Other Shores - August 2011

Wallet-restraint by US consumers has kept US import volume flat, but experts expect a rise by summer’s end when retailers build up inventories.

Will LNG shipping rates rise? At least one shipping company thinks so. It turned down a one-year charter at $125,000 a day of its newbuild LNG carrier Stena Crystal Sky, preferring a daily rate of $110,000 over only 210 days.

If you own a capesize bulker hauling iron ore from Australia to China, you have been enjoying the record rate of more than $8 per ton. 

Oil giant Shell applied to US regulators for permission to drill six wells in the Chukchi Sea. Permission was granted, perhaps because polar bears were recently re-categorized as merely “threatened” rather than “endangered.”

More than forty percent of about 600 Dutch and British mariners have personally experienced bullying, harassment, or discrimination at work within the last five years. Less than half felt they could make a complaint.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

As usual, there were collisions and allisions: The container ships CCNI Rimac and CSAV Petorca collided at Shanghai and a fire started on the Rimac when water reacted with inflammable goods in a container. The crew was evacuated and the ship was moved outside the port while authorities looked for twenty-six of its containers that had fallen into the sea. 

Ships ran aground: While being towed to a scrapping beach at Alang, the cargo vessel Wisdom broke free and ended up in Mumbai’s Jubal Beach. After three attempts, it was freed by two powerful tugs. In Indonesia, the crew of 28 manning the bulker Sunny Partners were rescued by a tug after it ran aground while on a voyage with a cargo of bauxite. In Indonesia again, the container ship Al Rawday ran aground near the Rock Island Chain at Sambu Batam and the chief engineer had a fatal heart attack during the incident. The ship had just left Malaysia’s Port Klang.

Fires and explosions took a toll: While discharging cargo at Luanda, fire broke out on the UAL Antwerp, probably in a tank of kerosene. Due to the firefighters’ extensive efforts, the ship took on so much water that it was beached to keep it from sinking. The cooling unit on a Dutch semi-trailer burst into flame on the ro/ro ferry Schleswig-Holstein en route from Puttgarden to Rodby but a deckhand on routine patrol spotted the fire and extinguished it. The container ship APL Chiwan suffered from main-engine camshaft problems off the coast of China but they were fixed. Two days later, an engine fire disabled the ship. A tug was called for a 100-mile tow to Hong Kong while onboard generators continued to power the coolers on refrigerated containers. 

Unusual things happened: Inland sand pits often use floating dredges and the Robert R Woodington lost its cutterhead and ladder when an underwater landslide occurred. What to do? Hire a marine salvage company to recover the head, now 100 feet deep and covered by more than 70 feet of sand and clay mix. The successful recovery team included five divers, a sectional barge with a crane, and airlift and jetting equipment. At Algeciras in Spain, the 509-TEU feeder ship Deneb flopped on its starboard side at a wharf for unknown reasons. In Israel, the bulker Avramit spilled oil on the coral beach between Marina and the border of a coral reserve. The oil was quickly pumped up and the Gulf of Eilat was spared further pollution. In Rotterdam’s Caland Canal, the bunker tanker Vialis embarrassed itself by breaking in half while refueling the chemical/oil tanker Marida Mimosa. At Beirut, a shore crane unloading the Laguna collapsed across the Darya, seriously damaging that ship. Both are small cargo ships.

Humans were rescued: Although the vessel owner said there was no emergency, the master of the small tanker Pavit disagreed and used e-mail to ask for help. As a result, Falmouth Coastguard in the UK coordinated the removal of thirteen Indian crewmen off the vessel, which had been drifting for several days about 120 miles off Oman with mechanical problems and a crew growing increasingly seasick. A helicopter from the frigate HMS St Albans made 27 trips to transfer the Pavit’s crew to the Indian tanker Jag Pushpa, which agreed to repatriate the men to India. Off Long Island, a Coast Guard small boat took a sick sailor off the USS Oak Hill (LSD-51) after he was disabled by abdominal pains. In Alaska near Valdez a Coast Guard chopper took the chief engineer off the 150-foot tug Sea Voyager. He was also suffering from abdominal pains. Another Alaska-based helicopter took a fisherman off the 50-foot fishing vessel Heidi Linea. He had bad back pains from a fall on the FV. 

Gray Fleets

Thou shalt lead a pure life. The US Navy has dismissed at least 29 commanding officers in the last two years. Included were nine commanding officers for sexual harassment or inappropriate relationships in the last 18 months. Three others were dismissed for alcohol offenses and two others for personal misconduct. And the Navy is currently investigating reports of hazing on the submarine USS Tennessee. Meanwhile, in Alaska, details were released on why the commanding officer of the Coast Guard patrol boat USCGC Anacapa was relieved of his command earlier this year. He had tried to get the vessel underway while intoxicated.

Soviet warships operated openly off the Virginia coast. They were part of a two-week-long international exercise originally designed to lessen Cold War tensions. Other participating nations were France, the UK, and the US.

The British destroyer HMS Liverpool has been having an eventful tour off Libya in Operation Unified Protection. In May it was under attack by forty rockets and her 4.5-inch main gun returned fire on the rocket battery near Misrata – the first time the main guns of a British warship have been fired in anger since Iraq in 2003. Then it used its 4.5-inch gun again, this time to thwart an attempt by four Libyan boats (three rigid hulls and one small boat) to disrupt shipping in the Gulf of Sirte. At least one boat was destroyed.

The Philippines will no longer buy second-hand naval equipment from the US but might lease relatively new US equipment rather than wait for surplus material to become available. Announced object of the new policy? To make the Philippines into a strong US ally. (The Philippines still uses WW II-vintage ex-US destroyers.) That nation also rebranded the South China Sea as the West Philippine Sea, thus mimicking the US’s recent renaming of the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf.

Want to buy some surplus military and naval stuff? Australia is selling up to 24 ships, 180 aircraft, 600 armored vehicles, 12,000 other vehicles, and so on. The proceeds will, hopefully, help pay for a massive $61 billion planned upgrade of the Ozzie defense forces. 

Where better way to train boarding teams than on a WW II-vintage museum steamship? Florida Coast Guardsmen used the SS American Victory as a training arena while it was moored at The American Victory Ship Mariners Memorial Museum at Tampa.

China is hell-bent on getting aircraft carriers. Photos showed concrete replicas of a carrier superstructure and a jump-jet flight deck, both far inland. The half-built ex-Soviet carrier Varyag, which a Chinese businessman bought with the announced goal of converting it into a floating casino, was taken over by the government and it will become China's first aircraft carrier. And several Chinese businessmen have put in bids for the retired British carrier Ark Royal, with the announced intentions of converting it into a floating showcase for high-technology items. (Two other ex-Soviet carriers, the Kiev and Minsk, are now parts of Chinese military theme parks.

Last year, the US Navy acquired 59,000 Chinese-made microchips, each counterfeit and each equipped with a “back door” that could allow nasty tricks such as admitting signals to shut-off the chip. 

Women will be allowed to man Royal Navy subs now that fears that fumes might affect fetuses carried by pregnant submariners have been allayed. Other nations allowing female subbies are the US, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

A Royal Navy commander failed to notify the education authority that he had separated from his wife of twenty years and thus he was able to illegally accept nearly £75,000 to send his two children to a boarding school.

It won’t help US unemployment figures shoreside but about 3,000 US Navy sailors will be released as surplus to decreasing needs. They will get no severance package and no retirement since most will not have served long enough to qualify.

White Fleets

The 122,400-ton cruise ship Celebrity Silhouette was floated-out at an inland German shipyard and needed to be taken to the North Sea Dutch port of Eemshaven for completion. The 26-mile route involved a narrow, winding river, several very tight spots with less than five feet of clearance, and passage through a railroad bridge that was too narrow for the vessel. (A crane on a barge created just enough room by removing the bridge’s center span and moving it out of the way.) And the ship had to be moved backwards. Two tugs, one at each end of the cruise ship, slowly towed the vessel with little fuss and great precision, and the voyage was safely made. Why not? The demanding routine was familiar since the Silhouette was the fourth of its class to be built at the German yard. 

Small events can cause major problems. The elderly (1952) cruise ship Philippines (ex-Augustus) had a fire in its stack while moored at Manila. The blaze was quickly quelled and an investigation revealed that the fire originated in the DC generator in the stack and was caused by someone closing ventilation flaps. That allowed heat to build up inside the funnel until ignition was reached. 

Those cruise ships that can’t fit under the Sydney Harbor Bridge have been using the one-cruise-ship berth at the Circular Quay but it really isn’t a cruise-ship terminal. Australian authorities are considering use of the nearby navy base at Garden Island even though it is busy with navy activities.

Those That Go Back and Forth

Patronage of a new East River ferry service in New York City that linked Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn (three of the City’s five boroughs) was pleasingly high because it was free. Then a ticket started costing $4 and patronage dropped to one half, Officials, however, were pleased with that number. It was higher than they had expected.

The Alaskan ferry Malaspina has a bow lookout on duty at all times. The ferry was near the eastern shore of Taiya Island and approaching Skagway when the bow lookout, in what was probably the quietest spot on the vessel, heard a faint call for help. All hands including the 45 passengers started searching the shore, a searchlight finally illuminated an injured man, and he was taken onboard. He was bleeding from multiple gashes, had two large swollen areas on his body, and was semi-conscious and dry-heaving. He also had no memory of what had happened (he probably had been hiking and had fallen down a cliff into the water and managed to pull himself ashore). When spotted, he was preparing to re-enter the water and swim toward the Malaspina.

High winds and heavy seas capsized a ferry in a bay west of Haiti’s capital and seven people went missing. The boat was transporting charcoal, bananas, and other goods to Archaie, a coastal town thirty miles northwest of Port au Prince. In Bangladesh, the Madinar Alo capsized in the Sitalakhya River and at least a dozen of more than 100 passengers died. In Indonesia ten people including two children died when their canoe sank in the Bengawan River in East Java. They were simply trying to get to their village on the other bank. At Charlotte Amalie, in the US Virgin Islands, the 89-foot fast catamaran ferry Royal Miss Belmar ran up high and dry on a rocky point. That crash injured five, including a baby, of the 102 people aboard. 

Those that carried fireworks onto a Washington State ferry around the date of the Fourth of July may have noted that explosives-sniffing dogs were active at the ferry terminal. They also learned that carrying legal fireworks onto the ferry was OK.

Legal Matters

The Chinese master of the bulker Full City is lucky and one might say he beat the current trend of criminalizing mariners for accidents. A Norwegian appeals court overturned a lower-court decision that he must serve mandatory jail time and instead substituted a suspended sentence. The second mate, also sentenced to jail, was acquitted by the appeals court. (The Full City ran aground off Telemark during a summer storm and the grounding released oil that became the worst oil spill in Norwegian history.) 

A Macedonian court jailed two men for a year because of a boating accident on Lake Ohrid in 2009 in which fifteen Bulgarian tourists died. Their offenses were allowing overcrowding and issuing false safety certificates. 

Nature

Researchers searching for the Pacific Ocean’s proverbial Great Garbage Patch of floating plastic, a patch reported as being twice the size of Texas and somewhere between California and Japan, found it hard to find and far less dense than reported. Scientists often could not see much plastic from the deck of their research vessel. “The amount of plastic out there isn’t trivial but the patch is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size,” reported one scientist. And the patch is not growing exponentially, as was earlier reported.

In New Zealand, a young humpback whale swam into a Tory Channel mussel-farming operation and became so entangled that it became exhausted. The mussel-farmers moved a barge alongside the whale and it was utterly passive during the 45 minutes it took to cut the whale free with the help of a crane on the barge.

A massive underwater landslide 200 miles off Cornwall caused a minor but measurable tsunami along the UK’s south coast. Wave heights were measured as being between 05 and 0.8 meters.

The North Atlantic island of Rockall is exceedingly unattractive to most people, being 82-feet wide, 101-feet long, and 68-feet high and 187 miles from the nearest land, and the highest waves in the world (95 feet) were measured nearby. Nevertheless, a Yorkshireman plans to spend a night on the island to replace a brass plaque left there in 1955 and re-establish Britain’s ownership of the island. (There is a four-way dispute between the UK, Ireland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands over ownership.) By the way, his name is Strangeway.

Metal Bashing

The 1960-built tanker Wenjiang was launched as the British Curlew for BP Tanker Co. It was shelled and abandoned in 1980 during the Iran/Iraq war while at Basrah. Apparently it stayed afloat and managed to end up Bandar Abbas in Iran. Someone decided that nobody really owned the tanker, took over ownership, a tug appeared, and the tow headed for Pakistan and scrapping. The real owners are unhappy.

China’s largest shipyard will expand into green recycling by erecting the world’s largest dismantling facility. It should be capable of dismantling about 75 ships a year that range in size from about 50,000 dwt to a VLCC-like 300,000 dwt.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

Due to the monsoon season, Somali pirates left open waters and concentrated their activities in the southern Red Sea and off the coast of Oman. Somali fishermen reminded everyone that they too carry AK-47s but just for self-defense against the real pirates. (If a fishing skiff’s equipment includes a boarding ladder and several RPG’s, it’s probably a pirate vessel.) And Somali pirates did something unusual: they rescued nineteen crewmembers from the cargo vessel Orna after it caught fire. No word whether they were held for ransom.

Odd Bits

Prince William and his new bride visited Canada and their progression has been much more sedate than the last time Canada was visited (in 1786) by another Royal Navy officer and heir to the throne with the name of William. That William, later King William IV, could be a rousterer (his several visits to Halifax while a junior officer are still prominent parts of local history) and he fathered several illegitimate children, including ten by one actress/mistress. (He would have married her but descendants of George II were forbidden to marry unless they obtained the reigning monarch's consent.)

Last summer, Canadian government searchers discovered the Arctic exploration ship HMS Investigator, which sank in 1854 off Banks Island. This summer, the same people hope to find HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, the heart of Sir John Franklin’s abortive 1854 expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. The vessels are Canada’s only national historic sites with no known location. Noted one searcher, Even if they are not found, “next time the team will know where not to look.”

A major problem for shipping companies and port operators is that shippers too often mislabel the weight or contents of containers, and that practice has resulted in a number of accidents. (When the MSC Napoli was grounded, it was found that the declared weights for 137 of the 600 shipping containers on its deck differed from actual weights by more than three tons.) The major shipping companies are organizing a Cargo Incident Notifications Network called Cinsnet (perhaps it would be better labeled as Sinsnet?) to help identify both potentially dangerous containers and industry-wide trends.

The following may tell readers something about the so-called “warrior complex.” The Navy SEALS that killed Osama bin Laden referred to him as “Geronimo” while those insiders at the Pentagon and the CIA preferred “Cakebread.”

Coal from Indonesia has been catching fire while being carried to China so one insurance company issued a simple checklist. Coals are ranked from anthracite, bituminous, and sub-bituminous down to lignite (aka brown coal). Indonesia mostly exports the lower-ranked coals, which tend to self-ignite. Shipments often have a high moisture content, which is a no-no. 

Upon hearing an electronic emergency signal one night, British coastguard authorities launched a lifeboat and searched for three hours some four miles off the Welsh coast before it was realized that the signal had been transmitted by a standard electronic device in a BMW parked on the ferry European Endeavour inbound from Dublin. This Emergency Telematics anti-theft, send-help device is fitted to many new BMW and Volvo vehicles.

Per international agreement, the longer a vessel, the lower must be the pitch of its horn. If longer than 200 meters, its horn must issue a sound between 70 and 200 Hertz. For lengths between 75 and 200 meters, the sound should be between 130 and 350 Hz, and between 20 and 75 meters, the pitch must be an almost squeaky 250-700 Hz. (To establish a baseline here, A above middle C is normally 440 Hz but is sometimes set at 432 Hz for a “warmer” orchestral tone.)

Head-Shakers

Since many persons refuse to believe the US Government’s announcement that Osama Bin Laden is dead, an underseas explorer and treasure hunter will search for the body and, if successful, he announced he will obtain DNA and other evidence.

Other Shores - July 2011

Is it Fiji or Tonga that owns the remote Minerva Reefs (two submerged atolls named after the wrecked whaleship Minerva)? The question became important when two Tongan patrol boats drove off a lone Fijian patrol boat. Any conflict will be limited; tiny Fiji has 3,500 soldiers, no air force, and nine patrol boats and the tinier Tonga has 500 soldiers, one maritime-patrol airplane, and three patrol boats plus a royal yacht. (The quarrel is really over Tonga’s providing refuge to a fleeing dissenter, a member of a prominent Fijian family.) 
 

Danish shipping giant Maersk is deep into the green scene. Its latest environmental policy is to reduce to a minimum the amount of illegally logged tropical hardwoods in the floors of its shipping containers.

Shipping companies are trying to ensure that the mega-container ships on order will have an adequate supply of containers by trying to fix ten-year charters for feeder ships of about 1,100-teu capacity.

At one point during the month, the transpacific rate per loaded 40-foot container was down to $1,932.

Increasing production in the US of shale gas and oil as a result of fracking (fracturing the shale layers in which gas and oil are trapped) should reduce by 5% the average ton-miles of oil cargo shipped, especially from the Middle East to the US. Attention in the Middle East became focused on the Asian market. And major flooding along the Mississippi River drastically cut coal shipments southward and that affected bulker traffic in the Gulf of Mexico.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

In Columbia, the bulker Chios Wind ran aground in the River Magdalena and that blocked access to the port of Barranquila for five days. As a result, at least seven ships were diverted to the nearby ports of Santa Maria and Cartagena. The German-owned deep-sea salvage tug Uranus finally arrived and pulled out the harbor’s cork.

Ships collided: At night, the container ship Euros London collided with and sank the 165-foot pogy fishing boat Sandy Point about eight miles south of Gulfport, Mississippi and three of its crew of sixteen died. Worldwide, shore installations took a beating. In New Zealand, the container ship Maersk Dabou punched a large hole in its side when it hit the Beach Street Wharf at Port Chalmers. In the UK at Littlehampton, the dredger Arco Dee lost control in high winds and its superstructure scraped a concrete wall. No holes this time. At Odessa, the container ship RHL Fidelitas lost its ability to reverse and slammed into a pilot boat and the wharf while trying to dock. The pilot boat sank and the pier needed extensive repairs. And at Karmoy in Norway, so much gravel was unloaded from the Nyyfjeli that the pier collapsed.

In Thailand at Laem Chabang, the container ship MOL Aqua had a fire and explosion in a cargo hold as it was berthing. In Sweden at Trollhatten, fire broke out in a load of scrap cars on the cargo/container ship Rebecca Rousing. A port crane lifted off the scrap to allow access to the fire, and it was extinguished but then broke out again.

At a Singapore shipyard, a welder and a nearby worker were killed when fumes exploded in a tank on a barge. The tank had been painted a few days earlier. At Port Manatee in Florida, a dockworker died when he lost his footing and fell about 25 feet down a shaft between a load and the side of a ship. An overloaded crane collapsed at a Vietnamese shipyard, killing two South Korean workers and injuring two others. At Mexico’s Veracruz, three crewmembers of a Greek-flagged cargo ship loading maize died of asphyxiation when the door to a cargo hold accidentally swung shut and trapped them inside. (The bulker was probably the Chios Destiny.)

Alaskan Coast Guard helicopters found the bodies of five clam diggers on mudflats southwest of Kalgin Island in Cook Inlet. They had been digging for razor clams and what happened to their twenty-foot skiff was unclear. At Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick the ro/ro ferry Grand Manan V failed to reach its dock, hitting a nearby ledge. Its bow then swung around and hit the dock. About 100 passengers and eighteen crewmen were helped ashore from the ferry in its awkward perch on the ledges. Failure of one engine to go into reverse was the probable cause of the accident. An injured sailor was brought into Bermuda for treatment of serious burns to his hands after an accident on board the container ship Washington Express. He was picked up by the pilot boat at Five Fathom Hole off St David’s and the container ship continued on its way from Germany to Charleston, South Carolina.

Somewhere in the Bering Sea, a Coast Guard C-130 helped a Coast Guard vessel by dropping enough spare parts onto the cutter Bertholf to enable repair of its helicopter. In India, the product tanker Pratibha Neera gave Vishakhapatnam Port authorities a major scare when it developed a severe list while loading. A problem regulating the loading-compensating ballast was the probable cause. 

Gray Fleets

Two officers and two others of the Indian Navy died when a floodgate collapsed at the naval dockyard at Visakhapatnam on that nation’s East Coast. In New York City for Fleet Week, a US Marine was struck and killed by a car about 200 yards from his ship, the helicopter carrier USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7).

A lieutenant commander on the Royal Navy frigate HMS Richmond was sent home from anti-piracy patrolling because of a seven-month affair with a leading seaman (a female). His father is a Rear Admiral and former head of naval training. The commanding officer of the US Navy’s Blue Angels flight team was relieved of his command at his request. He had led the team into a lower-than-planned maneuver during an air show at Lynchburg, Virginia. In Alaska, the commanding officer of the USCGC Anacapa was temporarily relieved of his command after superiors lost confidence in his ability to command. The vessel is a 110-foot patrol boat.

The Royal Australian Navy apologized to Britain, Malaysia, Singapore, and New Zealand because the submarine HMAS Decaineux, which was to play the enemy submarine during anti-submarine Exercise Bersama Shield in the South China Sea, couldn’t make it. The sub had to sit out the exercise in Singapore with “propulsion problems.” Making matters worse for the Ozzies was the discovery that just before the exercise the navy newspaper Navy News had written an imaginative and complimentary article on the sub’s daring performance in the exercise. High brass were not amused.

What does a nation do when it gets rid of its carrier-based aircraft but wants have a few carrier-trained fliers? It sheds its national pride and looks for alternative schemes. Since the UK has deleted its Harrier aircraft and its last aircraft carrier, naval fliers will serve on American carriers and be trained to fly F-18s, a plane the UK does not plan to operate. The flyers will form the basic training cadre when the Royal Navy once again has naval jet aircraft (probably a variant of the US Joint Strike Fighter F-35) sometime in the next decade. And thirty Royal Navy fliers will serve on the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle as soon as they learn enough French in a Parisian school. They will then join the air wing of the Charles de Gaulle for three years to gain experience flying French Rafale jets.

The French are also looking for win-win options. That nation has the one aircraft carrier while the UK has none but has two 60,000-ton biggies ’abuilding, although one will be put into storage as soon as it is completed. As a win-win option, French naval authorities have been pondering cooperative schemes in which that second carrier might fly the tricolor at times. As a French admiral explained, “It would be useful to each have a national carrier [and] then have an extra carrier – not as expensive and for training uses [only] – for UK and French use.” 

For his 90th birthday the Duke of Edinburgh was made the Lord High Admiral of the Royal Navy. Her Majesty had held the office of the titular head of the Navy since 1964 but passed it on to her husband as he celebrated his ninth decade. The office dates from the 14th century.

White Fleets

At Gibraltar, a sullage* tank on the North Mole exploded and that triggered a string of frantic activities. The first was to rescue the two men who had been welding on the tank’s top. They were badly burned and one had life-threatening burns. Also needing help were twelve passengers (mostly minor burns and one fracture) on the cruise ship Independence of the Seas, which was moored near the burning tank and the ship’s master then hurriedly took his ship to sea, leaving two passengers behind. Three tugs operated by a local company were among the first-responders. Two tugs set to work to help vacate the area of vessels - including fuel-laden bunker barges - before starting to spray the tanks adjacent to the fire to help cool them down. 
Meanwhile, the tug Egerton, crewed by off-duty employees who had run down to the port to offer their assistance, took on the task of moving a barge named Slop 107 that was docked next to the exploded tank and carrying fluids similar to what was in the burning tank. When the Egerton arrived at the scene, its crew found the company’s tug Sun Swale up against the quay next to the fuel barge, spraying water on the tanks on land. Getting the barge underway was not easy; Slop 1707 was tied up to two bollards and the initial plan was for someone to approach along the quay and cut the ropes, allowing Egerton to tow it away.
 But the fire intensified and it became too hot and too risky for land-based personnel to help.
 So the master of the Egerton pushed the barge against the quay, allowing two brothers to jump across and release the ropes. They were sprayed with water by the crew on the Sun Swale to give them some protection from the heat.

(*Sullage is usually defined as being gray water, the wastewater generated from domestic activities such as laundry, dishwashing, and bathing. In this case, sullage meant a mixture of oil and water. Sullage is not to be confused with ullage, the unused space in a nearly filled tank.)

The MSC Opera had to be towed to Sweden after an engineroom blast cause a massive power failure in the Baltic Sea. Readers know what “no power” means – no toilets, lights, air conditioning, or hot food – in short, much like steerage class was a century ago. At Copenhagen while leaving port, the Costa Magica, with a pilot on board, ran onto a sand bar without harming a single passenger. A tug pulled the ship free the same day.

A woman with symptoms of a stroke was heli-evacuated by an Alaska-based Coast Guard chopper from the Celebrity Millennium.

In the state of Washington at Woodinville, a tour bus carrying 46 passengers from the Sapphire Princess had mechanical problems. First, it ran across the community’s award-winning traffic circle, made it around the next traffic circle but not the third, and finally hit two cars along the way before being stopped by two large boulders. No one in the bus was hurt.

 

Norway was not kind to some cruise ships. While boarding passengers at Bergen, Norway, the Costa Deliziosa broke free, tearing off two bollards and a large chunk of the wharf. Fifty feet of the pier were destroyed and walkways plunged into the sea. After some cleaning up, the final one hundred passengers were boarded and the ship departed towards Geiranger. (140-180 cruise ships visit the beautiful fjord there during the four-month cruise season.) And at Kristiansand, the Oriana acquired a large dent in her stern after colliding with the dockside in Norway. The vessel was beginning to maneuver away from the quayside when a combination of high winds and fierce tidal conditions resulted in Oriana’s stern striking the corner of the solid stone dock, damaging a water pipe and a fiber-optic cable. Nobody was hurt and the ship was able to head to Southampton with 1,800 passengers on board.

In 2009, a woman slipped on a pool deck on the Carnival Pride and suffered a fractured kneecap and that required at least six surgeries. She sued, claiming that the cruise company knew the deck was slippery by nature and knew of other falls on the Pride and other ships in its fleet. She also claimed that she will need one or two complete knee replacements in the future. A US judge awarded her a total of exactly $2,998,155.70.

Those That Go Back and Forth

In Scotland, the £25 million ferry Finlaggan was the first new large ferry in the Calmac fleet in ten years and the first new ferry to serve Islay in forty years but the new vessel broke down with engine problems that cancelled its inaugural voyage. The problem was an “unexplained component failure of the port engine.” 

The Leonora Christina, one of the world’s largest high-speed ferries at 371 feet (113 meters), 1,400 passengers, and 357 cars, allided with a freshwater supply vessel at the entrance of the Suez Canal. The damage was not serious enough to stop the vessel continuing through the Suez Canal on its delivery voyage but it will arrive in Denmark with a depressing depression in its side.

The old (1965) ferry Grand Manan V made an unconventional and unsuccessful landing at its wharf at Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick. It hit a ledge and then its bow swung around and hit the pier. About 100 passengers and eighteen crewmen had to be helped off the ferry from its awkward perch on the ledge. Loss of the ability to reverse one engine was the probable cause. 

On Vancouver Island at Swartz Bay, a man committed suicide by driving his pickup truck at high speed through a barrier, down a lane leading to a loading ramp, and off the ferry’s ramp and into the water.

In Indonesia, at least 27 people died when a passenger ferry capsized off Indonesia’s Borneo but more than 70 people were rescued. The ferry was carrying four crewmembers and more than 100 passengers when it capsized and sank about two hours after the ship departed from Tanjung Dewa.

Legal Matters

In an unpublished decision, a US Appeals Court confirmed that the manufacturers of a recre

ational vessel and its engine were liable for injuries if a propeller blade cut and severely injured a swimmer. 

Imports

Refugees fleeing the recent “Arab Spring” series of revolts and overthrown rulers increased the already-massive illegal-immigration problem for other nations. Typical was the 100-foot fishing vessel Wave. With high hopes for better lives for those onboard, it set out from Tripoli in Libya with maybe 850 refugees from Mali, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh but ran aground and capsized off the Tunisian coast. Rescue forces were able to save 578 men, women, and children, and the reader can do the remaining arithmetic. The survivors were sent to a refugee camp at Ras Ajdir near the Libyan border.

Nature

Hydrophone-using scientists located some rare right whales in a region off Greenland where they were thought to be extinct. 

Southern California has the world’s first hybrid tugs, the purpose-built Carolyn Dorothy, and a converted sister, the Campbell Foss. European designers have been developing hybrid designs too and the Dutch tug RT Adriaan will be retrofitted with basically similar hybrid systems that combine main diesels engines, electric motors, and batteries. All three tugs basically use electric power except for tasks (high-speed transits or ship assist) that require more power, and that is when the main engines are started and used.

Metal-Bashing

She may look like an oversized, over-specified shrimp trawler but an as-yet-unnamed vessel and a 2009-delivered sister named Poncho will trawl for old tires, scrap metal, and any other scrap at the sites of decommissioned oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. US laws require that such sites be left clean enough to allow the typical Gulf shrimp boat to safely use its trawls.

Shell has decided to go ahead with construction of the world’s first Floating Liquefied Natural Gas facility. This “vessel” will process gas from offshore fields and cool it into liquefied natural gas. The FLNG facility will be immense, at 1,600 feet long and a displacement of about 600,000 tons (about six times the largest aircraft carrier). Some 260,000 tons of that displacement will be steel (as the Australian press release parochially notes, that is about five times the steel used in the Sydney Bridge). A South Korean yard will build what will be the world’s largest floating offshore facility.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

In 2010, Somalian pirates attacked 4,185 seafarers with firearms and rocket-propelled grenades; 342 seafarers were rescued from citadels (ships’ reinforced security rooms); 1,090 seafarers were taken hostage; 516 seafarers were used as human shields; and as many as 488 seafarers were subjected to abuse or torture. Currently, more than 400 mariners are held captive along with more than twenty vessels. Piracy increases the cost of international commerce by $12 billion a year. 

Piracy Somalia style, is big business with the actual pirates getting only pennies of each ransom dollar. There is even an actual stock exchange (at Harardheere and established ‘way back in 2009) that may list more than seventy entities that sell shares in pirate activities. As one participant bragged, “We’ve made piracy a community activity.” Somalia also has five banks eager and able to launder pirate money. Perhaps international sanctions are needed to complement the busy but relatively ineffective patrols by the warships of many nations?

Odd Bits and Head Shakers

The Felicity Tenacity, carrying 23,500 tons of propane, ran a gauntlet of vessel abuse during the recent Japanese tsunami. First, it broke free and rammed into the bulker China Steel Integrity, and was then battered in turn by numerous smaller boats and tugs before it hit a jetty, which opened a gash in its side. The vessel started taking on water into the engineroom but soon ran aground. It was repeatedly freed and then trapped again as tides came and went, and that sequence damaged and bent the rudder. The ship remained at anchor for at least two weeks before its dangerous cargo was discharged and the ship could limp to a repair yard. 

NOAA’s Office of Coastal Survey now uses Twitter to keep customers abreast of critical chart corrections and new chart editions. See www.twitter.com/nauticalcharts.

In May, the bulker Double Prosperity, which departed Australia for India with 65,351 metric tons of coal, ran aground on Bacud reef that runs along Sarangani Bay in the Philippines. The ship’s captain admitted to officials that he had moved his ship closer to the mainland merely to establish solid cellphone signals.

Other Shores - June 2011

The Administration, some members of Congress, and many in the media attack the oil companies for their greed but here are a couple of facts that may illustrate the unique financial conditions under which US oil companies operate. One: The oil companies pay a royalty of 18.75 percent to the federal government on all oil produced in the US. Two: Ethanol/biofuels receive federal support totaling $5.72 per million BTU while petroleum and natural gas receive a subsidy of just $0.03 per million BTU.

Driving its ships at high speeds (more than 18 knots) through pirate-ridden Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden and paying for piracy-related crew hardships cost shipping giant Maersk $100 million last year and that figure is expected to exceed $200 million in 2011 due to increasing fuel costs.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

On the Kiel Canal, the clipper bow of the container ship OOCL Finland swept the entire wheelhouse off the Russian container ship Tyumen-2. Two of four men in the wheelhouse ended up on the bottom of the Canal, still inside the upside-down wheelhouse. A tanker ran into the embankment while trying to pass the two ships. In Australia, Fremantle authorities were reminded that a 2004 engineering report had stated that the port’s “traffic” (vehicular?) bridge was structurally unsound when the re-fuelling tanker Parmelia 1 hit the nearby rail bridge. It appeared that an incoming tide contributed to the alllsion. No fuel was spilt and the small tanker was towed away after the incident. The container ship MSC Maria, en route from St. Petersburg to Rotterdam, ran into the concrete breakwater outside Kronstadt harbor at 10.8 knots even though the crew had dropped an anchor. Apparently the vessel experienced a rudder malfunction. In the North Sea, the standby safety vessel Grampian Defender lost all power as it approached the BP Magnus platform and the vessel slid under the platform. One bent mainmast.

 

In Australia at Gladstone, the coal- loaded bulker Dumun ran aground in the main shipping channel due to steering failure and a tug helped free it an hour and a half later. In the Philippines, the Panama-registered cargo ship Double Prosperity was en route to India from Australia with 65,900 metric tons of coal when it hit the Bakud Reef off Kiamba town. 

About forty nautical miles off the Kannur coast in north Kerala, a fire broke out in the engine room of the Orchids, a tanker bound for Cochin Port from New Mangalore with gasoline. The fire was immediately doused and there was no fuel or gasoline spill and no casualties. Off remote Tristan da Cunha Island in the South Atlantic, an explosion (probably fueled by an ammonia gas leak) resulted in a fire on the Taiwanese fishing vessel Lai Ching. Dead were five crewmembers, four went missing, and the remaining members managed to survive by jumping off the ship, getting into lifeboats, and waiting for help. They were soon picked up by the nearby Hsiang Man Ching. This vessel waited for Tristan da Cunha rescuers to take the eleven most-severely injured crewmembers and then headed for Cape Town at ten knots with thirteen slightly injured crewmembers. Meanwhile, the South African Navy Valour-class frigate SAS Isandlwana headed for Tristan da Cunha to assist in treating the seriously injured Taiwanese sailors. In the Faroe Islands, fire broke out on board one of the Islands’ largest fishing vessels, the 345-foot trawler Athena, which was being rebuilt at Runavik after a massive fire last October. The latest fire went out of control, a large explosion was heard, and the coastguard vessels Brimil and Tjaldrid were deployed to fight the fire. People in the local area were evacuated due to dangers of the smoke and escaping gas. (The vessel's ammonia plant contained 18 tons of ammonia.) An attempt was made to tow the ship out of the harbor but that meant passing a towing wire through the Athena’s bow-thruster tunnel underwater since it was impossible to make fast above deck. It was the third time Athena had been stuck by a large fire.

Off New Zealand’s South Island, more than 100 people are marooned for a while on the drill ship Noble Discoverer off the Taranaki coast. The rig, which had been drilling on the Ruru-1 exploration well on the southern boundary of the Maui gas field, was disconnected it from its wellhead as a precautionary measure before heavy winds hit. But, during the height of the storm, some of the vessel's anchor lines failed and the remaining lines were released, enabling the ship to be steered safely away from the location to find shelter in deeper water. Rolling heavily in the big seas due to its drilling derrick, the top-heavy vessel may have drifted within 1000 meters of the Maui-B production platform near the Tui oilfield to the north and the floating production and storage vessel Umuroa, laden with thousands of barrels of crude oil. While leaving a pier at Houston, the container ship Horizon Challenger clipped the dock and damaged a crane. Any problems were quickly and amiably resolved. Off Campeche, Mexico, 713 oil platform workers were evacuated when the flotel (“floating hotel”) oil platform Jupiter sank. The structure is taller than the water depth so much of the flotel remained above water. 

In the Fermer Baelt in the Baltic, a seaman was crushed on Solitaire, the world largest pipelay vessel, and he was rushed to a Norwegian hospital. While laying cables in Scotland, a crewman on the landing craft Forth Guardsman fell overboard and was trapped between the cable and the vessel. He died. Five miles off Slaughter Beach, Delaware, a crewmember fell some 20 feet into a cargo hold on the Greek oilrig Cosmic. Paramedics back-boarded the patient for transport. A State Police helicopter then lowered medical personnel to the ship. They and the casualty were hoisted up to the chopper, which went to the shore where the casualty was stabilized. He was then flown to a hospital where he was listed in critical condition. Lifeboat drills again took a human toll. This time it was in the Chinese port of Yantian and it was two officers on the containership Christophe Colomb who died when the release mechanism failed and the lifeboat dropped into the water. Ironically, the lifeboat was fitted with an IMO-recommended fall preventer. At Singapore, a Bangladeshi dockworker and the corpse of a companion were found in a container. They had been there for nine days with nothing but a pack of cigarettes and had entered the container for a post-meal nap. At Houston, a crane was used to retrieve an injured female stevedore from the hold of a ship, possibly the Norwegian-flag bulker Fermita.

 

Gray Fleets

The US Navy demonstrated a new laser weapon by tracking a small boat underway in rough water. First the laser set fire to one of its two 200-hp outboard motors and soon both motors were aflame. Worldwide, millions of video viewers silently cringed at the wanton destruction. The 15-kW laser was mounted on the destroyer USS Paul Foster (DD-964). The Navy plans to acquire a megawatt laser weapon that should cut through 2,000 feet of steel a second.

Up to 1,000 workers may be added to Newport News Shipbuilding's Virginia-class attack submarine construction program as production increases to two subs per year. But the Navy suspended the authority of its Norfolk command to oversee repair of Navy ships by private contractors, citing missing and flawed reports. A senior officer will provide technical oversight until confidence is restored.

The US Navy relieved the commanding officer (a female) of the USS Ponce (LPD-15) for poor leadership and failure to follow up on reports of sailors hazing other sailors. She was also charged with improperly handling a loaded weapon, thus endangering some of her crew. The executive officer (a male) was relieved for failing to support her. Both officers were “mustangs,” having started their Navy careers as enlisted personnel. 

The Royal Navy’s latest £1.2 billion nuclear submarine, the hard-luck HMS Astute, continued its trouble-attracting career. The hi-tech nuclear-powered attack sub was towed to the Faslane Naval Base after it suffered “a technical issue with hydraulics” that could have killed the entire crew. Reportedly, the hydraulics controlled the sub’s diving planes.

At Singapore, a civilian sub-contractor working on one of the ship's sea boats fell 13 meters from the side of the Australian replenishment oiler HMAS Success into the water. Three Navy sailors came to his aid, entering the water to bring the unconscious man to the surface, but he died a few hours later from his injuries.

White Fleets

Cruise fleet operator Carnival Corp filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court Eastern District of Louisiana seeking damages for “economic losses and damages” it claims to have suffered as a result of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The lawsuit named just about every firm or organization and person connected with the spill.

In Turkish waters, the cruise ship Melody lost power near the Akbas Light while transiting the Canakkale Strait and that gave its 946 passengers a thrill. The tug Kurtarma-1 soon arrived and stood by until the cruise ship’s engines ran sweetly again. In Alaska, the 935-foot cruise ship Westerdam was maneuvering through ice near Hubbard Glacier ice in the vicinity of Yakutat Bay when it sustained damage approximately 15 feet below the waterline. The hull was reportedly not breached and no injuries or pollution were reported. The Westerdam continued on her voyage to Sitka,

In the Bahamas, a passenger from the Carnival Sensation was killed and another was seriously injured in a shore-side jet-ski accident.

How sanitary is your typical cruise ship? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rigorously inspects each vessel and assigns a sanitation rating. Anything below 86 is a fail. One cruise company averages a rolling 12-month average for all of its ships of 98.7 and the Norwegian Epic got a 100 in its first test. A few cruise ships do get close to the fail level but none have failed since the Albatross, a private vessel, earned a 69 back in February 2010. Standards seem high. Dipping a pot in a hot sanitizing mix for less than 30 seconds is a typical no-no, as is storing strawberries in a plastic bag in the same chest freezer as raw meat. 

They That Go Back and Forth

In Libya, the passenger ro/ro Red Star came under rocket attack from government forces while helping to evacuate people from Misrata. At least five people died and there was widespread panic among those trying to board the vessel. The vessel, chartered by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), had waited offshore for several days because of the continuing fighting. 

At least twenty people drowned and five others were missing after a minibus carrying 32 passengers slipped into the Nile while it was disembarking from a ferry. The bus was returning from a traditional visit to a graveyard on the 40th day after the death of a relative of one of the passengers. In Bangladesh, the double-decked ferry Bipasha, operating at night on the Meghna River and badly overloaded with 200 on the 30-person-capacity ferry, struck a sunken vessel and itself sank. About sixty swam to shore but more than thirty died. 

The anchor of the Norwegian ferry Pride of Telemark (28,559 gt, built 1983) dragged a fiber-optic cable about 200 to 300 meters out of position while on a voyage from Spind to Lundevagen, and that left customers at Spind without broadband. The vessel required the assistance of pilot boats to get loose. The cable was destroyed and a new cable was estimated as costing a surprisingly modest 150,000 Norwegian Crowns (about $27,000).

In the Sea of Japan, the Russian ferry Michael Lukonin sent out a distress call during a storm, with waves of up to 2.5 meters high and with winds up to 15 meters per second. It had lost use of its main engine. The Sahkalin Shipping Company’s large Pioneer Kholmsk went to the rescue (as it often seems to do) and towed the disabled ship to Djigit Bay in the north of Primorsky Krai. There, repairs were made and the ferry headed for Korea, possibly to be scrapped. 

Somewhere probably in the Philippines (the news item was negligent in the completeness of its reportage of Who, What, Where, When, Why), the passenger ro/ro Mary The Queen (7,054 gt, built in 1985 as the Ciudad de Valencia) ran aground after “the vessel tried to head back to port due to big waves. Due to low tide, the vessel was maneuvering back to port but got stuck in shallow water about two km off pier 8.” That left at least 1,000 passengers stranded. Two tugs proceeded to the scene to tow the vessel off but had to wait until the high tide came in.

In the State of Washington, a multi-car collision on the Kingston ferry dock delayed sailing of the Spokane. One vehicle collided with a railing and that caused at least one other vehicle to crash. One person was transported to a hospital.

Boisterous Cook Strait separates the two main islands of New Zealand and several large ferries provide cross-Strait service. Last month, several ro/ro ferries made the news. Passengers on an unidentified Cook Strait ferry (probably either the Aratere or Kaitai) were distressed to watch a cow in a trailer parked on the top vehicle deck become distressed and then collapse and die. Another cow was later found dead in the same trailer. The stock company explained it had transported twenty loads a week for fifty weeks a year and had had no problems in the last three years. While en route from Wellington, the Interisland Line's ferry, the Monte Stello, veered off-course (possibly due to the helm being put the wrong way) and collided with what was initially reported to be an “object” just inside the Tory Channel. A company spokeswoman acknowledged that a brief grounding had taken place, the starboard propeller had been damaged, and that the ferry had continued on to Picton on one engine. There were truck drivers on board the ferry but no other passengers. Finally, at Wellington, the Cook Strait ferry Santa Regina was pushed by strong winds onto a berthed fishing boat at Glasgow Wharf. The FV had been for sale for many months and any damage to it seemed of little concern to anyone but the ferry suffered a long dent and gash on its stern quarter and was taken out of service for repairs.

In the US, determining a safe passenger load for a ferry was legally based on an average body weight of 160 pounds but a deadly accident or two demonstrated that humans now tend to weigh somewhat more so the US Coast Guard has raised the figure to 185 pounds.

Legal Matters

The Chinese bulker Shen Neng 1 ran aground on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef about a year ago and an accident report stated that the principal reason for the grounding that was that its new chief mate had had too little rest. He had wanted to make sure that the cargo of coal was loaded properly but loading took far longer than planned and he got only two and a half hours of naps in the 38.5 hours preceding the moment when he made a navigational error that put the ship aground. The accident left a scar three kilometers long in the Reef and it could take twenty years for Nature to repair it.

Nature

Fire ants can assemble themselves into a waterproof raft that can float for months. Trapped air helps provide flotation and enables the bottom ants to breath.

Imports

Since the outbreaks of unrest in North Africa, at least 25,000 Africans have used small boats to escape the troubles and to get a better life (ie, a job) but many of these migrants died in their attempts. Typical was a very small and overcrowded boat carrying 300 African immigrants that sank in the Mediterranean Sea near Libya’s coastline and broke into pieces only an hour after sailing. Dead were at least sixteen African asylum-seekers.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

Somalian piracy is getting nastier. Executions (including beheadings) and torture are now not uncommon (but such nasty deeds do tend to reduce the ransoms paid). In an example of spite, pirates held eight Indian seamen after their ship, the asphalt carrier Asphalt Venture, was freed after a $3.6 million ransom was paid because the pirates were mad at the Indian Navy for capturing pirates and putting them on trial In India. A pirate spokesman explained the situation thusly: “India has not only declared war against us but also it has risked the lives of many hostages.”

The Royal Navy has been teaching pirates it captures how to treat prisoners with dignity. It then usually releases these pirates as probably unprosecutable.

Metal Bashing

Brazilian iron ore mining giant Vale SA took delivery of the world's biggest ore carrier, a 400,000-ton capacity vessel built in South Korea by Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. The new vessel, named Vale Brasil, is the first of seven ore carriers ordered by Vale from the South Korean shipyard. 

Later this summer, Maersk should order another ten 18,000-TEU container ships from a South Korean builder and competitors CMA CGM and Claus-Peter Offen are discussing with builders about enlarging five 12,800-TEU ships on order to 16,000 TEU but the #2 company, Mediterranean Shipping, is not considering enlargement of any boxship it has ordered.

Odd Bits and Head-Shakers

The main function of the replenishment ship USNS Walter S. Diehl (T-AO 193) is to refuel warships while they steam alongside and so its after structure bears two captions. They may bewilder foreign warships but the port-side caption reads FULL SERVICE while the matching caption to starboard reads SELF SERVICE. 

Russia launched an urgent rescue mission after the nuclear-powered icebreaker Taimyr developed a nuclear leak in the frozen Kara Sea about 2,000 kilometers east of Norway’s border and was forced to abandon its mission. The seriousness of the event could be registered as a zero on the seven-point International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale – a level officially defined as “bearing no safety significance” but officials did look into the possibility of the situation becoming more serious. In any case, the incident was serious enough to force the mammoth vessel to abandon its mission and head back to the northwestern city of Murmansk using only its diesel engines. Another icebreaker was dispatched to help the vessel’s journey back to port. 

In the Indian Ocean, a Military Sealift Command replenishment tanker and a warship customer routinely changed course to improve sea-keeping conditions for an upcoming fuel transfer, and they ended up headed towards a small Arabian dhow. It nervously changed course to avoid the oncharging grey vessels. Soon after and perhaps coincidentally, a large yellow plastic bag, quite empty and with its corners neatly clipped off, was spotted. Nearby were the corners, still afloat.

Other Shores - May 2011

Maersk’s recent order for ten container ships carrying 18,000 TEU and options for twenty more was a “game-changer” according to one expert and if other firms don’t order at least 10,000-TEU ships by this summer, it will be too late for them. He also said a result of the Maersk initiative will be that many middle-sized carriers will be too small for the Asia-Europe trade and too big for intra-Asia trade. He expects many of the 8,000-TEU and 4,000-TEU ships will be scrapped.

The French have not given upon searching for the remains of the Air France Airbus that disappeared over the South Atlantic while en route from Paris to Rio de Janeiro in 2009. An autonomous underwater vehicle (a remotely controlled mini-submarine) located wreckage and some human bodies 12,800 feet below the surface. The search used three REMUS 6000 robots operated by a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on the French ship Alucia. It was WHOI’s third search for the downed airliner. The French cable ship Ile de Sein will continue the search for the plane’s two black boxes. (The Alucia is an interesting vessel. Built in 1974 as a heavy lift ship and launch/recovery platform for diving and submersible operations, the vessel was converted in 2009 into a long-range expedition yacht with luxury accommodation for up to 16 guests but it can still operate three submersibles, and retains a scientific lab and dive systems.)

If you are interested in drilling for oil, or chartering a drill ship, Transocean’s Discoverer Spirit, will cost you something like $520,000 per day. (No wonder any ban on drilling causes great anguish to oil companies.)

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Off the coast of Belize, the Panamanian-flagged, salt-laden Helga sank, taking with it three of its crew of eleven Cubans.

Somehow the soya bean-carrying bulker Oliva managed to run ashore on Nightingale Island at remote Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. The crew of 22 managed to get off safely but the Panamax bulker soon broke its back and 1,500 tons of bunkers started fouling seabirds, particularly Northern Rockhopper penguins. Bird-cleanup forces soon arrived from South Africa, some 1,500 miles to the eastward. Some 20,000 penguins may be affected. In the UK near the Isle of Wight, the 2,900-ton freighter Paula C ran aground on a shingle bank near the Needles, luckily during the lowest tide of the year (an “astronomically low” tide). The tug Wyeforce helped it get free. At Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, the large (2,403 metric tons) diving support vessel Bibby Topaz somehow managed to take a sharp turn as it passed the end of the harbor’s jetty and ran aground. This was in spite of an assisting tug and the presence of a pilot. The vessel later floated free and none of the 100 on board were injured but the planned voyage to the Gryphon oil field some 110 miles ESE of Shetland was deferred. In the Saint Lawrence Seaway, the saltie BBC Steinhoelft lost control and ended up blocking the Seaway, its bow on one bank and stern against the other. Passage of eight ships was delayed until tugs arrived at the scene. The ship had been the Beluga Fusion when it entered the Seaway the previous week, but was renamed, probably due to sale of the vessel.

About five miles south of the Isle of Man, the fishing vessel Lynn Marie and the coaster Philip met. The FV didn’t sink but suffered extensive damage to its portside bow.

It was kept afloat by pumps rushed to the scene by the Port St Mary lifeboat and HM Customs Cutter Sentinel while the Port Erin lifeboat stood by with another pump. The Port St Mary lifeboat then towed the FV, stern-first because of its damaged bow, to Port St Mary. The Philip was relatively undamaged. In Bangladesh at Chittagong where there always seems some maritime disaster is happening, the North Korean freighter Hyang Ro Bong ran into the anchored Bongo Lanka in the outer anchorage and ended up sitting on the harbor bottom with its bow still afloat. Its cargo of 13,492 metric tons of Pakistani rice was destroyed by incoming water while its bunkers started polluting local waters.

Unusual things happened: In pre-dawn conditions in the Philippine City of Cavite, the tug Hagonoy snagged a net from the fishing vessel Aleja and rammed the FV. One fisherman was missing but sixty-six other fishermen and tug crewmembers were rescued.


Gray Fleets
The short career to date of HMS Astute, the lead ship of a new class of British attack submarines, has been marred by numerous problems including a grounding that featured a collision with a rescuing tug. Last month, the sub was busy hosting various civic dignitaries and no one noticed when a rating donned body armor and camouflage and took an assault rifle from the sub’s armory; after all, he was obviously going on gangway guard duty. Instead, he started shooting, killing one of the sub’s officers and critically wounding another. One of the visitors, the leader of the Southampton city council, reacted swiftly to the flying bullets and wrestled the sailor to the deck.

The engine of a Marine F/A-18C jet fighter exploded on the deck of the carrier USS John C. Stennis during a training exercise about 100 miles off California. Four injured sailors were flown to a shore hospital while six others were treated on the carrier. The jet’s pilot was unharmed.

It was doubly embarrassing when the top of a steel mast on the destroyer USS Gravely snapped off just above the SRS-1 ring antenna because a video production team from the Discovery Channel was on board the recently commissioned (last November) warship.

The Japanese Self-Defense Forces were going to send warships and other equipment to the nine-day US-India Malabar naval exercise but decided that the needs created by the recent earthquake took precedence. Scope of the exercise was trimmed because important players such as the Japanese maritime surveillance aircraft were not available.

New Zealand and the US ships have not operated together since a 1984 rift over nuclear matters so the attendance of the New Zealand naval vessel, the sealift and amphibious support vessel HMNZS Canterbury, surprised many when it participated in the Pacific Partnership exercise with units of the US Navy, Australia, and France. The exercise, created in 2004 after the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami, aims at providing humanitarian, medical, dental, and engineering assistance to nations of the Pacific. The kiwi nation has also been invited to participate in Rimpac 2012, a major, US-led exercise featuring ships from many Pacific navies.

What to do with old aircraft carriers – to wit, USS Constellation, USS Forrestal, USS Independence, and USS Saratoga – is vexing US citizens. Some want to reef the ships as tourist attractions for sport divers and the Navy has sunk at least one carrier (the USS America) as part of live-fire tests. Others think they should be recycled, stating that each carrier represents 40,000 tons of recyclable steel, aluminum, and copper. In fact, the Navy may be accepting bids for disassembly in shipyards. Each scrapping job could save millions of taxpayer dollars and create 1,900 jobs for a year.

White Fleets
Off Norway, an emergency crew arrived by boat to take a sick woman off the cruise ship Ocean Princess but they dropped her stretcher into the icy (minus three Celsius) sea when the vessels moved apart. The British woman, suffering from internal bleeding, was picked up by the rescue boat in about eight minutes and made it to a hospital. At last report her serious condition was improving.

Forty kilometers off Queensland’s Gold Coast, an “unwell” woman had a better ride as she was winched by helicopter from the Rhapsody of the Seas and taken to the Gold Coast airport.

An English female worker on the Disney Wonder failed to report for her shift and was considered to have been lost at sea.

At Port Canaveral in Florida, the 88,500-ton Carnival Pride was buffeted by 85 mph winds. The company later admitted that conditions had “caused the ship to become disengaged from its moorings.” No word on whether any gangways fell but nobody was injured.

Those That Go Back and Forth
The operator of a ferry service from Cape Cod to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard fiercely opposed construction of a 130-wind turbine complex in Nantucket Sound but, now that the complex will be built, he recently announced that he would run eco-tours of the wind farm using a newbuild hybrid boat. (Tiny Denmark has 6,000 wind turbines and observers have noted that they tend to fascinate tourists and boost tourism.)

Somewhere between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, the new ferry Blue Puttees took several unexpected rolls in heavy seas and winds of about 60 knots when a stabilizer suddenly retracted due to low hydraulic oil level. Everything went flying and a crewmember had to be treated for cuts and bruises. Off the western shore of the UK between the Isle of Man and Birkenhead, a man on the Ben-My-Chree fell ill and a doctor suspected appendicitis and recommend he be taken ashore. An RAF helicopter obliged. In New Zealand while on a routine crossing of Cook Strait, a male passenger on the Aratere started having seizures. A medic was winched down onto the ferry’s deck from a helicopter, the man was stabilized, and both medic and patient were winched back up into the Westpac Rescue helicopter for a swift flight to a Wellington hospital. There, the man was treated and discharged.

At Galway harbor, three men were hurt when one of two straps snapped while a ship’s crane was lifting the former Aran Island ferry Clann na nOileain onto the cargo ship Thor Gitta, and the ferry’s stern smashed back about nine meters into the water. The men were aboard the ferry at the time of the accident. The Thor Gitta was at Galway specifically to collect the ferry and its sister ship, the Clan Eagle 1, for transport to foreign buyers. The accident happened less than a week after the 7,000-gt Pentanal broke free while anchored and ran aground. It had arrived in South Connemara to collect the two Aran Island ferries.

In New Zealand at Auckland, conservation authorities used three dogs and their handlers to check athletes getting on a ferry to nearby Rangitoto and Motutapu Islands for mountain-bike and running events. Object of the search? Rats. The islands are free of rats and mice and may soon be declared pest-free sanctuaries for endangered wildlife but a rat had recently been found in a van about to be ferried to nearby Motuihe Island, another of the several scenic islands outside Auckland.

In the Philippines in Cebu province , the 11,405-gt ferry Superferry 2 and a cargo vessel apparently tried to simultaneously squeeze through the entrance channel into the harbor at Talisay City but they sideswiped each other. None of the 435 passengers on the ferry were hurt but damage was substantial. Containers on the cargo vessel General Romulo were ripped open and their contents dumped into the sea. Local fishermen then enjoyed a short-term bonanza by salvaging cartons of Bear Brand powdered milk and selling them locally. This was more profitable than the fishing.

Nature
The 8.9 magnitude Japanese earthquake caused global positioning stations closest to the epicenter to jump eastward by up to 13 feet so Japan is “wider than it was before” and NASA scientists calculated that the redistribution of mass by the earthquake might have shortened the day by a couple of millionths of a second and tilted the Earth’s axis by nearly four inches. Another effect: water in the Edwards Aquifer in Texas was displaced about a foot as the underground rock formation was squeezed by the far-off quake. (This and other aquifers often reflect distant earthquakes.)

Videos showed numerous fishing vessels and coasters being driven ashore by the Japanese tsunamis and one report stated that the Panama-flagged general cargo vessel Victory was washed aground in the Port of Ishinomaki, the Panamanian general cargo vessel China Steel Integrity and the Panamanian Asia Symphony had grounded at Kamaishi, the Japanese bulker Shiramizu had grounded at Soma, and the Panamanian-flagged Shirouma was also aground at Haramachi. Thirty-one crew were rescued from the Italian Sider Joy adrift at the Ishinomaki Dockyard, the Panamanian Golden Grace was adrift at Kashima, the Chinese container vessel Long Mu Wang was adrift at Kushiro, and the Panamanian Coral Ring bulker collided with a berth at Onahama. (The 26,000-gt bulker Sider Joy had been launched at the Yamanishi Shipbuilding and Iron Works at Sendai and was being prepared for April sea trials. Damage to the shipyard and its equipment may mean the vessel, valued at over $20 million, could be scrapped. BTW, this vessel should not be confused with the smaller Maltese-flagged coaster of the same name.)

Floating debris (complete houses, containers, and whatnot) prompted the Japanese Coast Guard to warn ships to stay up to 90 miles offshore while passing the earthquake zone.

At Tampa, ospreys built a nest atop the end of a boom, thereby keeping the barge-mounted crane from doing profitable work – the owner estimated that a week's delay cost him $20,000. Under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, it is illegal to transport ospreys or their nests without permission. Working with the National Audubon Society, he had a platform installed at the top of an old utility pole. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission signed off on the relocation but the US Fish and Wildlife Service denied his permit because the nest wasn't causing property damage. Then the Audubon Society decided the federal government's regulations didn't address such situations and concluded the state permit and the Audubon Society's support were enough to move forward with the nest relocation.

Brazilian scientists announced that nano-sized fibers from pineapples, bananas, and other fruits might be used to reinforce plastics, making them almost as strong as Kevlar.

Three long-beaked common dolphins died of blast trauma during a naval exercise off California. The Navy stated that there were no mammals in the exercise area when it started the countdown but acknowledged it had spotted the mammals before the explosives went off but not in time to stop the exercise without putting humans at risk.


Metal Bashing
A former marina owner and sailboat racer fell in love with the discarded 3,500-passenger Staten Island ferry Gov. Herbert H. Lehman and bought it at auction for $162,000. Sugarplum fancies danced through his head of converting it into a floating dormitory for college students but the realities of up to $1,000 a day for berthing privileges brought him crashing to earth. An offer on eBay brought 9,000 responses but no takers. He now says, ”I like it but I can’t sell it and I start to hate it.” (Other former Staten Island ferries have been used for a methadone clinic and as prison ships.)

At Providence in Rhode Island, scrapping the old Soviet Juliet-class cruise missile submarine K-77 is proving to be tough. Already capsized and righted, the sub had a smoky fire when welders (more likely, cutters) set fire to fuel in the bilge and the fire spread to insulation. Firefighters had to call on the marine strike team since they couldn’t reach the sub from shore. Scrapping started last Fall and was expected to take three months.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Hiring armed security guards is increasingly popular with shippers but that may lead to more lethal violence, perhaps even “small wars,” predicted one expert. He envisions a quadrupling of hijackings and a change from opportunistic to must-accomplish-at-all-costs missions. Typical of today’s Gilbert and Sullivan anti-piracy policies was when members of the Dutch frigate HNLMS Tromp, flagship of the NATO anti-piracy force, were fired upon when they tried to board a hijacked dhow. Returning fire, they boarded and found two fatally wounded pirates and ten others trying to escape in a skiff. They were captured and the dhow and its rightful crew were escorted to safe waters. Waiting there was, the 1,066-TEU container ship Albedo, captured last November. It hoisted anchor and headed for the Dutch warship. The Tromp fired a shot across its bow and the Albedo returned to anchor. End of news item.

Odd Bits and Headshakers
In February, the 269-gt coaster Nordland 1 grounded on a beach on the northwestern German Island of Borkum right in front of some beach hotels – ”practically in their lobbies” as one person described the scene. The owner and the vessel’s insurance company decided to scrap the vessel where it lay but a salvor proposed a quick solution without pollution risk. He was granted permission and the ship was afloat after only eight hours of work. Greatly pleased were all hands, especially the German Water and Environment authorities.

Using the same technology that allowed the US Navy to differentiate between a whale and an enemy, retired US Navy sonar experts helped create a portable device to detect, diagnose, and monitor strokes in the brain. The device uses six accelerometers mounted on a head harness that hear the unique vibrations made by veins expanding and contracting, aneurysms wobbling, etc and send the data to a personal computer. The device was 97.3 % correct in identifying strokes and correctly ruled out 98.8% of normal patients. It can also separate patients with specific stroke conditions or vascular abnormalities into categories such as ischemia, hemorrhage, aneurysm, stenosis, and arteriovenous malformations. The device is ideal for ambulance and field work such as in combat and sports.

Many years ago, Auckland boasted the Aucklander, a most-modern steam tug, but the vessel had been delivered at the very end of steam’s ascendancy and the tug was soon taken out of service as being too expensive to operate. Moved to Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, it became a floating restaurant. Years later, it will host the 2011 NZ International Comedy Festival and all seventeen comedians will do their stuff below sea level in what was once the engineroom.

The UK is phasing out all its RAF and Royal Navy jump-jet Harriers, and their pilots (135 RAF, 50 Royal Navy) must find other jobs. The Ministry of Defense will give most (but not all) Harrier pilots a redundancy pay packet near the six-figure range (18 months pay plus £30,000). The overlying rationale behind the generous payout is that there are so many Harrier flyers that it will be impossible for industry to absorb all of them. But twenty or so trainee Royal Navy Harrier pilots must accept lesser alternative jobs (often involving flying a desk) with the Senior Service or leave with nothing.

An error unwittingly gave the crew of a ship unrestricted access to the Internet. The crew, who had already been notified of the company’s intentions regarding future Internet access on all its vessels, wrongly assumed that a new satellite unit had been provided for their unlimited use, and proceeded to download at will. The monthly bill should have been $3,800. Instead, the first bill was for $436,000 for three months of service.

Other Shores - April 2011

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

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

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

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

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

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gray Fleets

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

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

White Fleets

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

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

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

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

Those That Go Back and Forth

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

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

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

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

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

Nature

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

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

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

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

Metal-Bashing

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

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

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Bits and Headshakers

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

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

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

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

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