Other Shores - October 2010

Photos in daily shipping news publications show many container ships filled to capacity. But sometimes, a fully loaded ship is high out of the water. Is this due to a low level of bunkers at the end of a long voyage or are many of the containers empties? One wonders.

Due to the world’s economic situation and declining sea trade, orders for new ships declined last year but ship deliveries grew to 75.7 million gross tons compared to 64.2 million gross tons on 2008.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
At Constanza, the container ship Medy loaded scrap (in containers?) and sailed for Turkey. Shortly afterwards, it called for help and a Romanian rescue vessel took the crew of 17 off the badly listing vessel. Soon afterward, the Medy sank. Off Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan, the dredger Anabar ran onto rocks while outside a port and one of a crew of twenty went missing. In Russia’s Laptev Sea in the Arctic region, the tugboat Alexel Kulakovsky sank and a nearby tanker could find only the captain and two sailors. A prolonged search failed to find any bodies but did spot an empty liferaft. Off the west coast of South Korea, the South Korean cargo ship Ocean Ace No. 6 ran down an anonymous Chinese fishing boat and all its crew died.

In China in an area east of Changbai, the product tanker Jin He ran aground near the harbor entrance. The next high tide straightened up the listing vessel and local tugs managed to free it. At Kavaratti Island in Lakshadweep, the cement-carrying freighter Nand Aparajita ended up perched on a coral reef. The reef is among the finest in India. In American Samoa, the tourist submarine Atlantis V went aground in Apra Harbor. No tourists were on board and a tug freed the sub later that day. The fishing boat-refueling tanker Hai Soon 5 ran aground on the western reef off Bipi Island, Manus Province, and Papua New Guinea officials said it was fully loaded. The combined chemical and oil tanker Clipper Tobago ran aground off Guatemala. The ship was on passa ge from Houston to Santo Tomas di Castilla with a cargo of tallow and catering greases. (Extensive research failed to find a definition for the last but it may be the greases that accumulate in restaurant grease traps or used deep-fat frying oils.)

The in-ballast Belgian VLCC Flandre collided with the far-smaller coastal bulker Hua Chi 8 off the coast of China’s Zhejiang province, and the big one won. Six mariners died. Somewhere above the Russian landmass in difficult ice conditions and poor visibility, the Russian tankers Indiga and Varzuga collided in that nation’s North East Passage. Some hull damage resulted but no spill of its cargo (diesel oil) or bunkers. Both vessels resumed steaming for Chukota in the Far East.

Ghanaian authorities ordered that the product tanker Seven Seas be beached after it collided with a Cambodian cargo ship. Locals decided to vandalize the ship and about 200 were present while fuel was being siphoned off. Four were killed and another 70 injured when there was an explosion. Explosion and fire on the Vermillion Oil Platform No. 380 some 90 miles south of the Louisiana coast forced 13 workers into the water. Twelve of the well-trained men were spotted in life preservers and clipped together for maximum visibility for searchers. They were supporting a thirteenth man without a preserver. The platform only produces gas and oil and there was no spill.

The chief engineer of the bulk carrier Almeda died from drinking industrial alcohol while the ship was sailing to the Red Sea’s Port Sudan. An explosion at an east China shipyard killed five and left one worker missing.

A sick 3-year-old boy was airlifted from the ferry Stena Europe while it was 13 miles from Stumble Head on the west coast of Wales. Not far away, a lifeboat was taking a sick seaman to a hospital from the merchant vessel Marida Melissa. The lifeboat was used because the local RAF rescue helicopter was busy transporting the little boy.

Gray Fleets
The nearly new destroyer HMS Daring suffered a long dent when its escorting tug Svitzer Sussex lost power and steering control and they collided. The tug, protected by much rubber fendering, was unharmed.

The Royal Navy will scrap the icebreaker HMS Endurance and replace it with a leased or purchased Norwegian icebreaker, and it may receive the same name. The Endurance nearly sank when someone improperly opened an engineroom valve during maintenance while the ship was off the coast of Chile and that caused £30 million of damages. The icebreaker is a key contributor to Royal Navy presence in the South Atlantic.
The Canadian Navy may pare down the number of ships or reduce the capability of its Arctic/Offshore Patrol Ship program due to strict budget constraints on the CAD3.1 billion (USD2.9 billion) program. Measures included reducing the caliber of the main gun from 76 mm or 57 mm to 25 mm, using less-powerful engines, and only building six hulls instead of the "six to eight" specified previously.

The president of Ghana wanted “big” ships for that nation’s navy so he bought two elderly East German fast patrol craft that had been built in the late Seventies and retired in 2005. He paid a staggering $38 million, $23 million for the boats and another $15 million for refurbishment. (Tunisia purchased six of the better boats, two were sold to private parties, and the last two will be scrapped.)

In recent months, British subs have had frequent encounters with Russian attack subs and there seems to be only one reasonable answer to the sudden popularity of the Brit subs. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian Navy has put submarines on patrol so infrequently that officials must have suddenly realized that its library of vessel and other marine sounds is obsolete and needed refreshing. One may surmise that submarines of other nations are also being dogged, but the Yanks, French, and Chinese aren’t talking.

A New Jersey salvage company will recover the remains of USS Scorpion, Commodore Joshua Barney’s flagship of a small fleet of shallow-draft warships in the War of 1812. At the abortive Battle of Bladensburg , his ships and marines were far more effective than the US land forces in attempting to slow British forces advancing on Washington, DC. In the end, Barney was forced to scuttle his flotilla way up the Patuxent River at Pig Point and surrender. He was promptly paroled by the British commander, who had recognized his dogged gallantry.

The executive officer of the Indian Navy submarine INS Shankush lost his life about 60 miles off Mumbia when a wave swept him off the sub’s deck while he and five others were trying to rescue a maintenance worker who had fallen into the sea.

White Fleets
In Canada’s far north some 55 miles from Kugluktuk (aka Coppermine), the cruise ship Clipper Adventure ended up on some rocks and the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen was sent to take off the 110 passengers and 69 crewmembers.

The Explorer of the Seas (3,100 passengers) and the smaller Independence (100 passengers) sought refuge from Hurricane Earl at Portland, Maine. Passengers on the first vessel reported it had steamed for Portland at its top cruising speed of 23 knots and it had been too windy to stand on deck. (The hurricane’s impact on Portland was minimal but offshore waves were reported to be 15 -25 feet.)

In Russia, the river cruise vessel Viking Kirov hit a barge while on a cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. None of the nearly 300 passengers on the American-operated vessel were hurt and alcohol was mentioned as a possible contributor to the excitement.

A 72 year-old woman with head injuries was heli-lifted off the Island Princess 63 miles from Yakutat in Alaska.

Some junior crewmembers of some cruise ships are into child porn. Convicted in May was an assistant waiter on the Costa Atlantica and an assistant room steward on the Carnival Glory was recently arrested at Halifax.

Sixteen Brits are suing a cruise company because the Alexy Maryshev was too close to a glacier when it calved in 2007. Most of the 48 passengers were on the foredeck to get good close-up photos of the glacier and many were hurt, some seriously, by falling chunks of ice and violent wave motions induced by the calving. The cruise ship was originally an ice-strengthened research vessel.

They That Go Back and Forth
The operator of a Le Havre-Portsmouth ferry line substituted the ferry Cote d’Albatre on that route after the high-speed catamaran ro/ro Norman Arrow struck a mooring buoy at Le Havre and holed itself below the waterline
Five people were injured at Mayne Island when the British Columbia ferry Queen of Nanaimo made a very hard landing even though an anchor had been dropped. One passenger was airlifted to a hospital.

The State of North Carolina hired a retired Coast Guardsman to head up its ferry division. Within two months he reported nepotism, payroll padding, and out-of-control spending and he was promptly fired for not being a team player. But his reports triggered investigations that showed he was right – among other things, a list of ferry employees showed many repeats of the same surnames.

In central Manitoba on the Bloodvein River, a probably intoxicated young man threatened to jump into the river so the ferry returned to the dock. There, two Mounties attempted to speak to the youth. He backed away, then jumped off the ferry. One Mountie felt he had to jump in to save the teenager, who appeared to be sinking. In full accordance with ancient traditions of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mountie got his man!

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a river ferry caught fire while on the Kasai River, a tributary of the Congo River. Only fifteen people made it to shore and some 200 others died. Meanwhile in the same country, a fishing vessel capsized and 24 (according to the government) or 60 (reports from locals) people died.

Legal Matters
Usually the US government wins when it comes to prosecutions involving oily water separators, ”magic pipes,” and erring logbooks but a jury recently acquitted the chief engineer of the tanker Georgios M of five such charges. Earlier, his employer had paid a $1.3 million fine and cooperated with the prosecutors in their assault on the chief. Now he’s suing his employer and the tanker for $22.8 million for their complicity in his 28-month incarceration in Texas. However, the US government won in the case against the chief engineer of the bulker New Fortune for a “magic pipe” violation. His punishment was surprisingly mild: he got three years of probation, a $5,000 fine, and a $100 special assessment for failing to maintain an oil record book. The Greek owners paid a $750,000 fine and a community service payment of $100,000.

The Ukrainian master of the Dutch coaster Flinterforest was drunk (at least twice the legal limit) when he ran his ship aground in the Orestund strait that separates Sweden and Denmark. A Malmo court let him off with a sentence of the 17 days of time he had already served but his career was probably finished. And in Wellington, New Zealand, a cargo ship failed to sail because its master was too drunk. The harbormaster described him as, “I understand he was conscious but not feeling well.” The owners flew a new skipper from Japan. Authorities would not release the ship’s name but a news account at its next port revealed that it was the Tasman Pathfinder.

Waterfront workers in the US must possess a TWIC (Transportation Worker Identification Credential) card and pay for it themselves ($132.50 each and good for only five years) but not everyone is happy with the little marvel that carries so much identity information on a chip. For example, Houston longshoremen carry their cards in their hip pockets, where the cards get bent and the chips inside become broken. (The card is supposed to be carried on a lanyard around the neck but many think this practice is hazardous). And airport security workers have refused to accept a TWIC as evidence of a mariner’s identity although the card is government-issued and is on the Homeland Security’s list of approved IDs.

A Korean shipping company was fined $852,000 for carrying more than 1,400 tons of toxic waste from Europe to Brazil in 89 containers. Their contents were supposed to be clean plastic for recycling but included soiled diapers and other nasties.

Imports
Justice can be slow and perhaps not very just. Three years after their arrest, two Ukrainian officers were sentenced in Venezuela to nine years in jail for cocaine smuggling. Divers had found 128 kg of the white powder clamped to the hull of their ship, the bulker B Atlantic.

Packaged cocaine must have a distinctive smell because the crew of a Columbia Navy patrol boat reported it smelled 12 tons ($240 million worth) of cocaine in the hull of a 50-foot semi-submersible smuggler two miles away and gave chase.

Royal Navy destroyer HMS Gloucester vs. the 36-foot sailboat Tortuga in mid-Atlantic – no contest! The American-registered Tortuga was taken to Cape Verde where inspectors found £4 million worth of cocaine packets built into its hollow rudder. The destroyer had been en route to its station in the Falkland Islands when it was asked to accept a Cape Verdean law enforcement team.

Nature
The Danish Navy stopped the Greenpeace vessel Esperanza on its way to an Arctic oilrig off the island of Disko near Greenland. Greenpeace’s plan was to protest drilling in 500 meters as too dangerous to the environment.

Five Inuit villages in Canada near Greenland got an injunction that stopped a German icebreaker from conducting seismic tests that could be possibly dangerous to the environment in an area that abounds in wildlife and, possibly, gas, oil, and minerals

LNG seems to be the fuel of the future and a Swedish shipowner is one of the first to use LNG in its ships. The company is converting its 25,000-dwt tanker Bit Viking from heavy oil fuel to LNG. One reason for the conversion may be that the twin-engined vessel normally operates in Norwegian waters where NOx is taxed.

The Richter scale 7.1 earthquake that ravaged Christchurch, New Zealand moved parts of that country up to 11 feet closer to Australia. It is not clear whether airfares between the two nations will be reduced.

In Australia, the Brisbane River is full of bull sharks. Those found up-river are normally less than 1.5 meters long but when the water warms up in summer, they leap out of the water and spin around. Although bull sharks don’t target humans, they have been known to grab one here and there, and Brisbane-local sharks did bite the hand and finger of a boy, attack a racehorse being exercised in the water, and snap up a Chihuahua.

Metal Bashing
Vietnamese officials arrested another four executives of that nation’s fast-growing, state-owned shipbuilding industry. Two of them had made major purchases when the state had already expressed its disapproval. The other two had intentionally violated regulations, thus causing grievous losses.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Piracy charges against six Somali pirates were dismissed because a 1819 US law said piracy was maritime robbery and the suspects hadn’t been caught while actually committing a robbery. (They had only approached and shot at a US warship.) Congress was asked to pass a more-suitable law defining piracy for the contemporary scene.

Conditions were just right and appropriate forces (the amphibious transport dock USS Dubuque and the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton) were present so 24 battle-experienced US Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit on the Dubuque boarded the German-owned but Somali pirate-controlled bulker Magellan Star and took over. Nine pirates were captured and none of the crew or Marines were injured.


Odd Bits and Head Shakers
The 1864-built square-rigger City of Adelaide, the world’s oldest clipper ship, made some 23 emigrant-carrying round trips between the UK and Adelaide but, in recent years, its hull has been parked at Irvine in Scotland. Four options for its future were identified, with the leader being what authorities called “an archaeological deconstruction” (aka demolition). Option four was to transfer the hull to an Australian entity and, luckily, the City of Adelaide Preservation Trust wanted possession of the old vessel. Now there is the problem of how to get the relic to Australia in time for the celebration in 2011 of South Australia’s 175th anniversary of the State. (For those interested in genealogical data, about a quarter million Ozzies owe their existence to ancestors who emigrated in the old ship.)

Billionaires must find it hard to spend all their wealth. One arrived at Sydney aboard his Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran largely made from recycled plastic beverage bottles held together by an organic glue made from cashew nuts and sugar cane. The 12,860-km voyage from San Francisco took 128 days and he was seasick most of the time. But an onboard filmmaker had been able to watch the birth of a son via Skype over the Internet.

Some years ago, the master of the Zim Mexico was prosecuted in the US after his ship hit a shore-side crane, toppling it and killing an electrician inside. The master was judged to be guilty (he hadn’t notified the pilot about an “erratic” bow thruster although the thruster had worked the last fifty times or more). The case raised much international furor over its unfairness. Recently, he and three friends were fishing off the coast of County Cork when their boat caught fire. He and two other friends didn’t survive.

In the UK, Greenwich University kicked off a EU-sponsored study called Safeguard that focused on ship-evacuation and safety procedures. The fire-safety engineering group ran an unprecedented research project on the cruise ship Jewel of the Sea in which more than 2,300 passengers took part in an assembly drill while at sea. The passengers wore infrared tracking tags and were monitored by more than 100 video cameras as they moved about the ship on twelve decks to reach their assembly areas. As the project leader later exulted, “This assembly was unique in several aspects, as we collected data from a large cruise ship during a virtually unannounced assembly drill and while we were actually at sea.”

December 2009 was a bad month for the US Coast Guard: two of its small boats collided with other vessels. One was at Charleston, South Carolina and the other at San Diego, California. One child was killed and several injured. A common denominator in these accidents seems to have been that the Coast Guard boat operators were using cell phones for texting or conversation not pertinent to the job.

For many years, British mariners guilty of “unwanted and/or improper attention” towards female passengers were charged with “broaching cargo.”

Other Shores - September 2010

Last month, US merchants were still worried whether there will be enough empty containers in the Far East to get Christmas goods in-country in time for the holidays.

Researchers working for Parks Canada found the hull of HMS Investigator, abandoned and sunk more than 150 years ago after being trapped in the ice at Banks Island’s Mercy Bay in Canada’s far north. The vessel had been searching for Sir John Franklin’s HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. The Investigator stands upright and intact, although its masts have been sheared off by icebergs. Its crew had walked over the ice to Beechey Island where they and the crew of HMS Resolute, deserted at Dealey Island, were rescued by HMS Northern Star, HMS Phoebe, and HMS Talbot. The North was a busy place in 1853.

With six months to the deadline for continued operation of single-hull VLCC tankers, only 53 were operating last month. The others are being changed into bulkers (14), used for storage (9 plus 6 Supermax tankers), or are being equipped with double hulls (1).

Is there really a worldwide depression? Forty-five car carriers arrived at the German port of Bremerhaven in a single week in mid-July, twice the normal rate of about 25 such ships. In fact, things were so busy that nine carriers were unable to dock upon arrival. Most of the vehicles were exports to the Far East and the US. Imports were far down, as a result of the failure of Germany’s cash-for-clunkers program and the building of car factories in Eastern Europe by Korean and Japanese car companies.

Congress has required that all containers entering the US by 2014 must be 100 percent scanned at foreign ports but it seems that that would require technologies that do not yet exist, much additional manpower, and the rebuilding of many foreign ports to create a single area through which all cargo would pass.

A massive fleet of vessels supported well shutoff and oil cleanup operations in the Gulf of Mexico after a well being drilled by the mobile drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew out and the rig burned and then sank. The well dumped an estimated 4.9 million barrels (of 42 gallons each) of crude oil into the Gulf before the well was capped on Day 86 after the blowout. A fleet of nearly 600 skimmers, including from a converted supertanker (it didn’t work out well), most of the non-profit Marine Spill Response Corporation’s fifteen-vessel fleet of big skimmers, and local shrimpers towing collection booms from their boomed-out outriggers, recovered an estimated 2.9 million gallons of oil.

Many wonderfully designed vessels of many foreign nations work in the Gulf of Mexico energy area because there are not enough American-flagged, America-manned vessels that can supply the necessary highly specialized services. This came to public attention because of the Deepwater Horizon spill and there were demands that laws be changed so only American-flagged, American-manned, American-owned vessels can be used in the US’s exclusive economic zone. If enacted, look for severe and devastating impacts on the cost of oil and gas.

The International Whaling Commission met in Morocco and the world’s three still-whaling nations (Japan, Norway, and Iceland) nearly had enough votes to cause cancellation of the 24-year-old moratorium on commercial whaling. The vote failed because of revelations that Japan had been providing bribes and babes, (openly admitted by the representatives of some small developing nations) and had paid the £4,000 bill for the chairman of the meeting’s stay at a luxury Moroccan hotel. The Commission decided to review the Commission’s rules and thus provide a cooling-off period until the next meeting.

UN peacekeepers in Haiti have been living aboard two cruise ships. The Sea Voyager (aka “The Love Boat” among UN staffers) left in May but the Venezuelan-registered Ola Esmeralda (ex-Black Prince) will stay on until the end of August at a daily cost of $72,500. That rate has been called “outrageous, ridiculous….I’d love to have that contract.” The UN’s World Food Program selected the ship over four others in competitive bidding because it “was the most cost effective in terms of price per cabin.” Others estimated that the ship is generating a cash flow of at least $29,000 a day.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

Help was quickly sent to the Khalijia-3 after it reported it was taking on water and sinking off the Mumbia (remember, think of it as Bombay) coast. Its crew of 28 was removed while the Indian Coast Guard’s fast patrol vessel Subhadra Kumari Chauhan supplied enough pumping power to save the ship and its cargo of coiled steel during a six-hour operation. Rescuers found the water tanker Varnek upside down off the coast of the Kanin Peninsula and nobody, alive or dead. (For the curious but lazy: This peninsula in the northern European part of the USSR separates the northern part of the White Sea from the shallow Cheshskaia Guba of the Barents Sea and gave its name to a class of Cold War Soviet destroyers.)

At Mumbia, the container ship Chitra was in violent contact with the Khlijia and both ended up aground. The Chitra was nearly on its side and badly leaking oil, and the other vessel was nose-up. The Chitra also was periodically shedding containers, which littered the nearby local waters until they sank.

Where the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway intersects the Houston Ship Channel, the tanker Isabel Knutsen ran aground on mud flats after its steering failed. Initial efforts by three powerful tugs proved useless but the grounding did not affect traffic on either of the busy channels. (For those who have taken a ferry from Galveston to Bolivar Island, the grounding was one-quarter miles east of the Port Bolivar ferry landing.) The general cargo/container ship Transport did grievous damage to its stem and bulbous bow while docking at George Town at Grand Cayman, Antigua &; Barbuda. (The vessel operates a regular service between Mobile, Alabama and the port.) On the Amazon, the Panamax bulker Hellenic Star found it advisable to quickly deviate from its course to avoid a potential collision with an oncoming vessel and so it ran aground and suffered enough damage so that water ingress became a problem. (For those interested in the economics of vessel operation, this vessel was on time-charter at a gross rate of $23,000 a day.)

An accident at an Alang shipbreaking yard left one worker dead and four others injured. Workers were cutting a scrap piece with a gas cutter near a ship's engine room. Though the fire was quickly brought under control, one man had died on the spot. In Manila’s north harbor, an explosion (cause not specified) set the cargo vessel West Ocean 1 on fire. Nobody was hurt and the fire was kept from spreading to other parts of the ship.

Improper use of a desulphurizing chemical after a 300,000-ton tanker had finished unloading crude oil caused the rupture of a pipeline near the northern Chinese port of Dalian. The explosion caused a nearby, smaller pipeline to burst and together they caused a massive oil spill estimated at about 1,500 tons or 400,000 gallons. One cleanup worker drowned in a pool of crude oil and other workers were reported as using bare hands and chopsticks to scoop up oil.

A Russian electrical engineer disappeared from the LPG carrier Summerset while it was anchored off the shipbreaking beach at Alang in India. In the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia, a female cadet on the Safmarine Kariba reported to the master that she had been raped by the chief officer. The master called a meeting of the concerned parties, she failed to appear, a search was started, and her body was found in the water several hours later. The chief mate was fired.

An Alaska-based Coast Guard helicopter took a mariner off the US-flagged taker Alaskan Explorer some 200 miles south of Sitka. He was suffering from chest pains. 

The container ship Altivia arrived at Guam from South Korea and its cargo of containers were found to be heavily infested with spiders not native to Guam. The containers were hurriedly closed and reloaded and the ship was ordered to return to South Korea.

The Strait of Hormuz is a choke point for tankers serving the Persian Gulf. The Strait is 21 miles wide at its narrowest and is created by a narrow peninsula belonging to the United Arab Emirates that thrusts menacingly into the belly of Iran. Each day through the Strait pass about 17 million barrels of crude or nearly 20 percent of what the world needs. Traffic has been peaceful since the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, when dozens of ships of many nationalities were attacked (incidentally, tankers are remarkably resistant to sinking). Maybe the peaceful days are over. The Japanese VLCC M Star, loaded with one million tons of crude oil and heading for Japan, was attacked by what was finally declared to be a suicide boat. Initial reports attributed blame to a collision with a submarine or a rogue wave due to seismic activity somewhere (but there was none nearby) but a large area of dished-in and scorched plating the full height of the ship’s starboard quarter and extensive onboard damage (such as a lifeboat blown out of its position) soon brought realization that the probable cause was a suicide small boat that had exploded near but not against the hull. A terrorist group then confirmed that suspicion and supplied the driver’s name. He will not get a second chance to sink the Star M or any other ship.

Gray Fleets

Russia will boost its defense spending by more than 60 percent by 2014. That translates to an annual 2.025 billion rubles. The Navy will spend its share on the development of new submarines and the Bulava missile system, upgrades of the Black Sea Fleet and acquisition of two French-built Mistral amphibious landing ships. (Russia has previously announced that these sophisticated ships plus possibly two-Russian-built sisters would become part of the Black Sea fleet where the most-probable enemy is Turkey or the Ukraine. Other Western nations wish that France would not transfer western navy technology to a former enemy.) The 21,300-ton Mistral-class “BPC” (Batiments de Projection et de Commandement) ships operate as helicopter carriers and amphibious assault transports, with secondary capabilities as command and hospital ships. One of the vessels can carry 700 troops or evacuees for short periods. Normal hospital capacity is 69 beds, with a fully equipped operating room. That capacity can also be expanded in emergencies by appropriating other ship spaces. The command post section is not expandable, but has workstations for up to 150 personnel.

The British military structure must be made smaller, but how to do so is raising some interesting prospects. For example, it is possible that the Royal Marines could be handed over to the British Army and combined with the Paras. “Are the plans a touch mad? Possibly. Are they being discussed? Absolutely.” stated a senior defense figure. It is expected that the nation’s Ministry of Defence will tell the Army, Navy, and RAF to get rid of 16,000 personnel, hundreds of tanks, and half a dozen ships. That would leave the RAF smaller than it was in 1914—that’s World War One!

White Fleets

A gangway to the cruise ship MSC Spendid gave way while passengers were boarding at Genoa and an elderly woman fell to her death. Her husband hit the quay and suffered severe head and leg injuries. The Emerald Princess lost all power shortly after leaving Port Everglades and passengers enjoyed only intermittent hotel services for almost six hours and the ship missed a stop at Princess Cay. The body of a juvenile humpback whale was spotted atop the bulbous bow of the Sapphire Princess while it was steaming south of Juneau, Alaska in Tracy Sound. A tug soon arrived to pull the whale free and tow it elsewhere for a discreet necropsy to determine the cause of death.

Over the next few years, cruise ships will be required to use low-sulphur fuel while in the national waters of Canada and the US. The prospect caused one British cruise company to announce it may drop calls at ports like Halifax and Victoria, British Columbia. Currently, fuels with 1.5 to 2-5% sulphur are used but the sulphur level must drop to 1% in 2012 and to 0.1% in 2015. These changes will save 14,000 lives a year, predicted the US Environmental Protection Agency, but there are questions whether such fuels will even be available.

Those That Go Back and Forth

On Lake Victoria, a passenger boat capsized with sixty on board, mostly traders with their merchandise. Only four people were rescued. They had held onto pieces of wood and sacks of fish. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a (probably overloaded) ferry carrying passengers to the capital of Kinshasha sank in the Kasai River in the western province of Bandundu, leaving at least 138 dead. On Lake Victoria, a boat carrying 36 people, almost all of them primary-school children, capsized in strong winds and half of the children did not survive.

Legal Matters

Legal penalties vary tremendously worldwide. In the Philippines, the Coast Guard arrested the product tanker BMI Angelita for discharging about 15 liters (about four gallons) of oily waste water from its flooded engineroom. (The ship had gone aground at the height of typhoon Conson.) The arrest will be lifted as soon as the owners pay a fine of 10,000 pesos (about $217).

Illegal Imports

The car carrier Frontier Ace arrived at Walvis Bay in Namibia with several stowaways crouched atop its rudder. They had boarded at Lagos, Nigeria.

Metal-Bashing

Massachusetts’ senior senator John Kerry had the 76-foot sailboat Isabel built in New Zealand for about $7 million and apparently intended to put it into the charter business out of Rhode Island’s Newport, a popular port for East Coast charterers. It should be noted that Rhode Island is a state without a sales tax while the Massachusetts sales tax is 6.25%. The senator didn’t have to pay the Massachusetts sales tax of $437,500 if the luxury vessel stayed out of Massachusetts’ waters for six months but it was spotted at Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard shortly after delivery. (The Senator and his multi-million-dollared wife have a summer place on Nantucket.) When these inconvenient facts were brought to a flustered Senator’s attention, he agreed to pay the sales tax (plus an annual vessel excise tax of about $70,000) “if the taxes are owed.”

Nature

Revenge for ancient whaling kills or merely an accident? You choose. Off Cape Town, quite near Robben’s Island (where Nelson Mandela was jailed for so many years), a couple on the cruising sailboat Intrepid cut the engine to watch a southern right whale gambol nearby. Suddenly, the nearsighted cetacean swam in their direction, broached high out of the water, and crashed down on the yacht’s deck. Away went the mast and the whale swam away, perhaps missing some blubber. A nearby vessel got the whole episode on some-what shaky video. (Neither human on the Intrepid was injured.) 

In Alaska, the operator of a 34-foot jet boat taking loggers to work sites intentionally deviated from his course and hit humpback whales at high speed on two separate occasions. He got a remarkably light sentence of two years of probation and a $1,000 fine.

In the Philippines, the Coast Guard wants the owners of the coal-laden barge Gold Trans 306 to get it off a coral reef near Batangas (the barge is badly damaged) and to collect all of the coal that fell overboard so the reef and marine life would not be adversely affected. (The barge was another victim of typhoon Conson after its towline snapped.)

The Norwegian Polar Institute claimed at the abortive Copenhagen Climate Change Conference last year that sea levels may rise by 0.5 to 1.5 metres before the end of this century. If true, that will inconvenience about 150 million people. Most of the sea rise will be caused by melting ice and snow with 25% contributed by the expansion of the warming waters.

On Rwanda’s Lake Kivu, a barge has started collecting volcanic gasses in the fizzy lake. They are pumped ashore where methane is separated out and used to power three large generators that create electricity for that power-short nation. The volcanic gasses are a product of seismic activity in the Great Rift as Africa slowly splits apart. Historically, Lake Kivu's gasses have been a killer. Deaths attributed to invisible pockets of carbon dioxide along the shoreline are frequently reported. The gasses dissolved in the water, however, present a far greater threat. The ever-expanding volumes of carbon dioxide and methane in Lake Kivu, coupled with nearby volcanic activity, may trigger a “limnic eruption” (also referred to as a lake overturn, in which CO2 suddenly erupts from the lake). These are highly likely at some stage in the future unless degassing occurs. That has begun with the extraction of some of the 60bn cubic metres of methane in the Lake. The world's only other known "exploding lakes,” Monoun and Nyos, both in Cameroon, overturned in the 1980s. The clouds of carbon dioxide that burst through from the deep water asphyxiated about 1,800 people. But Lake Kivu is nearly 2,000 times larger than Lake Nyos, and is in a far more densely populated area. An American professor described Kivu as possibly "one of the most dangerous lakes in the world. She said, "You don't even want to think about the scale of the devastation that could occur."

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

At Bangladesh’s main port of Chittagong, a small group of pirates seemingly specializes in stealing one type of relatively low-cost items. Four pirates armed only with long knives took four mooring lines from the container ship PFS Keshava while it was anchored in Anchorage A. Then a week later in Anchorage C, four long knife-armed pirates boarded the bulker Hong Kong Star and got away with four mooring lines. A watchman failed to spot them and the loss was only noted when it came time to anchor the vessel.

Odd Bits and Head-Shakers

Ordnance left over from World War II’s Pacific battles still pose dangers. About fifteen Solomon Islanders lose their lives each year due to still-viable explosives. Royal Australian Navy divers have been training members of the Royal Solomon Island Police divers in explosive ordnance disposal techniques.

Insufficient dredging kept the Chinese-flagged Zhen Hua 10 from approaching near enough to a wharf to unload the first four container cranes that will be essential parts of making Cochin into India’s first international transshipment port. Rapid dredging enabled the ship to unground and deliver its towering cranes.

Near-misses, hails from another yacht, horn blasts from a coaster’s horn, and radio calls from the Coastguard failed to alert anybody on the yacht Erma, a sailboat jogging along under only a jib in the middle of an incredibly busy English Channel. But siren blasts from a hovering Coastguard helicopter brought a sole navigator topsides. He said he was sailing from Portland to the Azores and had been busy below. (Sleeping, perhaps?)

Other Shores - August 2010

by Hugh Ware

Arrivals of containers at Vancouver, BC hit a 20-month high. Container traffic at Long Beach went up 14 percent over a year ago while arrivals at Los Angles rose nearly 27 percent. Shipping giant Maersk reported a shortage of both space and containers for outbound Far East shipments (“It is a very exceptional year”) although the company owns 1.3 million containers and recently added another 50,000 FEU.

Asian demand for oil drove VLCC rates to a five-month high, from $41,800 to $78,900 a day for the Arabian Gulf-Far East run.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

At Le Havre, the vehicle carrier Grande Buenos Aires was caught by wind gusts while entering the lock and was pushed against the lock head. It was damaged and the ship suffered a gash several meters long at the waterline. About 42 miles east of Gibraltar, the product tanker Torm Marina collided with the container ship MSC Camille. Luckily, the tanker was in ballast so no ”boom.” At Durress in Albania, the 3,000-ton freighter Ruby approached a pier at six knots but its engine failed to reverse. It struck the cargo vessel Storman Asia near the bow. Alerted by frantic radio calls, crewmen on the nearby San Gwann took some spectacular photos. 

The coaster Uno and its cargo of soy beans ran aground underneath Valdemar’s Castle in Denmark’s Svenborg Sound. The master explained he had been avoiding a yacht race involving about forty boats. (The castle was built by King Christian IV for his son but he was killed in a battle in Poland during 1656 before he could move in.) In Hong Kong waters, the containership Kota Kado struck a submerged object and was beached. On the St Lawrence Seaway, the 740-foot laker Algobay ran aground and was freed by two tugs and her own power three days later. In New Zealand at Tauranga, the outbound log carrier Hanjin Bombay ran aground but was freed by two tugs two hours later. (The following may not apply to the last item but some years ago, I was told that a Tauranga pilot might pilot ships one week, run a tug propelled by Voith’s cycloidal propellers the next week, and in the third week operate the other port authority’s tug, one fitted with the radically different azimuthing drives. I queried whether they ever got confused but the confident answer was “no.”)

In the Malacca Strait, a fire that started in a container on the foredeck of the 8,195-TEU container ship Charlotte Maersk raged for two days before being put under control (but not out). In Scotland at Lochaber, a conveyor belt loading large stones from a quarry onto the 100,000-ton bulker Yeoman Bontrup caught fire and that set the ship on fire. A tug, ironically named Boulder, was sent to tow the badly damaged ship elsewhere for repairs. At Tampa, a conveyor belt unloading granite rocks from the 742-foot, self-unloading bulker Sophie Oldendorff caught fire and that proved a challenge for local firemen. 

A Turkish worker died under tons of material in a forklift accident at one of Tuzla’s many shipyards. He was the area’s 135th shipyard fatality since the Eighties. Off the Croatian coast, a cadet fell off the container ship Safmarine Kariba and his body was found two hours later. A Texas crabber was killed when struck by lightning on the ICW and his companion was airlifted to a hospital. 

An Australian helicopter removed a badly burned man whose clothing had caught fire while welding on a coal ship 220 miles off the north Queensland coast. He jumped overboard to extinguish the flames and was rescued by one of the ship’s lifeboats. Off South Africa, two South African Air Force helicopters cooperated in getting an injured mariner off the bulker Proud some 100 miles off Cape Town. One helicopter transferred its extra fuel to the other while both were in flight. 

Shortly after the bulker Medi Lausanne was moored at Charleston, South Carolina, along came a strong gust of wind and a stern line parted, followed by the rest of the mooring lines. The ship sailed across the channel and came to a soft grounding with its running gear entangled with a channel marker. 

Gray Fleets

The US Navy removed the commander of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard from command due to loss of confidence in his ability to command. 

The new Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers HMS Daring and HMS Dauntless finally have missiles for their main weapons systems now that their French-built “Aster” missiles have started passing test-firings.

Indian Navy personnel will train for a year on the former Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov before it is finally delivered late next year. Meanwhile Indian aviators flying MIG 29K jets will train on the Russian’s Admiral Kuznetsov, a similar jump-jet carrier. And two Indian submarines suffered minor damage when one tried to parallel-park against the other at a Mumbai naval jetty. 

The Russians announced that they would continue testing the new sea based intercontinental ballistic missile Bulava until it works. Seven out of 13 tests have failed, the last test missile spinning and failing in a spectacular explosion visible in Northern Norway. Three Borey-class submarines to carry the missiles are under construction. And the first attack sub of the Graney class was launched. Construction started in 1993, the launch was deferred for a month, and the news item stated that it would be delivered next year. It will carry 24 cruise missiles. 

Smaller services, worldwide, range widely in size. The US Coast Guard has about 39,000 active members (and is heading toward 45,000 personnel) plus 29,000 Auxiliary members; Camp Lejeune, one of the US Marine’s two main training bases, is home to about 47,000 Marines and sailors; the entire Royal Navy has about 38,000 tars and Royal Marines; and the Royal New Zealand Navy has 2,034 regulars plus another 237 Naval reservists. 

White Fleets

Hurricane Alex delayed the docking of the cruise-ship Ecstasy at Galveston by a day. The prime cause wasn’t wind but a strong crosscurrent in the channel. The inaugural departure of the newbuild Norwegian Epic from Rotterdam for Southampton was delayed for more than seven hours because of “technical problems.” Compounding the resulting irritation for 2,000 passengers was a breakdown of the security card system and all 2,000 cards had to be signed by hand. Alaskan-based US Coast Guard helicopters serviced two medical emergencies on cruise ships. One chopper took off a man who had suffered lack of consciousness and may have had a stroke. The cruise ship was the Norwegian Pearl and the location was 23 miles southwest of Juneau. The other was an Indonesian crewman on the Ryndam, 110 miles southeast of Cordova. He suffered from weakness and unconsciousness. (Readers may have noted that I report many Alaskan-based Coast Guard helicopter exploits. That is because the 17th Coast Guard District PA office does a superb job of publicizing the District’s valiant work in an extraordinarily taxing region.) 

Want to visit the North Pole on a nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker? This year it cost $22,690 for a two-weeks tour on the 2007-built 50 Let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory) and a suite cost $33, 390. But you’ll have to book for next year’s cruises; this year’s two remaining tours are already sold out. 

Under “cruise ships,” I occasionally include the smaller excursion boats and the like. They had a hard time last month. In Boston, the 87-foot whale-watch boat Massachusetts deviated from the well-marked South Channel and hit a well-known object, the Devil’s Back Ledge, at 18 knots. Nearly 170 passengers were quickly evacuated from the badly damaged vessel and serious salvage pumping started. In Alaska, the 75-foot whale-watch boat Catalyst ran aground near Port Houghton but freed itself on the next high ride. In the meanwhile, the nine passengers were taken by skiff to Robert Island. Near the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, something caused a small boat to jump a wave and land atop another small boat, and one man died. Contributing to the accident may have been the wake from the fast-moving tour boat Shark. At Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the two-man crew of an amphibious truck (DUKW) with 37 tourists on board, mostly a church group of young Hungarians, smelled smoke and stopped the engine to investigate, leaving the boat to drift for several minutes. The operator gave a warning call or calls on Channel 13, the ship-to-ship frequency, but not on channel 16, which is used for emergency calls. The crew of the approaching tugboat Caribbean Sea with the empty city-owned sewerage-sludge barge Resource on its hip didn’t hear the calls or see the drifting DUKW hidden behind the high bow of the empty barge, and the barge ran over the DUKW. Most people escaped due to life vests they had just donned but two Hungarian youngsters didn’t make it. 

Those That Go Back and Forth

Competition rowing is big in Brisbane harbor so City Cat ferry boats will be equipped with infra-red cameras to help spot oared shells and their crews. And waterline lighting on the ferries is being investigated so rowers can recognize that a City Cat ferry is nearby. 

At Hingham, Massachusetts, the commuter ferry Nora Victoria collided with the sailboat Cygnuc. Minimal sailboat damage and no injuries among the 150+ people involved. At Arkhangelsk, the Russian passenger vessels Nikolai Gogol and Peter Zavarnin managed to collide, fortunately without much damage to each other. (Arkhangelsk, near the Dvina River’s entrance to the White Sea, was medieval Russia’s chief seaport.) 

French authorities congratulated the crew of the ro/pax ferry Norman Voyager for going to the rescue of survivors of the French crabber Etoile des Ondes, struck and sunk last December by the bulker Alam Pinter. That vessel did not stop and other vessels ignored radio calls for help. (The Norman Voyager has since gone to the rescue of the two-masted yacht Zeewind, which had a suspected heart-attack victim on board.)

Things were buzzing on a British Columbia ferry when several thousand angry bees escaped from their hives. The bee owner had arranged with the ferry company that his truck was loaded first, the ferry’s rear doors would be opened for air flow, and all lights would be turned off except emergency lighting. It was, they weren’t, they weren’t, the bees got warm and excited by the lights and so out they buzzed. 

The People’s National Movement Government of Trinidad bought a used high-speed, 450-passenger catamaran ferry in Turkey for $3.29 million, had it transported to Trinidad and then towed to Curaçao for repairs (another three-quarter million) in 2008. The ferry is back in Trinidad and lies in a shipyard at Chaguaramas, still unused and very definitely for sale. 

An overcrowded ferry carrying sixty pilgrims capsized on the Ganges in India’s northernmost province of Uttar Pradesh and only twenty were rescued. In Bangladesh an overloaded ferry (80 on board) collided with a sand barge and sank, killing at least two-dozen passengers.

In the UK at Plymouth, smoke kept 62 passengers on the Commodore Clipper for several hours although the ferry was docked and the fire in a refrigerator truck on the vehicle deck had been extinguished while en route from Jersey. The ferry also had some steering problems, perhaps because of the fire. 

Legal Matters

Edison Chouest Offshore, a supplier and operator of specialized vessels for the US Government and operator of a sizable fleet of other specialized vessels, was implicated in “magic pipe” incidents on the ice-breaking Antarctic research vessel Laurence M. Gould in 2004-2005. And the US government dismissed an investigation of a possible ”magic pipe” episode on the Margit Gorthon (now the Forest Trader), and both the company and chief engineer walked free. This was the second instance in the month that a case triggered by whistle-blowers was withdrawn. 

The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (reputed to be a liberal bunch of judges) ruled that a mariner who had not been physically injured but was endangered due to an event in which a third party was severely injured or killed could file suit. In the specific instance, a fisherman didn’t even witness a collision but felt the circumstances of the event had put him in grave and imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and had emotionally impacted him so he could not work. 

Illegal Imports

For some time, South American narcotic-smugglers have been building and using, with considerable success, semi-submersible ”submarines” to import drugs into the US, and now Ecuadorian authorities, with help from the US DEA, have seized a true submarine, a submersible capable of operating at a depth of 65 feet. The 30-metre fiberglass vessel was built in a remote jungle area, has a conning tower with periscope, two diesels to electric motors to two screws, and air scrubbers to purify the air, and was to be crewed by up to six smugglers. 

US agents found illegal immigrants who had taken unpaid passage on the container ship MSC Debra from the Dominican Republic to Charleston, South Carolina. Crewmen detained one, another jumped overboard and was later captured, and a third was found dead in a shipping container. And seventeen illegals, all badly dehydrated, were discovered in the back of an articulated lorry (semi-trailer truck) at Dover. 

Metal-Bashing

Shipbuilding prices are low and bargains seem to be available even though the price of steel rose $40-50 a ton in the last quarter over the prevailing $750/ton. For example, one small company ordered ten tankers from South Korean builders for delivery in 2011 and 2012. And fears of a surplus of bulkers were expressed after owners signed contracts for more than 74 bulkers in June alone. This was in addition to the 93 ordered in May. But deliveries of newbuild bulkers meant that some older bulkers were idled. 

After months of shilly-shallying, Canada decided it will build six corvette-sized Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships after all. Construction will start after two (more) years of planning. (Interestingly, several sources agree that the lightly armed, icebreaking ships will be remarkably big 6,000-tonners, which is in the destroyer size-range for many nations.) 

Almost 4,000 feet of steel piping will be replaced on each of two Swedish icebreakers. Used in the replacements on the Atle and Frej will be glassfiber-reinforced epoxy piping. 

Nature

Where are the Earth’s magnetic poles? Not diametrically opposite each other and each roams around a bit. The North MP is relatively stable when compared with the SMP, which has moved an average of 11 km a year over the last 100 years. But it can move faster, sometimes moving several hundred km a day. A swift Australian scientist managed to get within 1.6 km of the South MP when it paused for several hours one day back in 2000. That was the closest anyone has gotten close to the SMP for a measurement and it is also probably the closest anyone will ever get.

In spite of an international law eight years ago forbidding use of asbestos in new ships, some are still being delivered with asbestos in thousands of gaskets and other seals. Replacement of illegal parts on one ship, the 8,400-dwt Caroline Essberger, may have cost 10 percent of the original cost of building since the ship was in service. The process was not easy (“shut down everything, drain systems of their rapidly cooling heavy fuel oil, drain the black sticky residue into the bilges, clean out the bilges, ….”).

Building extensive wind-turbine farms offshore (the UK alone will install 6,000 such turbines in the next ten years) may be delayed by a lack of suitable installation and transportation vessels. There are only a dozen or so of suitable vessels worldwide and many of these can find work in the better-paying oil/gas industry.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

German law states that piracy is purely a police matter so German warships cannot escort German ships in pirate-infested waters. Some German shipowners temporarily reflag their ships so onboard security contractors can do their thing. The Liberian flag is a favorite.

A Dutch submarine will provide realtime intelligence in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean by sophisticated eavesdropping of pirate activity. 

Pirates often shoot-up their intended victims. How extensive the damage can be was indicated by repairs made to the small German container ship Taipan. Almost 300 bullet holes were welded over and ground flush on both sides. Cabling was repaired in 80 places while many tempered-glass panes were replaced including 18 in the wheelhouse. Then there were the interior bulkheads and ceilings, doors, and cabinetry, etc.

As the Somali pirates’ success rates reflected the increasingly effective opposition, the pirates shifted to using six to ten skiffs in an attack. And some mother vessels are still at large in open waters and are running short of supplies so the primary focus of attacks may shift from ransom money to food and water, and yachts and tourist yachts and the like may be attacked. Violence may also increase. 

Many pirates moved to the Bab al Mendeb and Red Sea areas—there were six attacks in the month as opposed to three attacks for the year’s first five months. Unfavorable monsoon conditions and the increased effectiveness of naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden were probable reasons for the shift.

In west Africa, Nigerian gunmen attacked two cargo vessels, killing one and seizing twelve sailors Two days later, special security forces stormed the BBC Polonia, and also (the details are very confused, something not unusual in that area) somehow freed the twelve mariners plus three other hostages taken in May. 

Odd Bits and Headshakers

The director of Tampa’s aquarium was nervous about tests of seawater brought in by a barge owned by the Mosaic Fertilizer Company – after all, there had been a massive oil spill in the Gulf…. (The water tested just fine.) For some years, water in the aquarium tanks has been periodically replaced by seawater donated by various barge companies whose empty barges load up in offshore Gulf of Mexico waters while returning to Tampa. The donations save the aquarium about $300,000 a year.

A memento of the world’s largest ship, a 36-ton anchor, was shipped to Hong Kong to be an exhibit in the new Hong Kong Maritime Museum. The Knock Nevis/Jahre Viking/Seawise Giant was scrapped earlier this year in India at Gujarat. The biggest moving object ever built by man, the tanker was 1,503 feet long, displaced 564,763 tons, and had a draft such that she couldn’t pass through the English Channel (or enter many ports) when fully loaded. As Seawise Giant, she was sunk by an Iraqi jet in 1986 during the Iran-Iraq war. She was raised, repaired, and renamed. 

A retired Coast Guard officer was hired in April to head up North Carolina’s ferry operations. He found “nepotism, payroll padding, and questionable spending” and reported this to his superiors and the inspector general. They fired him for not being a team builder.

Other Shores - July 2010

by Hugh Ware

Container traffic had double-digit growth in the first quarter and probably will grow 5 percent this year. Some firms sharply increased prices on certain routes. China loaded up on oil in the three months ending in April, with tanker demand exhibiting a 42 percent growth. But the recession with its ship lay-ups and slower steaming reduced the number of ship accidents last year by almost 20 percent.

Maersk established a system that enables shippers to get priority containers last-minute-loaded onto ships that already have full loads. The cost will be dynamically determined depending on space available and market demand.

The Chinese coal ship Shen Neng 1 strayed off course and onto an Australian coral reef. The government acted as expected, exhibiting poor judgment and an anti-shipping attitude. All concerned were delighted when the Chinese tug De Da towed the bulker north for repairs.

Six ships carrying humanitarian aid for the Gaza strip were legally denied access by the Israeli Navy. One ship was boarded by commandos, they were attacked, and nine protesters were killed in the subsequent melee.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

Ships collided and allided: Off Wanderlaar, Belgium, the reefer Sierra Leone collided with the combined chemical/oil tanker Sten Moster. The collision punctured the reefer’s bulbous bow and left a garden hose-like stream of water spurting upwards. In the Singapore Straits, the bulker Wally rammed the port side of the tanker Bunga Kelana 3 and several thousand tons of oil escaped. Much of it later ended on Malaysian beaches although Singaporean authorities had pumped skimmed oil into empty tanks of the tanker. The collision occurred in spite of a traffic-separation scheme, a mandatory vessel-reporting scheme, a vessel traffic information system, a differential GPS system to provide ultra-precise location information, and the compulsory Automatic Identification System.

Ships ran aground: Engine failure caused the 2001-built geared bulker Sluisgracht to run aground on the Carolus bank in the Netherlands’ Westerscheldt. It was freed later that day by the tugs Multratug 10, Union 6, Union Emerald, and Union Topaz, with the coastguard’s Barend Biesheuvel standing by. Far away, the container ship Pacific Flores ran aground on the Columbia River near Kalama, Washington due to a steering failure. No details are available as to what tugs freed her.

Fire and explosion took a toll: Traffic through the Panama Canal was disrupted when the coal-laden bulker Atlantic Hero failed to live up to its name. An engineroom explosion and subsequent loss of power caused it to hit the Bridge of the Americas across the Canal and then slew aground. It took two days to reopen the Canal.

Other bad things happened: The cargo vessel Najaden was passing under Rotterdam’s Caland Bridge when it was lowered. The bridge messed up the electronics and other equipment atop the wheelhouse and bent the ship’s funnel backwards.

Humans got hurt: At Harwich on the UK, a dockworker was killed and another seriously injured when a cradle carried by a crane collapsed, trapping them between cargo (possibly turbine propellers) and the crane.

Humans got help: The four-person crew of the yacht Octagon were taken off by the chemical tanker MTM Princess after the yacht lost steering and started taking on water 300 miles west of Spain. The rescue was triggered by an EPIRB and DSC signals and was coordinated by that old rescue standby, Falmouth Radio in the UK. As ice conditions deteriorated, aircraft from the US Coast Guard in Alaska kept checking on Russia’s North Pole 37 Station, asking if it needed help. Each time, the Russian scientists replied that they were OK and icebreaker Rossiya was en route to pick them up. Even when the icebreaker was parked next to the station’s buildings, the crew of a C-130 asked if help was needed.

After surviving a tropical cyclone, the small cargo ship Dubai Moon got in trouble off the Horn of Africa when its cargo of used vehicles shifted and the ship took on an extreme list. HMS Chatham, about 175 miles away, heard its distress call and made best speed to the rescue in Force 10 winds and extremely high seas. Meanwhile the ship was drifting towards Abd Al Kuri Island, narrowly evading it but getting into shallow waters where HMS Chatham couldn’t go. Finally, the weather abated enough so the Lynx helicopter of the Type 22 frigate took off 23 seamen in an operation that lasted over three hours as the Dubai Moon rolled up to 40 degrees. Later, its master explained, “Normally we operate close to the cost but we had to go far out to sea to avoid the pirates. That meant we could not find shelter from the storm.”

Gray Fleets

The world responded to the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in different ways. A Russian team of submarine and torpedo experts found the report by an American/Australian/ British/Swedish team that the warship was sunk by a heavy North Korean torpedo to be unconvincing, but offered no alternative explanations. South Korea vainly asked China to send a crew of inspectors to check out the sunken corvette. Instead, the Chinese Navy leaked intelligence information to two American Internet sites. In essence, the Chinese believed that an American-positioned mine sank the corvette, perhaps in some sort of a friendly-fire incident. The mine may have been a limpet mine placed on the hull by American divers as part of a campaign to influence public opinion. Or it may have been a Mk60 CAPTOR-type mine that inadvertently rose from the seabed when it “heard” the corvette pass overhead. As partial proof, the Chinese also questioned why the commander of US Forces Korea attended the funeral of a South Korean navy diver who was killed during the search for survivors. The Chinese also questioned why US Navy divers (“SEALS” in the language of the Chinese report) from the salvage ship USNS Salvor didn’t dive although their Korean counterparts did.

The destroyer HMS Dauntless joined her sister HMS Daring in the Royal Navy fleet but both still don’t have functional primary weapons that use the French-built anti-aircraft missile ASTER. It keeps failing tests.

A vigorous 19-year-old US Navy sailor set a world’s record for the most pull-ups in a 24-hour period when he managed 3,376 pull-ups using both reverse and overhand grips. It took him 2-3 weeks to recover before he resumed training for concept 2 rowing, where he already owns a world record in his age group (100,000 meters in 6 hours, 6 minutes, 0 seconds, set last November).

The US Navy is carefully selecting women candidates for manning its submarines. One selectee is an ROTC graduate of the University of Washington who has commanded an ROTC battalion and headed a team that trained members of two teams that crewed 44-foot racing yachts. She said, “I hung out with jocks at high school and I have four younger brothers so I know how they operate a bit.” Another selectee and her twin sister recently graduated from the US Naval Academy. The sister is going to flight school and hopes to be an astronaut.

The US Navy is missing four of its Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) after completion of training exercises to locate mines on the ocean floor off Virginia. Navy-trained dolphins and sea lions may be used to search for the usually ultra-reliable 7.5-inch-diameter REMUS 100 bots.

The US Navy is reopening bidding for California cities that might like to acquire the WW II-vintage battleship USS Iowa as a war memorial. Los Angeles might apply if it can find waterfront space at San Pedro.

As Indian officials expressed delight with progress being made in converting the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov into what will soon to be India’s INS Vikramaditya, the US Secretary of Defense and a top admiral said that aircraft carriers would soon become obsolete because of China’s development of anti-ship missiles specifically designed to target carriers. One such weapon is based on the DF21/CSS-5 medium-range ballistic missile.

Russia agreed to help Ukraine finish construction of a missile cruiser. The Slava-class cruiser Admiral Lobov (now Ukraina) was launched in 1984 but, due to economic problems, work stopped in the late 80’s when 95 percent complete. Russia has three Slava-class cruisers in service and each carries sixteen supersonic SS-N-12 Sandbox anti-ship missiles

White Fleets

At the Norwegian port of Edfjord, an engineroom fire on the cruise ship Deutschland at a pier forced evacuation of 607 people, including 364 passengers. The ship is the “star” of the German TV Show “Das Traumschiff,” a show about a world traveling cruise ship. And the Italian-flagged Vistamar was detained at Belfast until numerous faults were fixed.

One cruise company was hard-hit when its Zenith and 1,140 passengers were unable to start a week-long cruise of Greek Islands when strikers closed the port of Piraeus for 24 hours. (Greek seamen have been protesting government plans to lift restrictions on vessels with foreign crews docking in Greece and cruising between its islands.) Also affected by the quickie strike were at least thirty ferries and five other cruise ships. A month later, same Zenith, same destinations only the vessel started from Malta instead of Piraeus and the company warned if the situation continued, it would not travel to Greece again.

The former commandant of Jamaica’s Island Constabulary Force fled the island after being charged with sexual assault on a minor. The vehicle of escape was the cruise ship Carnival Liberty. Police boarded the vessel with an arrest in mind but the naughty one grabbed a lifejacket and jumped overboard. He was quickly captured and, somewhat ironically, his attorney then claimed his client had fled because he didn’t trust the Jamaican justice system!

While a young couple were on a cruise on the Paradise, a baby girl was born while off San Diego . Both mother and child needed medical attention so a Coast Guard small boat took them ashore.

Those That Go Back and Forth

Third-World ferries continued to sink and kill humans. In Bangladesh, an overloaded river ferry capsized in bad weather and at least twelve died and others were missing. Many were school children. In Mozambique, a ferry carrying 82 Somali nationals capsized and nine died while another forty were missing. The ferry Camilla was overloaded with fuel barrels and more than 140 passengers when it sank on the Amazon River near Peru’s border with Columbia and twelve died while dozens were missing.

As the Manly ferry Collaroy approached Sydney’s Circular Quay two young Irish tourists stripped to their shorts and jumped overboard. Climbing out at the famed Opera House, they were met by multiple policemen and later paid $200 fines.

A woman arrived at Holyhead on a ferry from Dublin with €26,000 in €500 bills in her bra. She claimed she had sold a business in Ireland but could provide no proof. The UK Border Agency kept the money since it suspected it was the product of criminal activity. The money will be returned if/when the woman can prove to a court that it came from a legitimate source.

In Western Australia at the builder’s yard in Henderson, strong winds ripped a newbuild $100 million trimaran ferry from its moorings and tugs were needed. The 102-meter ferry can carry 1,165 passengers and hit a top speed of 39 knots.

The Swedish ferry company Stena RoRo will remove midbody sections from the 2006-built Stena Trader and the 2007-built Stena Traveller before they go on a five-year charter with the Canadian Maritimes ferry company Atlantic Marine, replacing the popular but aging Caribou and Joseph and Clara Smallwood by mid-summer next year.

Stena Line will build the world’s largest ferry. At 62,200 tons, the Stena Brittanica, however, will be far smaller than the biggest cruise ship, the Oasis of the Seas at 225,282 tons.

Legal Matters

Both the chief engineer and the operator of the chemical tanker Chem Faros pleaded guilty of violating the US’s Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships and making false statements, and the company was fined $850,000. He gets sentenced later. And the Turkish owner of the combined chemical and oil tanker Kerim was fined $725,000 by a US court on two charges of failing to maintain an oil record book. Several members of the crew had tipped-off federal authorities when they boarded the ship at Tampa. The tanker has since been renamed Chem Pegasus.

Illegal Imports

A Royal Navy gang tried to smuggle £2 million-worth of cocaine into the UK on the destroyer HMS Manchester. A female sailor had picked up the stash in Columbia and it was found in the linings of her clothing in a locker upon arrival at Plymouth. And two Spanish men were sentenced to 12 years in jail for trying to smuggle 33 kg of cocaine (street value €8 million) into the UK on the cruise ship Black Watch in March.

The Nigerian Customs Service seized the foreign fishing trawler Felistar for smuggling contraband into the country. The contraband consisted of 300 cartons of frozen chicken, 1,600 cartons of baron (?) wine, apples, used clothing, second-hand refrigerators, hides and skins, rice, and more. The trawler had been refitted for smuggling.

Nature

In the Mediterranean, Greenpeace activists from the that group’s Arctic Sunrise were dropping sandbags into purse-seine nets to allow tuna to escape when a French fisherman from the French tuna-catcher Jean-Marie Christian VI angrily drove a harpoon into the thigh of an English activist. He required surgery in a Malta hospital. The fishermen have only 15 days on the high seas each year to catch tuna.

In Australia, the Russian master of Greenpeace’s Esperanza was fined $8,000 on three charges arising from a 36-hour blockade of the Hay Point coal terminal although charges against Greenpeace were dropped.

Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, will decline to carry containers with any fish that Greenpeace had declared to be a member of an at-risk species. Included will be New Zealand orange roughy, the Patagonian toothfish (aka Chilean sea bass), shark, whale, and canned tuna. (Fresh tuna usually travels by air.)

In Japan, the New Zealand skipper of the Sea Shepherd’s trimaran Ady Gil went on trial after being indicted on five charges (trespassing, obstruction of business, property destruction, violation of a weapons law, and assault). He pleaded guilty to the first four charges but denied the assault charge. He faces up to 15 years in jail. (A Japanese whaler collided with the Ady Gil, cutting off its bow so that it later sank. Its skipper boarded the whaler, intending to make a citizen’s arrest of its skipper and present him with a bill for loss of the Ady Gil. Instead, the whaler took the Kiwi back to Japan, where he was arrested.)

Off New York the clam-dredger ESS Pursuit hauled up ten WW I shells containing liquid mustard gas. One broke open as it was being returned overboard and two fisherman needed hospitalization for blistering and other problems. The other fishermen and the FV were isolated and then decontaminated while what to do with its 504,000-pound catch of clams was being considered.

Several Americans outfitted a tugboat to scoop some of the floating trash caught in the North Pacific Gyre, a Texas-sized eddy between California and Hawaii.

Canada’s leading authority on arctic shipping stated that the Northwest Passage would not become a Panama Canal in his youngish lifetime. He added that the Northwest Passage was a destination, not a transit route that makes business sense.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

The total number of pirate attacks was up 150 percent but actual hijackings were down 25 percent as resistance to being hijacked increased sharply. About 600 pirates are being held by a growing number of cooperating nations. Successful prosecutions are relatively easy to achieve although where to house prisoners is a problem. In Kenya, there is confidence that 106 Somalis will be sentenced while in the US a pirate pleaded guilty to seizing a ship (the Maersk Alabama) and kidnapping its master (Capt. Richard Phillips) and will face a minimum of 27 years in jail. A Yemeni court was far tougher; it sentenced six Somali pirates to death by shooting and jailed six others to ten years for hi-jacking a Yemeni tanker last year and killing two of its crew.

After failure of shoreside negotiations by five pirates with a Somali mediator, the ten-man crew of the North Korea-flagged cargo ship Rim regained control of their ship from the five remaining pirates even though another hi-jacked ship, the Voc Victoria Daisy, gave chase for some time until scared off by a helicopter from the Spanish frigate Victoria. It is unclear whether the five pirates were killed but the warship’s medics treated some wounded. The freed Rim was in such poor condition that it wasn’t able to proceed very far before its machinery quit. Dutch technicians tried to get it going again but it was decided to abandon the Rim and let it drift, probably taking on enough water in the prevailing rough conditions to sink. However, many continued to exhibit curiosity about why the Yemeni and Libyan governments had been so solicitous about the North Korean ship’s fate.

About fifty troops from Puntland, a semi-autonomous part of Somalia, stormed and retook the QSM Dubai after the ship’s master was shot and killed by seven pirates. They were arrested. The destroyer USS Cole (remember her?) was standing by at a distance and later supplied medical help to two injured officers.

Odd Bits

In 1941, a US navy sailor lost his wallet at a commercial Chicago school to which he had been sent for training in hydraulics. Recently, it was found, dusty but intact after 69 years, complete with his social security card and family photos including some of his girlfriend who was killed in a car crash three years after they were married. The Singapore-registered tugboat Asta and the barge Callista were hi-jacked in the South China Sea off Malaysia. The pirates took the vessels into Philippine waters to be sold with new names but both were seized by the police of a remote island. Then that nation’s anti-smuggling agency claimed ownership of the craft because they had entered Philippine waters without paying customs duties! (The owner does have recourse to courts to have the decision reversed.)

On the Mississippi River near St Louis, a small towboat was sucked under its barge by a strong current. Its crew of one swallowed a good deal of river water as he traveled under the full length of the barge but the life vest he was wearing no doubt helped him survive. Two sets of willing hands pulled him out as soon as he popped to the surface.

Head-Shaker

Last November, two Dutch divers were working on an underwater memorial in Aruba when a digital camera in a water-tight housing floated away. Six months later, the camera was found on a beach at Key West, Florida. The finder tried the camera, it worked, and it was soon evident that a sea turtle had played with the floating camera or had tried to eat it. In the process, it turned the camera on and incidentally photographed itself. The video can be found on YouTube.