but produce long-lasting hallucinations and drastic changes in behavior, sometimes culminating in suicide.

As had been expected, the commanding officer of the nuclear attack sub USS Montpelier was relieved of his command for letting the sub surface in the path of the oncoming cruiser USS San Jacinto. The Navy said an investigation revealed that the primary cause was human error, poor teamwork by the submarine’s watch team, and the commanding officer’s failure to follow procedures for submarines operating at periscope depth.

A Royal Navy insider described the two UK aircraft carriers being built as “white elephants with dinky toys on top.” He stated that they have less basic capabilities than Argentina’s navy during the Falkland war and noted that their aircraft will lack midair refueling capabilities and so the ships will have to remain close to shore

Shortly after a Chinese pilot landed a Chinese-built jet on China’s first aircraft carrier for the first time, the president of the company that built the jet dropped dead from a heart attack.

The third of Russia’s Borey-class strategic nuclear subs started sea trials. The fourth-generation nuclear-powered missile submarines are intended to replace the aging Delta III and Typhoon-class submarines and will carry up to 16 Bulava missiles with multiple warheads.

White Fleets

New York met Hurricane Sandy; Fiji met Cyclone Evan. Both were damaging. The cruise ships Carnival Spirit and Crystal Symphony changed itineraries to avoid Cyclone Evan but the Fiji-based 140-passenger cruise ship Reef Endeavour took a beating and suffered some damage. It was back in service within eleven days. Other nautical damage included the storm-induced groundings of two anchored ships at Suva, the bulker Starford and the fully loaded container ship Captain Tasman, aka Capitaine Tasman.

Fishnets wound around a propeller shaft damaged shaft seals on the Carnival Splendor and repairs forced a change in the next seven-day cruise. Passengers on that cruise were offered a full refund due to the itinerary change.

The status of QE2, Cunard’s longest-serving liner, was obscure. Reportedly, more than 160 planned events on the ship were cancelled and the QE2 was sold to Chinese or Indian scrappers for £20 million. The famed vessel had been bought by Dubai interests for £64 million for conversion into a luxury hotel at the tip of the man-made Palm Jumeirah Island but along came the credit crunch.... (For the last five years, the QE2 has been maintained in running condition at a cost of £650,000 a month.)

About 300 passengers on the Oriana were afflicted by what was probably the norovirus, with the first passenger reporting to the sickbay within two hours after leaving Southampton. Since the disease has an incubation period of one to two days, at least one sick person had the disease when he/she boarded.

The start of a 109-day round-the-world cruise of the Saga Ruby was delayed to a faulty crankshaft; a defect discovered only hours before departure. Some passengers spent the night on the ship before returning home. Repairs took about a week and there were no cancellations for the world cruise.

Those That Go Back and Forth

In Massachusetts’s Boston harbor, a homeless man boarded a holiday-vacated ferry on Christmas Day and celebrated by setting the empty vessel adrift. They were three piers away when police arrived. In the UK, a pub boss disappeared the same day as £29,000 in Christmas Club cash. He boarded a ferry for France but seems not to have arrived there. Somewhere between Devon and Cornwall, a popular teen-aged lad was seen on CCTV jumping off the Torpoint ferry, which is pulled across the river Tamar on chains. An extensive search failed to find him. On Lake Tanganyika a ferry sank between Tanzania and Burundi due to violent winds with about ninety on board. Eight died and around twenty were missing.

At New Orleans, the lower Chalmette-Algiers ferry turned around in mid-stream and returned after passengers got sick. A “chemical cloud" drifting over the Mississippi River had caused throat and eye irritation. The cloud was probably sulphur dioxide released by a local plant during maintenance. A British mother of two spent the evening drinking with her husband on the Pride of Rotterdam and CCTV showed her staggering about, alone on deck in the wee hours. She was not on board when the ferry arrived at Rotterdam.

Energy

Low speeds to save fuel have created a continuing struggle between the container shipping lines and shippers. Speeds below twenty knots save money for the lines but increase customers’ costs. However, the lower speeds also increase schedule reliability. In any case, express service is unlikely to return any time soon. (An item below explains how a major container shipping company plans to improve its bottom line.)

Demand for crude oil abroad increased as US crude-oil output rose to the highest level since January 1994. (The International Energy Agency recently reported that the US would overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia by 2017 as the world’s biggest producer of liquids.) The gains have been primarily in light, low-sulfur oil from Bakken and Eagle Ford shale formations in North Dakota and southern Texas. (North Dakota output jumped 57 percent last year.) An oil glut in the upper Midwest has producers shipping oil to the East and West Coasts by train. Refiners were also using tankers to ship North American crude to eastern Canadian plants to replace foreign oil and another refiner will ship oil from the Gulf of Mexico to a refinery in Quebec. Driving these moves was the fact that Bakken oil was about $27 a barrel cheaper than North Sea Brent crude, the benchmark for overseas imports.)

The first attempt to ship railcar-carried Bakken Field crude from Albany, New York to a refinery in New Brunswick was aborted when the tanker Stena Primorsk had a steering failure and ran aground just south of Albany. Three tank barges offloaded the oil and the tanker, escorted by two precautionary tugs, limped south for a date with a New York shipyard. The tanker lost its left rudder in the grounding but normally features twin engines, twin propellers, and twin rudders.

The famed Staten Island ferries make 109 trips each workday and burn between 60,000 and 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel in doing so. But that gallonage will lessen after one of the smaller Austen-class ferries is converted this year to use LNG.

An American company will build the world’s largest LNG-powered container ships and put the duo into service to Puerto Rico. The company is also converting existing container ships in its Alaskan service to LNG while they are sailing.

Legal Matters

The US Coast Guard established temporary safety zones so four small vessels (think tugs and the like) could service grain-shipment vessels on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Why? “To ensure that protest activities relating to a labor dispute do not create hazardous navigation conditions for any vessel or other river user in the vicinity of the safety zones.”

The longshoremen’s strike at seventeen Gulf of Mexico and East Coast container ports was averted when parties agreed to keep on talking.

Nature

Unusually thick sea ice on Laizhou Bay in east China's Shandong Province, the worst the area has experienced in three years, stranded a thousand coastal ships, and conditions were expected to grow worse.
 Local aquafarmers were concerned that the thicker ice may lead to heavy losses because  they were unable to penetrate the ice to provide adequate ventilation for sea cucumbers and other aquatic organisms.

Oil and methane gas seeps may contribute as much as 50-70 million tons of atmospheric methane per year, or about 10% of global sources. Capture and use of methane from seeps could mitigate global pollution in two ways: Combusting methane (a potent greenhouse gas 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide on a per molecule basis) converts it to the weaker greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and water, and use of local methane could reduce energy consumption associated with shipping costs and diesel usage by remote villages.

NOAA has been mapping US East Coast deepwater gas leaks between Cape Hatteras, North Carolina and Cape Ann, Massachusetts because "It's important to find and understand such seeps because they have global significance for the transfer of methane carbon from long-term storage in ocean-floor sediments into the ocean and atmosphere.” Approximately 25 distinct seafloor gas seeps were identified based on plumes rising into the water column as high as 1,100 meters (3,600 feet). 

In British Columbia, leaking dishwashing detergent is imperiling the clams he harvests. So claimed a member of the Gitga’at First Nation who voiced concerns about fluids leaking from the sunken ferry Queen of the North.

Metal-Bashing

It’s been five years since a commercial vessel was built on the River Clyde but the world’s first seafaring hybrid ferry was launched there recently. The ro/pax will utilize a hybrid system of diesel engines and lithium ion batteries and it and a sister ferry will operate in Scottish waters.

Bulbous bows reduce fuel requirements by moving the bow wave forward into space not yet occupied by the hull. (That is not the technical explanation but hopefully the reader gets the general idea.) Maersk has found it can reduce fuel bills up to two percent by replacing the bulb with a new bow design. Because retrofits will be both costly and time-consuming, individual business cases will have to be developed for each class of Maersk containership. Bulbous bows are most effective when used in vessels when the waterline length is longer than about 15 meters (49 feet) and the vessel operates most of the time at or near its maximum speed. Maersk’s decision may be because it has been operating its container ships at slower-than-normal speeds due to high fuel costs.)

Odd Bits and Headshakers

In Virginia, a man found what he thought was an old buoy, He trucked it home where he spotted a plaque that identified the “buoy” as a 1917 anti-shipping mine, and it was still ”hot.” Experts blew up the mine in a nearby state park, placing it underground (it was a mine, after all!) for safety.

At Lyttelton, New Zealand, a ferry skipper didn’t hesitate when a line fouled the port propeller. He got the boat back to a pier on one engine and then he stripped to his skivvies and over the side he went, pocketknife in hand and mask on face. Sixty-six waiting Christmas-time passengers applauded as the successful skipper re-donned his uniform over wet undies and invited them aboard.

Two Brits were walking their dogs near the South Pier at Blackpool one night, tossing objects for the dogs to retrieve, Somehow, both men ended up in the water and only one was saved. Also saved was a soccer ball that had been heaved into the sea as an impromptu substitute for a life ring.

Other Shores - January 2013

Retailers on the US East Coast may have less-than-ideal Christmas sales because of difficulties in getting containerized merchandise in stores in time for the holiday season. After Hurricane Sandy, more than 6,000 New York/New Jersey-bound containers were diverted to other ports and many ocean carriers declared force majeure, abrogating their responsibility to deliver containers to the original destination port. Importers had to pick up their boxes at their own cost (although some carriers generously offered to relay containers back to New York/New Jersey at a cost of around $750 per box.) Worse, there was an acute shortage of trailers.

West Coast labor unrest quieted without too many container ships being diverted elsewhere or sitting at anchor but expect labor problems on the Gulf and East Coasts in 2013.

The Panama Canal moved a record 333.7 million Panama Canal tons last fiscal year. (In million Panama Canal tons, full container ships, 119.8; dry bulkers, 83.4; tankers, 51.6)

One expert said gas and oil projects historically deliver 20 to 30 percent less than promised, largely due to a lack of engineering graduates, who shy away from what they see as “a sunset industry.”

For a while, bargain hunters could pick up a secondhand VLCC crude-oil carrier for only $54.5 million.

Will water levels fall so low that parts of the Mississippi River will be closed to barge traffic? The Coast Guard says no; other entities fear yes. As this is being written, the situation is iffy. A National Weather Service hydrologist predicted lower water levels, possibly below nine feet, unless there are heavy rains or snow upstream. An increased flow from the Missouri River, which feeds into the Mississippi, would help but the Corps of Engineers is bound by law to refuse requests to release more water, and that alone may close the Mississippi. Meanwhile, barge drafts are being limited to eight feet (instead of the usual nine feet) with one expert noting that it is not economically sensible to reduce drafts farther, and some future shipments have been cancelled. There is a race to get grain to Gulf ports for overseas shipment, and a year ago, the River was at flood stage!

China confirmed that it is building large amphibious-warfare ships. Said the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, “Some of our analysts believe that once China and Japan start a military confrontation, China will be able to use this type of naval vessel in amphibious battles against Okinawa and the Japanese homeland.” On state-owned TV, an admiral bragged, “With the amphibious assault ships in our hands, our Navy will be capable of delivering power to any nation within the three island chains in the Pacific. (The so-called “island chains” include the US and Australia.)

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

In nasty weather, the coal-carrying Volgo Balt 199 sank while waiting to transit the Bosphorus and a coastal safety boat, part of the subsequent rescue operations, hit rocks and also sank with loss of two of its crew of four. Three from the ship were rescued but another ten died. The car carrier Baltic Ace sank after colliding with the container ship Corvus J. about 25 miles NW of Westkapelle, The Netherlands. Eleven crewmen and 1,415 vehicles went down with the carrier. Passing fairway buoys on the wrong side can put you aground. So learned the bulker Trans Agila in the Kalmar Sound SW of the Kronogrund and north of Sweden‘s Olands Bridge. It suffered hull damage and water ingress but got free. After going south about a mile, it was intentionally grounded to keep it from sinking.

In Germany in thick fog with visibility less than 100 meters, the coaster Telamon collided with the ferry Nordenham on the Weser. One woman was hurt. The Telamon continued on to hit an anchored dredger. Also in Germany and in the same dense fog, the coaster Katharina Siemer collided with the coaster Angon in the North West Anchorage off Brunbuttel. The Angon suffered enough damage to its starboard side that it took on water. (Judging from AIS tracks, Angon was under way at the time of collision while Katharina Siemer was either anchored or drifting.) The small container ship Cecilia allided head-on with the Sluiskil Bridge in Holland and damaged the bascule bridge’s mechanism. In the Bahamas, the container ship MSC Eugenia holed a bunker-oil tank after striking an object in Freeport harbor. The ship was taken offshore while divers set to work to patch the slowly leaking hole. At Vancouver, the bulk carrier Cape Apricot wiped out 100 meters of a causeway at Westshore Terminals, severing the only link with one of the terminal’s two loading berths. The causeway carried a road, a coal-carrying conveyor belt, electricity, water, and other services. Repairs could take months and so Westshore Terminal, North America’s largest coal-exporting facility, will not ship out the anticipated 33 million tons in the coming year. (Coal, particularly metallurgical coal, is British Columbia’s largest export.)

While trying to avoid a fishing boat, the container ship Hanjin Geneva ran aground on a sandbar at the Prince Rupert harbor entrance in British Columbia. Tugs refloated the ship on the next high tide. (In spite of its Asiatic name, the vessel is German-flagged.) 

Off Holland’s coast, the geared bulker Ocean Victory ran over a buoy. Its chain became entangled in the bulker’s propeller, jamming the main engine to a stop and damaging the propeller. Wind was pushing the vessel toward the beach and various rescue craft futilely tried to hold the bulker. Its crew finally managed to drop an anchor and several tugs soon arrived to relieve the bulker of its misery. In a Singapore shipyard, a test on the drill platform Noble Regina Allen went wrong when the jacking mechanism for one of three lifting legs failed and the platform sharply listed to one side. Ninety workers were hurt, some seriously.

In Hartford County, Missouri, a chain broke while removing a four-to-five-ton towboat propeller and it fell, crushing the pelvis of a worker standing several feet away. He died of his injuries. A crewman on the grain-carrying Tecumseh accidentally died while the freighter was docked at Thunder Bay, Ontario and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada decided the circumstances of his death warranted an investigation. (The 29,984 -dwt, US-built ship was formerly the Mexican-flagged Sugar Islander II and carried sugar. Its bridge wings were trimmed back to satisfy St Lawrence Seaway regulations.) In West Virginia at the Robinson Run coal mine, a bulldozer and its operator slid into a slurry pit when an embankment he was constructing collapsed. Rescuers determined that they were 25-30 feet down in the slurry but it was too thick for a rescue diver. A barge was trucked in, sheet pilings were driven around the dozer, and the search began. Five days after the accident, the body of the operator was found inside the cab when divers peeled back the roof of the dozer.

An Alaskan-based Coast Guard chopper medevaced a crewman from the container ship COSCO Long Beach approximately 200 miles south of Kodiak. He was suffering from abdominal pains.

Gray Fleets

Does it pay a nation to acquire the most-advanced warships if not enough qualified operators can be found to man them operationally? That is a question that is plaguing Norway (five advanced frigates of the Fridtjof Nansen class) and Australia (its six Collins-class submarines), Canada, the UK, USA, New Zealand, and other navies. Swapping a crew in and out of ships as they deploy helps solve the problem but it’s hard on the personnel.

On the day the US Navy officially took the aircraft carrier Enterprise out of service after 51 years in the fleet, the Navy announced that its name won’t be long-absent from the fleet. The third Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, CVN-80, will become the ninth ship in the Navy’s history to be named Enterprise.

The US Navy fired the top two administrators (president and provost) of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, for mismanagement and fostering an atmosphere of defying Navy rules and regulations. (The details are juicy but far too long for this column.)

The US Navy's IT network is targeted by 110,000 attacks every hour. That translates to 1,833 attacks per minute or some 96.36 billion attacks every year.

The Coast Guard cutter USCGC Halibut became suspicious of a panga-type small boat off Southern California and sent its RHIB, its blue light flashing, to investigate. The panga maneuvered sharply and struck the approaching RHIB at high speed. One of the RHIB’s two-man crew, the cutter’s executive officer, suffered massive head trauma that caused his death. The panga was stopped by other Coast Guard assets and its crew of two were detained.

After a seaman was critically injured when he got between a berthing (mooring) line and a winch on Landing Ship Tank RSS Endeavour, the Singapore Navy ordered a 48-hour safety time-out (aka “stand-down”) for its frigates, missile corvettes, and landing ships tank.

White Fleets

While heading for the North Cape at the northern tip of Norway, the heating system on the cruise ship Amadea broke down when the temperature in Olso was -18 (Celsius, one presumes) and so the ship headed to Bremerhaven for repairs. Most (95 percent) of the passengers stayed with the ship although cabin temperatures were 9C. For their bravery, they received a refund of 130 percent of their fares and the crew was put off duty for a while.

The former cruise ship Explorer is now the nautical platform for the Semester at Sea program, carrying college students to foreign shores. During a stop at the Island of Dominica, some students went on a snorkeling excursion. The captain of the boat went off to get food and upon his return somehow backed over several students in the water. A female student was dead upon arrival at a hospital.

Due to high winds, the Pacific Princess ran over the harbor-marking buoy while entering the port of Yalta. The damaged buoy sank. The Celebrity Reflection had to skip a stop at Tenerife in the Canary Islands after a mechanical problem slowed the ship. The Costa Pacifica suffered minor damage when it collided with a berthing structure called a "dolphin" at Marseille. A strong gust of wind was blamed and there was a one-day delay in a Mediterranean cruise.

Those That Go Back and Forth

The Washington State ferry Walla Walla went abruptly out of service during routine maintenance in the engineroom. State workers were cleaning a drive motor commutator when something went terribly wrong. The resulting temperatures of over 2,600°F melted brass and steel components of the motor. A spare motor may be installable but otherwise the 1972-built ferry will have to wait for General Electric to build a new motor, and that might take two years. 

But that wasn’t the state ferry system’s only problem. One of its captains slept over on the Whidbey Island ferry Cathlamet at Clinton and was supposed to take out the adjacent sister ferry Kittitas early next morning. He overslept and the Cathlamet sailed on time but had to return to Clinton due to a “personnel issue” (the over-sleeping captain). That put the schedules of both ferries back by about twenty minutes. A ferry spokeswoman said the incident apparently had nothing to do with recent minimum-staffing problems. (In 2011 when union and Washington State Ferry officials couldn’t agree on manning levels for the ferries, they let the Coast Guard decide. It established minimum manning levels and union members started failing to show up for work, each no-show meaning a ferry couldn’t sail. In October, the Coast Guard issued revised guidance that mandated more mariners on nine ferries in four classes, and no-shows have drastically dropped. The company does not yet know how it will pay for the additional mannings. Cuts in sailings may be the answer.)

Luckily, a midwife, an OB/GYN nurse, and two EMTs were on a Bainbridge-to-Seattle ferry when a passenger went into labor. The result, a first for the ferry company, was a girl named Lucy.

The Japanese ferry Ginga, carrying 162 high-school students and teachers on a school trip, ran aground on the shoals off Suo-Oshima town, Yamaguchi Prefecture. The efficient Japanese Coast Guard soon rescued them but the school trip was truncated. In Iceland, a heavy current suddenly drove the ro/pax Herjolfur against the breakwater at Landeyjarhofn. An examination at the pier revealed substantial damage to a screw and the ship proceeded to Westman Islands using only the starboard propeller. Mooring lines snapped due to strong winds and the cruise ferry Baltic Queen smashed into a pier at Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Some superficial damage. In northern Germany, the smallish UK-flagged container ship Kitty C. collided with the canal ferry Swinemunde moored at the Brunsbüttel fishery quay, probably due to human error. The ferry crew saw the collision coming and jumped ashore. The ferry’s pilothouse was bent to one side and numerous pilings will have to be replaced. In the middle of the English Channel, separate fights on the Holland-bound ferry Pride of Rotterdam sent two men with serious injuries to a Dutch hospital. One fight was over a piece of pizza in which one man injured his neck while falling down a flight of stairs. The second fight involved four men and ended with an 18-year-old being stabbed in the neck with a piece of glass.

Near Pingshan village in Anhua County in China, a river vessel capsized, tossing four trucks and eleven people into the stream. Three persons were rescued and the vessel’s owner and “driver” were detained by local police. And. perhaps presaging a long-overdue crackdown on corruption, six local officials were removed from their posts.

Over the Veterans’ Day weekend, a New London, Connecticut ferry company came to the rescue of Long Islanders and New Yorkers plagued by no gas or long gas-station lines after Hurricane Sandy’s visit. It offered free one-way passage across Long Island Sound and even provided directions to local gas stations in and around New London.

Legal Matters

A ship’s agent was asked to supply tidal information for an arriving ship. He scanned the wrong tide table (a corner of a page was folded over, hiding the year). The ship had excessive draft upon arrival and could only unload a few hours each day and had to shift anchorage three times in four days. The agent settled with the owner for the additional costs to the tune of $120,000.

The US Customs and Border Protection seized 35,000 imported rubber ducks in the port of Los Angeles/Long Beach. They contain an excess amount of phthalate, making them potentially harmful to the health and safety of children. 

Nature

Sponges are harmless, aren’t they? Well, the harp sponge (Chondrocladi lyra), found in the depths off California, is carnivorous, using elaborate harp-shaped arrays (they are well-worth Googling) to catch tiny crustaceans and wrapping them in a membrane before digestion starts. And its sexual behavior is interesting too. (Actually, a dozen or more carnivorous sponges have been identified to date, all members of the same family.)

Corals threatened by approaching toxic algae call for help by releasing specific chemicals and its inch-long resident gobie fish respond by immediately attacking the algae. As one report explained it, “The symbiotic relationship between fish and the coral on which they live is the first known example of one species chemically signaling a consumer species to remove competitors. It is similar to the symbiotic relationship between Acacia trees and mutualist ants, in which the ants receive food and shelter while protecting the trees from both competitors and consumers.”

Despite its fearsome name and appearance, the small deep-sea vampire squid is the only non-predatory squid identified to date. In fact, it eats “marine snow,” the tiny particles that drift downward towards the bottom. Its feed falls onto three categories: particles from dead bodies, fecal (poop from small coepods), and snot (debris from animals that use gelatin-like mucus nets to catch prey).

Metal-Bashing

An American shipping company (Totem Ocean Trailer Express) will have two 3,100-TEU container ships built that will be powered by LNG. They will be the first of the kind in the world.

Russia started construction of the second LK-25-class diesel-electric icebreaker, with the “25” standing for its power output of 25 megawatts. The vessels will feature 150-ton cranes for underwater work in the oilfield and pipeline industries. Although touted as “the largest icebreaker in the history of the Russian shipbuilding industry," these icebreakers are far less powerful than planned icebreakers with up to 100 megawatts from double nuclear reactors. [In general, Russia divides its icebreakers into several classes: nuclear-powered, multi-purpose; diesel-powered; icebreakers for non-Arctic conditions (non-Arctic=Baltic Sea?); auxiliary; harbor, and shallow-water.]

Too much tonnage and a weak rupee dampened the enthusiasm of India’s ship-scrappers for new deals.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

A revised South Korean law calls for new ocean-going construction to have built-in citadels where crews can retreat from boarding pirates.

Nigeria, Somalia, and the Far East were, pirate-wise, quiet last month and the major piracy effort was off the coast of Vietnam, where the small Malaysian chemical tanker Zafirah was hi-jacked by up to eleven knife and pistol-wielding pirates. It was later recaptured by Vietnamese marine police with its name changed to MD Feahorse, and a fishing vessel came across its crew of nine, all unhurt, in a liferaft.

A Nigerian pirate described the business of ship hijacking as “highly lucrative” and said that “Nigeria today had some 1,250 trained pirates and 3,000 high-caliber military weapons… There can be no successful vessel hijacking in West Africa, or Africa as a whole, without inputs from Nigerian oil mafias, including top government functionaries.” Helping is that Nigeria’s security forces suffer from under-funding, a lack of hardware, vessels and maintenance, and problems with discipline and corruption. Add to them grudge attacks that stem from personal conflict, envy, disputes over payments and contracts and turf wars between gangs of bunkering thieves.

Odd Bits and Headshakers

Three of Denmark’s formerly state-owned icebreakers, Thorbjoørn, Danbjøorn, and Isbjoørn, have seen so little use in the last sixteen years that they are for sale. (Bjørn is a Nordic male given name or, less often, a surname meaning the animal “bear.”)

In the last dozen years, there have been 410 engineroom fires, with cruise ships having the highest number (90) or about eight a year. Most ships have CO2 fire-extinguishing systems but CO2 is deadly for humans so there is always a race between getting personnel out of machinery spaces before the CO2 system is triggered. A master’s dilemna: save your crew or imperil your passengers by tardy firefighting? (There are firefighting systems, such as water misting, that are safe for people in the fire space.)

The French skipper of the racing yacht Safran was intent on breaking his own record for sailing around the UK and Ireland but he sailed the wrong way in a traffic-separation lane in the English Channel and forced ships to take action to avoid him. He told the French Coastguard he was trying to set a record and would not alter course. A British court later fined him £9,381 plus costs of £4,125.

Other Shores - December 2012

The current global marine insurance market has the capacity for $1.1 to $1.2 billion of coverage but the risk presented by a single large container ship could be larger. A loaded 18,000-TEU box ship could have a total value of maybe $2.3 billion. In contrast, the hull and machinery and insured value of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, currently the biggest marine insurance loss in history, was $500 million.

India’s Supreme Court banned all mining operations and transportation of iron ore, a $4.5 billion-per-year business, in Goa. A report estimated that the exchequer had lost Rs35,000 crore (US$6.3 billion) due to illegal mining in the last 12 years.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

In the Russian Far East, an EPIRB from the bulker Amurskaya started bleeping for help and then the ship sank with its crew. The vessel was undermanned, overloaded with 700 tons of gold ore, and had left port without proper clearances.

In the UK, the master of the reefer Springbok pleaded guilty to three charges (failure to keep a good lookout, failure to ascertain that risk of collision existed, and a failure to keep clear of a vessel being overtaken). Because visibility in the English Channel had improved, he had dismissed the lookout and proceeded at 18-20 knots. He spent the next twenty minutes chatting with a son and brother-in-law when he suddenly saw through the ship’s forward cranes the fast-approaching stern of the small LNG carrier Gas Arctic (7-8 knots), which was desperately altering course to avoid the coming collision. However, they did collide. He was fined £1,500 plus costs of £1,000. In 2003 at Singapore, a small timber carrier named Springbok was T-boned by an LPG carrier named Gas Roman. The collision welded the two ships together and salvors separated them with difficulty and some trepidation. Different ships, different owners, but much similarity in names.

The smallish Wilson Avonmouth gently grounded north of Elsinore. (If that name is vaguely familiar, get out your copy of “Hamlet.”) The vessel traffic service had noted that the coaster was heading for a problem and tried to call the ship on VHF. No answer so the VTS took actions involving a helicopter and the Swedish Coast Guard in hopes of getting the ship to anchor but no luck. The master was intoxicated. The container ship Fremantle Express ran onto rocks and its starboard anchor while entering Puerto Cortes in Honduras. No leaks or structural damage, and the ship was freed the next day by two tugs. In Alaska, the small tugboat Capt Hendren had just finished a summer of dredging for gold when it ran up on some rocks two miles outside of St. Michael, It got off a day or two later. In India, the chemical tanker Pratibha Cauvery was pushed aground at Chennai by Cyclone Nilam and the crew tried to get ashore in a lifeboat. It capsized and eighteen were rescued but four others went missing.

The container ship Deike Rickmers arrived at Cape Town with dense smoke arising from a probable fire in a container. Last summer’s fire on the container ship MSC Flaminia claimed one more life, raising the death toll to three. A Filipino crewmember died in a hospital in Portugal from severe burns sustained during the fire.

Three walkers were 3,000 feet up the munro (any mountain in Scotland with a height over 3,000 feet or 914.4 m) Beinn a’Chroin in the Trossachs when a cloud rolled in and they were lost. Poorly equipped except for a smartphone and whistle, they asked for help. A Royal Navy helicopter was diverted from a training flight but decided it didn’t want to operate in thick cloud. A crewman hiked up the munro and found the stranded walkers about 15 minutes later, uninjured, but cold. Visibility topside was about 40 meters and the whistle provided useful vectoring information for the chopper crewman. On the other side of the world, Typhoon Son Tinh separated the jack-up drill rig GSF Key Hawaii from its tugboat. As the rig approached the shore of Ha Mai Island, a Vietnamese military chopper evacuated all 35 workers on board. In the dark of night, a helicopter from the USS McCampbell spotted five Filipino fishermen standing on the roof of their sinking boat because one of them was repeatedly flashing a lighter. The destroyer took them to Manila.

An argument on the tug Nicole at Manila turned ugly and the quartermaster hacked the chief engineer to death with a bolo. At Tampa, the geared bulker Honesty Ocean was unloading bundles of 4-inch pipes with a ship’s crane when a bundle broke apart, showering pipes into the hold, on the ship’s deck, and onto the pier. Four stevedores were trapped under the pipes in the hold. One died and another was seriously injured. In Alaska near Skagway, a fisherman fell off the fishing boat Darlin’ Michelle. Shipmates tossed him a life ring and tried several times to pull him aboard but his lifejacket broke and so he died. A mechanic was killed while performing maintenance on a crane at Oakland, California. He was about 250 feet up when the trolley moved and he was crushed between a cable and the body of the crane. About 90 miles SE of Cape Hatteras and pretty much in the path of Hurricane Sandy, the made-for-a-movie replica square-rigger HMS Bounty ran into trouble and sank. Fourteen made it into liferafts but two missed a raft when the Bounty rolled. One was later located, survival-suited but comatose and unresponsive. She was Claudene Christian, a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, the original Bounty’s chief mutineer. Still missing was Capt Robin Waldridge, a vastly experienced skipper of replica ships like the Bounty. The master of the Saudi Arabia-flagged tug Resolve Guardian died, probably of a heart attack, while the tug was en route from India to a Pakistani port. A South Korean Coast Guard small boat capsized while rescuing 15 of the Malaysian freighter Shinline’s crew and five of the just-rescued died. On the LPG carrier Maharshi Krishnatreya, five died when they accidentally inhaled gas from a leaking pipe.'

At Loch Lomond, an unconfirmed report stated that more than 100 vessels had been stolen after dark, taken out to an island and stripped that night, and then sunk. One of the custodians of the Mersey Heritage Trust’s Baltic trader tall ship Zebu attempted to mount his bike on a pontoon (float) alongside the dock wall. But he lost his balance and fell head first into the narrow gap between the pontoon and quay and became trapped under it. The Zebu’s safety officer immediately jumped in and pulled him out. He was rushed to Liverpool Royal Infirmary where he was admitted to intensive care suffering from secondary drowning. He recovered sufficiently to come out of intensive care but his condition then deteriorated and he died.

Gray Fleets

Off Florida, the submarine USS Montpelier rose to periscope depth in the path of the cruiser USS San Jacinto. Their meeting crushed the cruiser’s sonar dome.

The USS John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group had barely arrived in the Middle East when its commander, a rear admiral, was temporarily reassigned because of an "inappropriate leadership judgment" during the deployment. The CO of the Navy’s Southwest Regional Maintenance Center was relieved of command for mismanagement and misuse of funds. And the commanding officer of the frigate USS Vandergrift took photos during a three-day “happy” visit with the ever-convivial Russians at Vladivostok and posted them on the 7^th Fleet’s own Facebook page. He was promptly relieved of command for “demonstrating poor leadership and failure to ensure the proper conduct of his wardroom officers.” Three of his senior officers were relieved of duty “for personal conduct involving use of alcohol and not adhering to established liberty policies."

The commanding officer of the landing ship dock USS Harpers Ferry was hospitalized after a motorcycle accident while commuting home from work. His executive officer took over. At Mayport, Florida, a Royal Navy officer died after falling off a hoisted-out landing craft on HMS Ocean and landing on another landing craft below.

To raise £5,000 for the British Limbless Ex-Service Men's Association a Royal Navy diver ran the Great South Run while wearing 200 pounds of antique diving gear. He figured he could run a mile in an hour and a half so race organizers allowed him to run the ten miles over three days and start two days before the race itself. (For those who really must know, yes, he wore a catheter.)

White Fleets

The ex-master of the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia sued his ex-employer for wrongful termination of his job. In Western Australian waters, a helicopter from the frigate HMAS Toowomba was training off Fremantle when it was diverted to pick up an elderly man off the Sea Princess. He was suffering from acute stomach pains. Serious damage was discovered on the Ventura, 116,017 gross tons and built in 2007, after it hit bad weather in the Bay of Biscay. A crack at least two inches wide ran across the full width of an upper deck. (The cruise ship and its passengers made it safely to Southampton.)

Off Cape Town, an un-named catamaran capsized near Hout Bay and a crewman went missing. Passengers said he had given his lifejacket to a youngster. His body was found the next day. The boat was carrying 38 people to Duiker Island, a popular destination for seal spotting. A mock cannon exploded on a mock pirate ship carrying 26 tourists near the island of Kos in the south Aegean Sea. The explosion killed the master and injured five tourists, none seriously. A relative of the dead master got the ship back to port. In Vietnam’s scenic Ha Long Bay, five tourists died when their boat collided with another and capsized. None were wearing lifejackets and there was no safety or medical equipment on board. After a similar accident killed five tourists last year, safety standards for tour boats were implemented but their enforcement seems to have been haphazard if at all.

Those That Go Back and Forth

Gusts of wind caused the ro/ro ferry Napoleon Bonaparte to break its moorings at Marseille and it ended up aground and leaning heavily on a dock. That ripped an underwater breach in the hull about 30 meters long. The ferry was out of service for the winter. A female deckhand on the Alaska Marine Highway’s Columbia was injured at Fairhaven, Washington when a cable supporting a passenger ramp snapped and it buckled and collapsed. She fell about 20 feet onto the ramp and suffered multiple injuries. Due to bad weather conditions, the ro/pax Pride of Burgundy collided with the similar ferry Berlioz off Calais. The PoB had damage to its starboard bridge wing. On Lake Erie, the small ro/ro ferry Jimann got stuck on a sandbar only two hundred meters from its terminus at Leamington, Ontario. Thirty-three crew and passengers, including an infant, spent the night on board and the next day a tugboat pulled it free. Many on Pelee Island breathed a sigh of relief because the ferry was due to bring over six hundred hunters for the Island’s annual pheasant shoot. The Washington State ferries have minimum staffing and, if a crewman doesn’t show up for work, the ferry doesn’t sail. There were dozens of such cancellations this summer (up from four last year) and company officials are talking with unions whether union members might be unhappy (as in “work slowdown”).

In the Egyptian province of Beheira, a minibus rolled off a ferry into the Nile and fourteen workers died. In the US or perhaps Canada, another minivan knocked down a raised ramp and rolled off Horne’s ferry while it crossed the St Lawrence River between Cape Vincent in Jefferson County, New York and Wolfe Island, Ontario. The three occupants standing nearby weren’t hurt but ferry’s master/owner Horne was hospitalized for a possible heart attack. And the next day the company’s website announced, “We must close early this year due to low water levels.”

Energy

A 13.8-megawatt solar power plant has been operating at the US Navy’s China Lake research center in the Mojave Desert since January. It will save the Navy about $13 million a year because the maker of the solar units got to install its units if it sold electricity to the Navy at below the current rates.

The US Navy signed an agreement with a privately owned company for the development of advanced biofuels and bioenergy for use throughout the US military. The company will build a sustainable bio-refinery at US Naval Base Ventura County that will produce biofuels and bioenergy at prices competitive with unsubsidized conventional fuel and power. Construction of the plant will be partially funded by the California Energy Commission.

Nature

An Australian-Bahraini team of coral-reef rebuilders has been using realistic molded-concrete replicas of coral heads but may switch to more-complex heads printed by a 3-D printer.

Scientists are working on ways to “see” through the icy crust on an ocean to explore what is underneath. A major problem is the sea is on Europa, a moon of Jupiter some 390 million miles from Earth.

Metal-Bashing and Salvage

Three laborers died when steel plates fell on them from a ship’s deck at the Gadani scrapping yard on the Balochistan coast in Pakistan. In India, Asia's largest ship breaking yard, Alang, was closed as a protest against the arrest of company officials in connection with death of six laborers in a blast on a oil tanker being dismantled. Those arrested were booked for culpable homicide not amounting to murder and negligent conduct with respect to fire rather than the more-usual charge of negligence, and they could get life imprisonment.

To eliminate pollution sources Russia may hire international salvage companies to raise two old nuclear submarines. While being towed to a dismantling site, B-159 (originally K-159), a November-class submarine, sank in the Barents Sea in 2003 with nine of her crew and 1,760 lbs. (800 kg) of spent nuclear fuel. K-27 was an experimental attack submarine built in 1962 and decommissioned in 1979 due to her troublesome nuclear reactors. Nine of her crew died when fuel elements failed. Her reactor compartment was sealed and the submarine was scuttled in the eastern Kara Sea in 1982.

The sunken ro/ro ferry Bahuga Jaya may remain at the bottom of Sunda Strait at a depth of 76 meters and with strong underwater currents along with what is now believed to be the bodies of 43 passengers. Rescue authorities said it would be “inefficient” to raise it to the surface. (A salvor might have a different opinion.)

“Bottom suction” is often a limiting factor when refloating a grounded vessel. At Valencia, the grounded bulker Celia broke bottom suction by using its cranes to swing two heavy containers from one side to the other while the tug Punta Mayor pulled. Everything worked and all that remained were a damage assessment and an investigation into why the ship had gone aground almost a month earlier.

Human Imports

As many as 130 people may have drowned off the coast of southern Bangladesh after a boat carrying passengers trying to illegally get into Malaysia sank in the Bay of Bengal. Only six survivors were found. At least 61 people died when a boat believed to be carrying illegal Syrians and Palestinians migrants sank off the coast of Turkey. A boat carrying as many as 100 Tunisian migrants ran into trouble in the Mediterranean and at least 56 people were rescued, some from the sea and others from the small and uninhabited Sicilian island of Lampione

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

West Africa was the month’s piracy hot spot. Seven non-Nigerian mariners were kidnapped from the anchor-handler Bourbon Liberty 249 off Nigeria while another nine crewmen, reportedly all Nigerians, were left on board. The vessel was soon located at Bonny Island and the captives were released two weeks later, probably after ransoms were paid. The comment was made that “this attack was a ‘departure against the usual pattern of piracy’ in the Gulf of Guinea.”

The Aframax tanker Orfeas quietly left the anchorage at Abidjan, probably hijacked and heading for Lagos, Nigeria. About three days later, the tanker was released minus a goodly part of its cargo of 32,068 tons of gasoline.

Odd Bits and Headshakers

The US Coast Guard conducted an extensive search off Mobile, Alabama for a Filipino sailor from the containership MSC Tokyo. He had been told to recover the Jacob’s ladder after the pilot arrived. The ladder was down and a shoe was on the deck so it was believed he fell overboard. Four days later, he was found in a downtown Mobile hotel.

The Statute of Liberty will soon have a rival. In 2014, a giant Ferris wheel will open near the Staten Island ferry terminal. The wheel will be 625 feet high while London’s famed London Eye wheel is only 443 feet tall. (I once asked a carnie operator why they bothered erecting a Ferris wheel when few rode on it. He said attendance was always way down unless the Ferris wheel showed above the trees.)

Actor Sir Alec Guinness said, “I gave my best performances during the war trying to be an officer and a gentleman.” (He was commanding officer of a landing craft or two during World War II with several combat landings to his credit.)

In the UK, the Strood is an ancient causeway (originally built by the Saxons in about 680 AD) that connects the Essex mainland with Mersea Island, about a half-mile offshore. The causeway (now paved) is low-lying and is regularly inundated by high tide. Most locals carry a tide table to avoid being embarrassed or inconvenienced but one elderly woman forgot that detail and was stranded. She got out of her car and was swept away. A nearby recovery truck was called and rescued her but within half an hour there were seven more vehicles trapped on the flooded road. Nine forgetful adults and a toddler were rescued.

At San Rafael in California, a backhoe excavator on a barge was cleaning silt from a canal when the crew spotted a nearby apartment on fire. Moving in, the operator tried to dump dredge buckets of water on the fire but was too far away. He then dredged his way closer. The fire was effectively knocked down when local firefighters arrived.

A Senatorial candidate in Connecticut ran a television ad promoting his efforts to create jobs at the state's sub-maker, General Dynamics' Electric Boat of Groton. Inadvertently, it featured a Norwegian submarine.

Was the homophone accidental or not? A marine technology magazine creatively used the English language when it printed that one company had “developed a way to take fish awful and make a world-class fertilizer.”