Other Shores - June 2012

Although imports of containers into the US rose by 7.3 percent in March (most of the growth was in furniture and car parts), experts predict that the second half of this year will have a very modest increase in imports.

Elsewhere, Israeli shipping line ZIM is reactivating two 10,000-TEU boxships, idle for months, for when ZIM resumes its Far East-Europe express service.

The new icebreaking anchor-handler tug Aiviq, built for use in Alaskan waters, was painted white and blue because natives told the builder/operator that animals in the region fear the company’s usual all-orange paint scheme.

Although the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia is under 24/7 surveillance and the ship’s bell was in 25 feet of water, it disappeared. (Obviously, an inside outside job!)

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

While crossing Elefsis Bay near Piraeus, Greece, the product tanker Alfa 1 sank after hitting a submerged object (probably the marked wreck of the City of Myconos). That was in March and since then the sunken tanker has been leaking oil through manholes, vent pipes and sounding pipes. Now, the remaining oil is being removed by hot-tapping the tanks. The sixty-foot tug Aquarius sank on the final leg of a voyage from Gibraltar to Plymouth but the crew had time to yell for help. That radio call was heard by the cruise ship Saga Pearl and relayed to authorities. Two crewmen were later lifted from a life raft by a French rescue chopper but a third man was apparently trapped inside the sinking tug.

At Jamaica, the British container ship MSC Brianna was allowed to continue its voyage after posting security because it hit the Kingston Wharves. In the Gulf of Mexico in the Aransas Pass Channel near Corpus Christi, the in-bound crude-oil tanker FR8 Pride lost power and drifted into the outbound jack-up drill rig Rowan EXL-1. The tanker’s forward ballast tanks were holed and it was towed to shallow water, where it was grounded to prevent further flooding. The rig suffered significant damage and was moved offshore where its legs were extended to the sea bottom while damage was assessed. The jack-up is capable of operating in 350 feet of water or more and drilling to a depth of 35,000 feet.

In New Zealand, the mate had been drinking the night before so he wasn’t exactly on the top rung when he stood bridge watch the next day. He failed to notice that the coaster Anatoki had run aground off Golden Bay. But he did ring down to the engineer to comment that the engine “sounded different.” (The incident was attributed to the absence of a bridge alarm system and the mate’s lack of adequate sleep.) In Italy, its pilot may have been aware that the vehicle carrier Hoegh Asia, carrying about 6,000 cars, drew 8.4 meters but he forgot that the channel to Livorno was only six-point-eight meters deep. The vessel met the bottom. Water levels on the Casamance River in Senegal have been low and both the small cargo ship Cap Saint George and the larger Dakar-Ziguinchor ro/pax ferry Aline Sitoe Diatta (whose master should have known the local conditions) ran aground.

A Single Point Mooring is a large buoy that enables connection of a sea-bottom pipeline to a ship. At the Ras Laffan oil and gas field off Qatar, twelve workers on the tug Al Deebel were conducting maintenance on an LNG SPM when there was an explosion. Seven workers died including the tug’s elderly English master. In India, the container ship Cap Norte had a fire in no. 4 hold while about fifty miles off the Mangalore Coast. The fire was under control by the time the fast Coast Guard boat ICGS Savithri Phule arrived. While docked at Hobart, the research vessel Aurora Australis had a fire in the ship’s laundry. Reportedly, an overheated tea towel in the dryer was blamed for the fire.

Three bird-watchers on the cruise ship Star Princess off the Galapagos Islands saw waving figures on a small fishing vessel and frantically tried to tell someone. But word never reached the bridge and the ship sailed on. By the time a commercial FV rescued the small boat two weeks later, two of the three Panamanian fishermen had died. The cruise company admitted to an apparent "breakdown in communication in relaying the passenger's concern."

US forces have been bragging about recent rescues of Iranian vessels in various forms of distress so it was nice when, despite international tensions and sanctions, Iran welcomed an airliner after it declared a medical emergency while en route from Dubai to Seattle. On board was a 52-year-old American man with heart problems. Medical facilities at Tehran stabilized him enough so that he continued his flight a few days later. In Alaska, a Coast Guard 45-foot Response Boat-Medium was out for night training when the nearby cruise ship Carnival Spirit requested medical help. The boat medevaced a 66-year-old female passenger.

The Hong Kong-flagged bulker Pacific Sea almost made it to San Francisco Bay but drifted to a stop 24 miles off Pt. Reyes. Two tugs towed it to Oakland for repairs. The Danish company A.P. Moller – Maersk Group is the largest container ship and supply vessel operator in the world and may be the maritime industry’s most-environmentally conscious firm. For example, its container ship Gerd Maersk recently broke down off Porto, Portugal. It was safely far from shore in 1,000 feet of water but the company hired the small tug Castelo de Obido to stand by even after the ship regained partial power. Maersk also sent out a larger tug to tow the 6,6000-TEU ship to port if its engineers couldn’t complete the repairs.

Gray Fleets

The Royal Navy will no longer provide frigates to the NATO anti-piracy forces off Somalia. Budget restrictions now make only two frigates available to cover everything east of the Suez Canal, and neither ship can be committed to counter-piracy efforts full time. And it is not yet clear whether the Royal Navy’s replenishment ship Fort Victoria will continue to support the 16-ship fleet after this summer.

The highest powers in the UK have changed their minds once again about which plane should equip the two aircraft carriers being built. First, it was decided that the carriers would carry the F-35B vertical-takeoff version of the US-built F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Problems with its procurement forced them to shift to the pure F-35C naval version, but that meant installing catapults and arresting gear – very expensive, probably too expensive. Despite “I-told-you-so’s” from the Labor party opposition, it now looks as though it will be no catapults but some jump-jets. Another background reason for the decision: the F-35C’s are too heavy to land on the French Navy’s carrier Charles de Gaulle.

The uniform head of the Royal Navy admitted that the government took a chance (“took a punt,” as he put it) when it demobilized HMS Ark Royal, its only carrier, and sold-off its fleet of Harrier jets. A carrier strike ability will not be available to the Brits until some time in the 2020’s, he admitted. (One can imagine long rows of crossed British fingers, all hoping that Argentina does not get feisty about the Falkland Islands again.)

A $3.5 million floating barrier or boom at Halifax, installed in 2007 to protect warships from terrorist attacks, hasn’t been able to withstand the harbor’s stormy conditions (particularly during the tropical storms that somehow reach the Maritimes) or the buildup of marine organisms. Structural deficiencies coupled with lack of a comprehensive maintenance program resulted in serious damage and the boom was removed last winter for repairs. (The boom’s specifications called for a minimum 15-year operating life.)

White Fleets

The small expedition cruise ship Plancius, built in 1976 as a Dutch oceanographic research vessel, broke down while moored at Grytviken on South Georgia Island in the Antarctic South Atlantic, some 2,150 kilometers east of Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of South America. Its seventy bird-watching passengers were taken to Montevideo on the small passenger vessel Ushuaia and a tug assisted the stricken vessel to a repair port. (Petrus Plancius was a 17th century Dutch astronomer, cartographer, and clergyman.)

The Allure of the Seas had a short-lived fire in an engineroom while en route from St Martin to Port Everglades. The ship’s high-pressure fog sprinkler system quickly contained and extinguished the fire, no passengers or crewmembers were injured, and the vessel continued sailing towards Port Everglades.

During its sea trials in the North Sea, the 77,034-ton newbuild cruise ship AIDAmar ingested flotsam into a bow thruster and the ship had to return to Hamburg and a visit to a drydock.

Those That Go Back and Forth

A Coast Guard inspection revealed that the 195-year-old, not-for-profit Sistersville Ferry needed new life jackets. A local sporting-goods superstore donated 25 youth and 25 adult life jackets as well as one [each?] for the captain and deckhand. The ferry connects West Virginia and Ohio across the Ohio River.

As the big Alaskan ferry Matanuska made a 180-degree turn while docking at Petersburg, it sliced into a concrete dock, snapping dock pilings and damaging a crane. Then it attacked the second floor of a fish-processing plant, doing no good to a wall and outer walkways. The stout ferry suffered only minor dents and scrapes to its bow. An unanticipated current of 3-4 knots may have played a role. In Norway, the ro/ro Hordaland should have set sail for Aarsnes but never left the dock at Varaldsøy. A wire on the car ramp had broken and even a crane couldn’t lift it. In Japanese waters, a high-speed ferry, traveling at about 80 kph, probably collided with a whale off Kagoshima Prefecture and five people were slightly injured while the vessel was disabled and had to be towed. News reports made no mention of the whale’s condition. In Germany, two ferries collided in the Baltic seaport of Travemuende. The Nils Holgersson hit the moored Urd, holing it badly enough so that it sank and lay on its side, No spills. No injuries. The Philippine Coast Guard realized that the ro/pax Grand Star Roro 3, carrying 155 passengers and 13 vehicles, had run aground in the shallow part of Sorsogon Port when they noticed that the vessel was out of the channel and not moving. It was towed free. The Bass Strait ro/pax Spirit of Tasmania had a fire in the overhead of the Galactica games center. When two fire alarms sounded and smoke appeared, a contractor used a fire extinguisher. Next, the chief mate confirmed that the fire was real and activated the general alarm. A fire party in full breathing kit removed ceiling panels and killed the fire. A small fire in the engineroom of the ro/pax ferry Commodore Clipper, en route from Portsmouth to Guernsey with 220 passengers and 39 crewmembers, caused a disappointing return to Portsmouth.

Legal Matters

In a surprise out-of-court settlement, the eighteen survivors of the sinking of the Philadelphia Duck Boat, run down by a sludge barge on the Delaware River, will split $2 million and the families of two dead teenagers from Hungary will divide $18 million.

Costa Cruises settled with French passengers who were on the Costa Concordia when it was wrecked: 235 get €9,000 ($11,700) and can sue the company; 180 have already accepted €11,000 each in exchange for dropping any legal action; 20 have joined a class action suit; another 20 are acting independently, and 14 are asking for €50,000, admitting that they have not suffered physical injury but have post-traumatic stress.

The owners and operator of the supermax bulker Aquarosa were fined $925,000 each for oily water-separation no-nos. The ship’s third engineer had told US Coast Guard inspectors about the malfeasance and provided extensive evidence, even showing them where the magic pipe was hidden. The court awarded $462,500 to the whistle-blower and he may get another $462,500 if an appeal by the companies is denied. They claim he should have notified the company instead of the authorities.

The Seaman’s Protection Act gives seamen legal protection when they complain to the Coast Guard. The Labor Department said riverboat captains are required to report lost engines to the Coast Guard and they can lose their licenses if they don’t. One Louisiana captain complained to the Coast Guard about a faulty engine and his employer suspended him and told him not to make reports without company approval. The same problem recurred, he made a report to the Coast Guard, and he was fired. Then OSHA got into the act and the company agreed to pay $245,000 in pay, compensation, and attorney’s fees to settle the whistleblower case.

Nature

A major factor in salvage of the cruise ship Costa Concordia will be preservation of the seabed. An underwater platform will support the wreck after it is rotated and partially raised from the bottom. Once the hull is repaired, it would be floated away. Posidonia, a protected species of sea grass, will be removed and then replanted after the platform pylons are removed while protective casings around the pylons will shield their seafans and sponges.

Metal-Bashing

In Chinese waters, the 3,100-TEU container ship Bareli ran aground off the coast of Fuqing in March and salvors decided to divide the ship after tide-induced bending caused significant metal fatigue. The stern section was towed to Tanguy anchorage while the forward section remained firmly aground.

The main engine of the container ship Celina was so badly damaged when the vessel ran aground off Gangsøy just south of Maaløy (both locations are in Norway) in March that the vessel will be scrapped.

Scrapping of the Oriental Nicety (ex-Exxon Valdez) at Alang was delayed when the Gujarat Pollution Control Board and the Indian customs department denied permission for the ship to anchor and ruled that the ship must remain in international waters. Despite a pending court case, the Gujarat Maritime Board had given a green signal for the vessel to berth.

In Russia’s Far East, the ro/pax ferry Georg Ots fell off the blocks in a drydock at the Skavyanka shipyard. That punched two holes in the vessel’s bottom.

The military-industrial complex occasionally comes through! The nuclear-powered attack submarine USS Mississippi (SSN-782) was delivered to the US Navy 363 days ahead of contract schedule and more than $60 million below target cost.

Three pinholes and a hole slightly smaller than a golf ball were found in the hull of the Coast Guard’s newbuild national security cutter USCGC Stratton. The 418-foot vessel went into service last fall. No similar problems have been found in the other two cutters of the class.

Do not be surprised if you see an inland-rivers barge painted pink. Its name is Big Hope 1 and the color raises cancer awareness. Part of the barge’s profits for the next five years will be donated to cancer research.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

Worldwide, 102 incidents of piracy and armed robbery were reported in the year’s first quarter, with dangerously increasing numbers in West African waters. In total, 11 vessels were reported hijacked, with 212 crewmembers taken hostage and four were killed. A further 45 vessels were boarded, with 32 attempted attacks and 14 vessels fired-upon – the latter all attributed to either Somali or Nigerian pirates.

A Kenyan court found eleven Somali suspects guilty of piracy and sentenced each to 20 years in jail. A US court found a Somalia man guilty of kidnapping, hostage-taking, and weapons charges although he was a land-based negotiator. Explained the US Attorney, “He was among an elite fraternity of pirate negotiators – the vital link to any successful pirate attack. His skills were essential to obtain a ransom for those who attacked the vessel and the financiers who paid for the attack.” Prosecutors said he received at least $30,000 for his role as a hostage negotiator for the Marida Marguerite, which was ransomed for $5 million in 2010 after nearly two dozen crewmembers were held captive for about eight months. Eleven other pirates have been sentenced to life in US prisons. Three more are awaiting trial on murder and other charges that, if convicted, could make them eligible for the death penalty.

Odd Bits and Head-Shakers

Long-distance sailboat races on the US West Coast twice turned deadly. The 38-foot Low Speed Chase ran into the Farallones (aka Farallon) Islands after being hit by a big wave. Five of the crew of eight were washed overboard and two more took involuntary swims after the allision with the rocks. Five men went missing, two were helicoptered off the island, and a man with a broken leg was plucked from the yacht. Then, the 37-foot Aegean ran into one of the Ensenada Islands during the Newport to Ensenada Race and four were killed. Early reports of extensive fragmentation of the fiberglass yacht and head trauma on recovered bodies led searchers to initially believe that the yacht had collided with a large vessel but a detailed GPS track of the yacht showed the last pip coinciding with the shore of North Coronado Island. (Satellite reporting of each contestant’s GPS data is now required during many long-distance races.)

In the UK, a 14-year-old sea cadet died when he fell from the rigging of the sailing brig TS Royalist while it was anchored at Portsmouth. He was furling sails and unclipped his safety harness to help a nearby female cadet, who was having trouble with her bit of the sail. He hit a deck bin and the side of the ship before landing in the water and died of traumatic chest injuries later that day.

At Antwerp, an old ferry will become a city-operated swimming pool, complete with water filtered and heated each night. (Make-up water will be taken from the harbor and filtered through reed beds.) Available will be a 120-meter, Olympic-sized swimming pool, restaurants, bars, and meeting spaces. The Badboot (bathing boat) will double as a skating rink in winter. Open this August, admission will be four euros.

The mobile drilling unit Noble Clyde Boudreaux was anchored in 2027 meters of water, a world-record depth. Deploying and retrieving a drill rig’s anchors requires powerful tugs with immensely strong and large winches to handle the mooring lines, which are increasingly being made from ultra-high-strength plastics instead of wire.

This columnist’s headline pick of the month was “Removal of Capsized Costa Concordia to Begin in Italy.” Doesn’t that lead one to wonder where the salvage process will finish?

Sometimes Her Majesty has to redo a job. Queen Elizabeth recently opened an exhibit featuring the tea clipper Cutty Sark. She did essentially the same thing fifty-five years earlier. (The Cutty Sark was rebuilt after a bad fire and is now indoors and visitors can walk under the old ship.)

In Belfast Lough, a woman holding a child jumped off the Superfaast VII. She was recovered by a pilot boat fifteen minutes later but the nine-day-old child wasn’t in spite of an extensive search. After discussions with the woman’s family, police concluded that no baby was involved in the incident.

Other Shores - May, 2012

Italy is treating the cruise ship Costa Concordia stranding as a national disaster and it is important for other nations to stand back and be rational. So noted an industry technical expert.

Royal Dutch Shell announced that it was losing $1 billion a year due to drilling delays since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

How many seaports and their terminals will be able to handle the larger bulkers of the near future? We’re talking about ships of 200,000 dwt and more. The paucity of such ports and terminals will limit the available options for shipowners.

“Automation is not something that scares us, as long as employers take us along with them,” announced a California labor leader with regard to plans to introduce automated straddle carriers at one container terminal at the Port of Los Angles. (Such automation is common overseas.)

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In thick fog in the Dover Strait, the gas tanker Gas Arctic collided with the cargo ship Spring Bok. No “boom” and both ships, although damaged above the waterline, proceeded to Portland for inspection. At Belfast, at the harbor entrance, the 21,800-ton ferry Stena Feronia was hit by the small coaster Union Moon. The little one‘s bow took a beating, its master was found to be under the influence of drink and faced a possible two-year sentence, and he was fired.

In Danish waters, the combined chemical and oil tanker Terry ran aground off Drogden. Reason why? The master tested quite drunk. In Scotland, the Dutch-registered coaster Flinterspirit became stuck on Flodday Mor Island on its way from Sweden to Belfast. The second mate felt a judder and rushed up to the bridge; there was no one there. The second mate called the chief mate to the bridge and together they sounded the general alarm. When the master still did not appear, the second mate went down to his cabin where he was found in bed. The vessel was refloated on the next high tide. The Russian master fined £3,000 for failing to alter his course and prevent grounding the vessel, and additional £300 on another charge for failing a routine breath test three days after the grounding. (Life for the two officers on a coaster is brutal. Full-time work in port for both – mate loading cargo, master handling shoreperson interactions – and then they alternate on-duty watches with inadequate rest breaks when finally underway again, all repeated frequently. Drinking and misjudgments often result.)

The 2,000-ton coaster Carrier was loading limestone at the jetty of a North Wales quarry when it began to blow. The skipper tried to break away but the vessel was blown ashore against nearby riprap alongside dual-lane highway A55. As waves broke over the vessel, a Royal Navy helicopter hoisted five and lowered them to the highway (which had been closed to traffic) until the winch cable caught on a light on the ship. The chopper aborted, leaving a winchman on the coaster. An RAF chopper later rescued him and the last two crewmen.

An explosion wracked the chemical tanker Royal Diamond 7 near Mumbai, injuring seven, one of whom later died from his burns while being transferred from one hospital to another. On Lake Ontario, the newly purchased tug Patrice McAllister was steaming on its way to new owners in New York City when an engineroom fire gutted the vessel and burned the chief engineer seriously enough that he died in a Toronto hospital. An EPIRB was used to alert Canadian and US rescuers. Two Vietnamese fishermen got into a fight as the fishing vessel Jung Woo was leaving Montevideo. The fight caused a fire in the accommodations area and the FV had to return to port. Off the coast of Brazil, a tug towed the container ship Buenos Aires Express towards the Dominican Republic after an engineroom fire off the coast of Brazil. The 20-day tow probably meant that the powerless-ship’s cargo was a total loss.

On Denmark’s North Jutland island minutes before a train was to cross a bridge at Aalborg, the Finnish coaster Ramona struck it and put it out of commission for six months. The coaster was undamaged and neither the master or the bridge tender were drunk so they may have just miscommunicated. Trains stranded north of the bridge were sailed to Gothenburg from Fredrikshavn and returned to Copenhagen via the Øresund link.

On the Outer Weser, the engine of the container ship MSC Frederica failed and the vessel drifted on the German river for some time. Eventually, two tugs towed the vessel back to the quay. In New York, a crane on a barge towed by the tug Thomas Dann tore a fifty-foot hole in metal sheathing under the Brooklyn Bridge. The sheathing protects passing boats from anything dropped during painting operations.

Rubber tires make great fenders in port but are noisy seamates offshore. The New Zealand tug Tuahine used its EPIRB to request help when its steering broke down off Australia’s Cape Moreton and couldn’t be repaired. A report on the incident revealed that the tires had been stored in the lazarette and, during rough weather, one had chafed through a hydraulic hose, disabling the steering.

The container ship Gati Pride had been anchored off the Chennai coast for three months after the vessel was arrested on an order from the Madras high court because its previous crewmembers had not been paid. The ship was released after its owner paid up and hired a new crew. The new third officer fell into an empty hold and was killed. His widow promptly had the ship arrested, claiming it was unseaworthy due to long neglect. In Georgia at Savannah, a female dockworker was killed when struck by a forklift. She was a retired postal worker who had become a full-time member of the longshoremen’s union. An explosion in the engine of a tugboat in the Suez Canal killed three and injured a dozen others. Four Chinese college students were killed on Taihu Lake when a drunken boat operator tried cutting between a tug and barge. The towing hawser cut off the motorboat’s roof, which collapsed onto the students.

A muttonbird in New Zealand is usually the sooty shearwater (Puffinus griseus) or tītī (Maori), and muttonbird young are caught and preserved by Maori families for later consumption. Helicopters are often used to get to the remote muttonbird islands off NZ’s South Island during each two-month season but boats, often rickety boats, are still used. The 40-foot Easy Rider, without much in the way of basic safety equipment, set out with a family group in bad weather and was capsized by a large wave. A sole survivor was found clinging to a barrel in the ocean after enduring 18 hours in the dark, rain, and cold but eight others, including a 7-year-old, had died.

About 400 miles off California, the USCGC Bertholf took the two most-seriously injured crew off the 68-foot racing sailboat Geraldton Western Australia, one of ten yachts competing in the biennial Clipper Round The World Yacht Race. A big wave overwhelmed the boat, snapping off the steering-wheel pedestal and injuring four of a crew of eighteen. And, at the request of the US Coast Guard, the California National Air Guard dropped four paramedics and a Zodiac near the Chinese fishing vessel Fu Yuan Yu 871 some 700 miles off Acapulco. Then two special-ops helicopters, refueled in flight by a special-ops MC-130P tanker aircraft, arrived and took two badly burned fishermen to Acapulco where another MC-130P flew them to a San Diego burn treatment center. It was a mission the Coast Guard can’t do with its current equipment but, luckily for the fishermen, southern California is host to an Air Force air-rescue wing.


Gray Fleets
The British helicopter carrier HMS Illustrious was participating in Exercise Cold Response in Norway when one of four tugboats escorting the carrier into port at Harstad punched two sizable holes in the thin-skinned warship. After minor repairs, it continued on with the exercise in blizzard conditions for the next five days but then authorities decreed that the ship had best return home.

The large offshore multi-purpose oilfield support vessel Skandi Bergen was purchased by the Australian Navy but it will never see combat unless special insurance is purchased for its civilian crew. The 6,500-ton ship might be very useful in Australia’s humanitarian and disaster relief efforts but critics say the $130-million vessel was purchased for the Border Protection and Customs Service, is of no use to the Navy, and the purchase was a public-relations stunt anyhow.

In about a year and a half, the US Navy will test a humanoid robot firefighter named Octavia (why a female name here?) that can walk onto a fiery, smoke-filled compartment and throw extinguisher grenades or "man" a hose. She will also provide feedback to human firefighters safely outside the compartment.

Scotland votes next year on separation from the UK so should the Royal Navy place ship orders with Scottish yards in the meantime? One political party is calling for a ban until after the referendum. (It should be noted that the Royal Navy will have two replenishment ships built in far-off South Korea.)

White Fleets
In thick fog off Vietnam, the cruise ship Silversea Shadow T-boned a smallish Vietnamese container ship in Ha Long Bay in what the cruise company described as “a minor incident.” Both vessels were damaged and some on the other vessel, whose name was never publicized, may have been injured.

In Philippine waters, the Azamara Quest had an engineroom fire and smoke drifted into dining spaces, alarming the ship’s 1,000 passengers. The fire was quickly extinguished and, after drifting for 24 hours, the ship limped at six knots to Sandakan city in Malaysia's eastern state of Sabah on the island of Borneo. In the Caribbean, the Caribbean Princess arrived four hours late at St Maarten due to a propulsion-motor problem and the next two sailings were cancelled.

Damaged by an engineroom fire earlier this year, the Costa Allegra, one of the company’s smallest and oldest vessels, will be sold as-is or scrapped.


Those That Go Back and Forth
Officers on the cross-Channel ferry Spirit of France were forced to confine about 1,300 passengers in a secure lounge while 200 drunken students from two Manchester, UK universities, trashed the ship. They will not return from a European skiing trip on that ferry.

The Isle of Man ferry Ben-My-Chree returned to Douglas after an engine developed problems two and a half hours into the voyage. It wasn’t that the ferry was inoperable but the ferry’s master figured he needed two engines to berth at Birkenhead. Overnight accommodations and alternative sailings were arranged for the 40 passengers.

Since the small craft used by students to get to school had proved to be extremely dangerous, strictly supervised students of some schools in China’s Hunan Province now wear lifejackets as they board new “school boats.” These are working out better than the rafts and fishing boats previously used.

Locomotive operators must expect vehicles stopped on the tracks at crossings and, accordingly, ferry skippers should expect passengers to go missing. A woman told her husband that she was going for a walk but her “walk” was off the Condor Rapide somewhere between the Channel Island of Guernsey and Poole in Dorset. A search on board and of the sea until nightfall failed to find her.

In Myanmar, the Pathein Thu sank as it was about to dock at a jetty near the town of Ngapuda in the Irrawaddy Delta. Seventy-two people were rescued, ten died, and others were missing. In southern Bangladesh, the double-deck ferry Shariatpur-1 capsized after colliding with a coal barge and 142 people died. The Japanese ro/ro ferry Masagena was heading to its new home in Indonesia when it sprung a leak. Most of the crew was taken off but the master and chief engineer remained on board to fight the leak. No reports are available on what happened next but they may have grounded the vessel.

A Washington-state ferry company needs full loads as part of a federally funded research project to see whether the low-wake ferry Rich Passage I can carry riders through Rich Passage without damaging beaches or bulkheads so it is offering very low fares for five months.


Legal Matters
Drugs can be hard to trace. At Los Angeles/Long Beach, custom officials found twenty bricks of cocaine in the sidewall of an empty reefer container. The container originated in El Salvador with vessel stops in Guatemala and Mexico, and had been returned to the terminal after delivering a shipment of cantaloupes to a distributor in California.

Nature
Explorer and filmmaker (“Titanic” and “Avatar”) James Cameron bottomed at the 35,756-foot depth in the Mariana Trench in his 24-foot-tall Deepsea Challenger. He filmed and took samples and readings with a sediment sampler, a robotic claw, a "slurp gun" for sucking up small sea creatures for study at the surface, and temperature, salinity, and pressure gauges. His vessel is bullet-shaped and designed to spin its way down faster than conventional diving vessels.
Elsewhere in the Marianas Trench, scientists discovered an eco-system, including ovesicomyid clams, that feeds on mantle material such as serpentinized peridotite, or serpentinite. Yep! Rock-eating clams.

The Cascadia fault in the Pacific Northwest is an offshore subduction zone fault capable of producing a magnitude-9 earthquake that would damage Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, and Victoria, British Columbia and generate a large tsunami. Scientists will soon build and install a seafloor geodesy observatory above the expected rupture zone.

Oceanographers have found that the very-cold deepsea Antarctic Bottom Water has been disappearing at an average rate of about eight million metric tons per second over the past few decades. That is equivalent to about fifty times the average flow of the Mississippi River or about a quarter of the flow of the Gulf Stream in the Florida Straits.

In a Caribbean rift, other ocean scientists discovered the deepest-yet vents. They spout water hotter than 450°C more than one km above the vent openings, four times higher than other vents. The vents also host a new species of pale shrimp, which cluster in dense clumps (2,000 per square meter). The shrimp have a light-sensing organ on their back in place of eyes, and the vent output is unusually rich in copper.

Metal-Bashing
The ex-Exxon Valdez was sold for $25.8 million (about $460 per ldt) for scrapping (probably in India) 23 years after the crude-oil tanker caused the worst oil spill in US history. Now converted into an iron-ore bulker, it was renamed Exxon Mediterranean, SeaRiver Mediterranean, S/R Mediterranean, Mediterranean, Dong Fang Ocean and, most recently, Oriental Nicety. Also sold for scrapping, this time in Turkey, was the cruise ship Pacific Princess, better known to TV watchers between 1977 through 1987 as the Love Boat.

Imports
The tanker Hamburg and a Canadian helicopter rescued six of nine men on the 35-foot sailboat Tabasco 2 in deep trouble about 100 miles off Canada’s Sable Island. It is suspected that the boat was smuggling humans since the occupants were from Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia.

In 2011, at least 1,500 people lost their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean in search of a better world – and few governmental or private entities made any attempt to help those in trouble. One small boat left Tripoli during the conflict in Libya with 72 people on board. It needed help and a distress call was duly logged by an Italian rescue center. Several vessels made contacts with the boat but none provided meaningful assistance (although a helicopter did drop biscuits and water). Only nine people were alive when the boat drifted ashore back in Libya 15 days after its departure.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Employers and unions agreed that the territorial waters of Benin and Nigeria are a high-risk area so mariners venturing there will get double pay.

Peru joined most South American nations demonstrating solidarity with Argentina in its dispute with the UK over the Falkland/Malvinas Islands by cancelling a visit by the Royal Navy frigate HMS Montrose.

Odd Bits and Headshakers
The 164-foot Japanese fishing vessel Ryou-Un Maru, spotted floating crewless off British Columbia, was the first large object to complete a trans-Pacific transit after being set adrift by the tsunami created by Japan’s earthquakes in March of last year. The Canadian fishing vessel Bernice C claimed salvage rights to the FV but was unable to tow the abandoned ship. As soon as the Bernice C left the scene, the USCGC Anacapa used its 25-mm deck gun to sink the FV 180 miles off Alaska.

Those fighting shipboard fires often need shore-based assistance. Some time ago in the UK, national funding enabled fifteen counties to organize and equip quick-response Maritime Incident Response Groups, each consisting of about fifty specialist firefighters and medics. Teams of nine responders would have been helicoptered to incidents as far as 250 miles at sea. To save $535,000, in the national budget, the MIRGS were de-funded and now only seven local fire and rescue services might be able to respond to a ship fire, and that number is expected to dwindle.

Excavations at the site of a former army barracks in Plymouth brought up a grenade-shaped object. A bomb disposal team decided it was either the knob of a bedstead or the end of a curtain rod. But the bomb disposal team at Portsmouth had a juicier object to work on – maybe a WW II German V2 rocket! Some of it was sticking up in shallow water and had been used for years for mooring local boats. Digging revealed it was the last four feet of a V2—nothing explosive, just the rocket motor.

Mozambique’s northwestern Tete province has the world's largest untapped coal reserves, estimated at 2.4 billion tons. How to get coal to customers hit a hitch when the government rejected a proposal to barge thermal and coking coal down the Zambezi River due to possible flooding if the river was dredged for barges. One mining company still plans to use both barges and the Sena railroad, recently restored nearly thirty years after the civil disturbances that put it out of service, since it has already invested $4 billion to buy one mine and control of another mine.

Some bunker fuel originates in the Urals and passes through many hands before being pumped into a ship, perhaps at Rotterdam. Along that long path, nasties have been adding waste products not naturally present in the fuel, including chlorine and zinc. The illegal pollution has been found in about one third of the tanks of inland tankers.

A new shallow-water sidescan sonar system was able to lead rescuers to the body of a drowned sailor who had been missing for over 10 years.

In Louisiana, a foreign shipping company was fined $2 million for dumping oily water in international waters while a land-based environmental company was fined $5,000 for dumping 1,200,000 gallons of oily water into a canal near New Orleans. Same court but different versions of justice.

Other Shores - April 2012

When Iran threatened to get nasty, the US Navy passed carrier battle groups through the Strait of Hormuz. Seeing no military advantage in having European ships taking part, the US Navy preferred an all-American response. Great Britain wanted to participate but was turned down. The French insisted on participating and sent the frigate La Motte-Picquet. So the Brits decided that “Britain must participate too, regardless of the military importance“ and sent the frigate HMS Argyll, thus preserving “the Special Relationship” between the US and Great Britain, a relationship that has come under doubt during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Most of the world’s largest container ships serve Europe but some are being shifted to trans-Pacific routes, possibly to force increases in freight rates.

Outfitting the entire world fleet by the end of the decade with equipment to kill invasive species in ballast water is physically impossible and would cost $74 billion. So predicted one group.

It has been long recognized that the suppression of regional piracy largely depends on the existence of a stable Somalian government. It is yet to be created but, encouragingly, regional Somali authorities are now hiring private security firms to provide counter-piracy forces. Puntland is creating its own maritime police force thanks to substantial financial aid from the United Arab Emirates while the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia is forming its own anti-piracy taskforce with financing from international donors and a French sovereign wealth fund.


Thin Places and Hard Knocks
The Chinese freighter Xinyuanshun 6 was carrying 5,000 tons of pottery clay to the coastal Shandong province when it sank off the coast of Chongwu in Fujian province, drowning eight crewmembers and leaving another two missing. The capsize might have been caused by shifting cargo. In Greece, the small product tanker Alfa 1 capsized and sank west of Athens, possibly from hitting an old shipwreck. The master died while the other ten of the crew survived.

In Texas, the platform supply vessel Miss Pearl managed to run up onto the west side of the Sabine jetties until it was almost completely out of the water. The four-man crew suffered a variety of injuries from the sudden stop and was helicopter-evacuated to a local hospital. About 4,000 gallons of fuel were spilled. In Western Australia, while under control of a pilot, the product tanker Challenge Prelude ran aground at Dampier Port. (The port was created in the 1960s to handle iron ore shipments for Rio Tinto and it also exports salt, produced in nearby evaporation beds, and petroleum gasses.) The container ship MSC Carole ran aground off Jakarta for as-yet-unexplained reasons. The crew was OK and no oil was spilled but the first attempt to pull the ship off the reef failed.

In Belfast Lough, the coaster Union Moon T-boned the ferry Stena Feronia. The coaster master was drunk and both vessels will need extensive repairs.

In Finland at Hamina, the container ship Bianca Rambow experienced an explosion in the engine room. Nobody was hurt since the space was unmanned at the time. Life at Brazil’s Antarctic research station has been eventful. In December, a small fuel barge capsized and sank while being towed by four small boats in bad weather. None of the 10,000 liters of diesel fuel has leaked out. Then, a fire starting in the station’s generator room killed two navy personnel and forced helicopter evacuation of forty-four to Chile’s station. The burns of a third man were treated at Poland’s Antarctic station and then he was transferred to the Chilean station. In Ajman (the smallest of the seven emirates forming the United Arab Emirates), a short-circuiting industrial vacuum cleaner caused a ship fire that killed three and seriously burned another five workers.

The 3,000-TEU container ship MOL Maneuver collided with the 6,700-TEU container ship Zhen He while both were underway in open waters southeast of Hong Kong. No injuries, no oil spilled, some damage, and each proceeded on its way.

A female dockworker was killed at Port Newark when caught between containers being unloaded from a ship. At Portland, Oregon, a worker on the barge D/B Boaz fell into a tank and drowned. Responders used a camera to confirm the body was in the tank and then pumped out the toxic, corrosive lignin amine so two people in hazmat clothing could be lowered into the tank to remove the body.

In bad weather, an Iranian sailing dhow capsized in the Persian Gulf, triggering a search and rescue effort. The coastal patrol boats USS Firebolt and the USCGC Maui found one survivor and parts of the bodies (sharks?) of three others of the dhow’s crew of six. The bulk carrier Global Bay was more than 200 miles south of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, when it asked for help because it had a crewmember suffering from abdominal pain and possible appendicitis. The bulker was told to close towards Dutch Harbor so a Coast Guard helicopter on the cutter Alex Haley could make a mercy run. The man was medevaced and, after stopping at the Alex Haley to refuel, the chopper took the man to Dutch Harbor and a connection with a commercial medical flight. (The chopper was on the Alex Haley because the Coast Guard tries to maintain search and rescue-ready assets in the Bering Sea due to the harsh weather and job hazards experienced by those who work in that environment.)

And a Coast Guard helicopter flew more than 300 miles from Clearwater, Florida into Cuban waters to evacuate a 44-year-old man off the Carnival Liberty. He was suffering from abdominal pains. The ship, although American-owned, is Panamanian-flagged. Which may explain why Cuba didn’t raise a fuss about the intrusion of the chopper!

Gray Fleets
Three female US Navy officers were among several officers caught submitting fraudulent travel claims. The trio will no longer among the women recently selected to serve in the previously all-male submarine force.

Since drug use by sailors is up, the US Navy will start using Breathalyzer tests and random tests for synthetic drugs such as the synthetic marijuana Spice. The procedures should improve the readiness of sailors and Marines, the Navy claimed. The Navy will also end discounting cigarettes for sale at service exchange, raising the prices up to market levels.

Recently, the British Prime Minister pontificated that, "The Royal Navy is going to pack a huge punch in the future… we are going to have a very, very capable Royal Navy." But its only fixed-wing carrier (HMS Ark Royal) and all the Harrier GR9s capable of flying from it were axed, as were four highly capable Type-22 frigates. One of the Navy's two LPDs (amphibious ships) has been placed into extended readiness for three years and the Astute-class submarine construction program has been slowed. By 2015, the Royal Navy will have just thirty frontline ships, compared with nearly 100 at the time of the Falklands War in 1982.

The British nuclear-powered attack submarine HMS Talent has been experiencing exciting events lately. First, hydraulic shutter doors protecting the mast suddenly closed on the head of an engineer and he was trapped for a few minutes. He had minor injuries. Six days later, fire broke out onboard. Authorities refused to disclose the fire’s location.

In 1998, Canada purchased four mothballed diesel-electric submarines and the second-hand subs have been trouble-prone ever since. The four were originally purchased from Britain for $890 million but estimates put repairs since at close to the same figure. HMCS Victoria is currently doing sea trials that include firing torpedoes. HMCS Chicoutemi and HMCS Windsor are being refitted and will be in the water by the end of next year while HMCS Cornerbrook is in extended maintenance until 2016. The subs must soldier on to at least 2030 But good news; planners will start thinking about their replacements some time in the next four years.

A South Korean firm will build three submarines for Indonesia. The 1,400-ton diesel-powered vessels will have eight torpedo tubes capable of emitting torpedoes, mines, or guided missiles, and a crew of forty. Deliveries will be in the first half of 2018.

The Maverick air-to-ground missile saw combat in the Vietnam War, the Yom Kippur War, and other conflicts but has been out of production for more than two decades. Now the laser-guided version is back in production. It is effective against frigate-size ships, small moving boats, tanks, fortified personnel, and fast-moving maneuvering vehicles in excess of 70 miles per hour.

White Fleets
It has not been a good year for Costa Cruises. A major contributor to the Costa Concordia fiasco may have been that the master didn’t have his glasses with him and had to repeatedly ask the first officer to adjust the scale of the radar so the master could see. Or so it was revealed at the first post-wreck inquiry.

A generator-room fire crippled the Costa Allegra while more than 200 miles off the East African island of the Seychelles. First to arrive on-scene was the French purse-seine tuna catcher Trevignon, which took the cruise ship in tow. Two tugs arrived soon after but the French fishing vessel, possibly with thoughts of salvage, refused to transfer the tow. (It was later revealed that the Costa Allegra had a history of fire violations so an appropriate award might be €1 million.) It maintained a creditable six knots, a surprising accomplishment for a vessel designed more for speed than pull, but the three-day tow to Mahe took several hours longer than necessary. In the interim, helicopters delivered fresh bread, 400 flashlights, and satellite phones but the lack of electrical power on the cruise ship meant the 627 passengers tended to cluster on deck in any available shade rather than retreat to their non-air conditioned cabins, which were often smelly from unflushable toilets. A company spokesman did optimistically note that the six-knot towing speed of the ship “creates a slight breeze... making the situation more comfortable.”

And a third Costa cruise ship had smaller problems. A cigarette started a fire in a cabin on the Costa Voyager while in the Red Sea. A sprinkler quickly took care of the fire but the carpet needed to be replaced.

The cruise ships Adonia (3,250 passengers) and Star Princess (2,580 pax) were denied entry to Argentina’s southernmost port of Ushuaia “for political reasons” and had to continue on to Chile. Both had just stopped at the Falkland Islands.

The Queen Mary 2 had two power outages while voyaging from Port Louis to Fremantle. The first lasted for 25 minutes. The second, in rough weather, lasted about ten minutes. Passengers were inconvenienced only momentarily by the loss of lights and TV but the engines took more than eight minutes to resume propelling the vessel. “Routine maintenance” was blamed for both outages.

A crewmember jumped overboard from the Magic while the ship was about 100 miles southeast of Galveston, Texas in rough weather and at night. He was wearing a life vest with a strobe light attached so the Magic’s rescue boat was able to pick him up within 45 minutes.

Those That Go Back and Forth
In Scotland, strong winds drove the Oban-Mull ferry Isle of Mull into the pier at Oban. No injuries to the 177 passengers. A few days earlier, a strong gust drove the Caledonian Isles into the pier at Androssan. The master had the ferry tied-off to the pier until winds abated and about an hour later the ferry berthed and landed its 277 passengers.

Also in Scotland, a landslide before Christmas closed A890 so the highway was replaced by a six-car ferry. Then, motorists faced a 180-mle detour because the Glenachulish ran aground. The thrifty Highland Council had the ferry beached at high tide so repairs could be made.

In the Philippines, the Cebu Ferry had an onboard fire after leaving Batangas 60 miles south of Manila and two Coast Guard vessels responded. The ferry’s 43 passengers, including one child, were safely transferred to the ferry Supercat-38.

While enroute from Lae to Rabaul in Papua New Guinea, the ferry Kimbe Queen ran aground on a reef off West New Britain. The thirty passengers were evacuated by boats provided by the Hargy Oil Palm Company and the ferry was refloated later that day.

Greek bureaucracy and problems faced by ferry companies could mean that a number of Aegean islands will be without ferry service this summer. Fuel costs have gone up 44 percent since 2010 and are expected to increase, and passenger and vehicle traffic has been down.

In Lagos, a sudden but seasonal overabundance of water hyacinth, a pernicious waterweed, has been denying ferries access to their berths and thus commuters had to find alternative ways to get to work. Also affected were fishing boats. The government took actions to clear the affected waterways.

Legal Matters
In New Zealand, the master and second officer of the wrecked container ship Rena admitted willfully perverting justice by altering various ship’s documents after the vessel grounded. Both also pleaded guilty to operating a vessel in a manner that caused unnecessary risk. The master also admitted that he was responsible for discharging harmful substances from the vessel. Several years of jail time and a sizable fine seem to be in their near futures.

When the bulker Laconia arrived at Astoria, Oregon, a Customs agent thought the master was drunk and soon after the Coast Guard agreed and also found open alcohol containers in his stateroom. The master’s blood-alcohol level was well above legal limit for a ship operator and he was taken into custody. He was sentenced to a $500 fine and one-year probation during which he must stay out of US waters.

The 1989-built Global Star was detained at Plymouth, UK after port state control inspectors found 19 deficiencies, four bad enough so as to constitute grounds for detention. The ship jumped detention and authorities in Europe, North America and Egypt were asked to keep their eyes open for the Mongolian-flagged chemical tanker. Authorities at the Suez Canal may spot the ship since it was originally bound for Alang for scrapping.

Perhaps because he was towing two barges, the master of the Volga River tugboat Dunaisky-66 opted not to go to the assistance of the sinking river cruise ship Bulgaria when it capsized and sank in a storm last July. At least 122 people died. He was fined 190,000 rubles (about $6,000) by a city court.

Nature
Satellite tracking data suggests that most dolphins rescued during recent mass strandings in New England survived their ordeal.

Marine scientists and a commercial telecommunications company are exploring deployment of sensors along a deep-sea cable and using the cable to send data such as the size and direction of passing tsunamis. The initial project may use a cable route spanning 12,950 kilometers (8,105 miles) from Sydney to Auckland and across the Pacific Ocean to Los Angeles. Initial efforts may use seismometers, pressure gauges, and temperature sensors.

Greenpeace activists, including “Xena” actress Lucy Lawless, swarmed over the drill rig Noble Discovery at Port Taranaki, New Zealand, and set up light housekeeping atop the 53-meter drilling tower for several days. Eventually, seven activists were arrested, reportedly for burglary. The rig was about to set off for the Sea of Chukchi off Alaska where it would have drilled three exploratory wells.

In the Antarctic, Sea Shepherd activists managed to get a rope into the propeller of the “research” vessel Yushin Maru No. 2, slowing it to some extent. The anti-whaling activists also threw smoke-producing flares and bottles of butyric acid (these stinkbombs spoil any whale meat they come in contact with and make it almost impossible to work on the deck) onto the ship and it responded by feebly spraying water and issuing warnings. The “fun” lasted about two hours and nobody was hurt.

Metal-Bashing
ExxonMobil sold for scrapping its tanker S/R Long Beach, the last single-hulled tanker in the Alaska crude-oil trade. The 1987-built, 214,853-dwt vessel was reflagged to Tuvalu on January 31 and its name shortened to Beach. By now, it may have been scrapped, probably in China.


Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
A British researcher concluded that 30 percent of a typical ransom goes to the Somalian pirates themselves, 10 percent to their shore-based support, 10 percent in bribes to local communities, and 50 percent to bosses, often safe in foreign countries. But local economies have been boosted, the exchange rate is better, real wages have risen, and inflation is down, all due to hard work by pirates. Another conclusion by the researcher was that the revenue from a typical ransom was roughly equivalent to exporting 1,650 head of cattle.

A commercial anti-piracy center recently established in the UK by a private firm will be manned by ex-Royal Navy warfare specialists and intelligence experts. The center can warn clients, such as shipping companies and charterers, if their vessels are standing into peril. Its intelligence warnings can also save, so the company claims, an average of two to four days of transit time and the hire of physical security guards at $90,000 to $220,000 per voyage.

Conflicting accounts told how a six-man Italian military security force on the Italian tanker Enrica Lexie fired at a threatening pirate boat in Indian waters but hit nobody. Or maybe it was the Indian fishing boat St Anthony the military fired at, killing two fishermen. India arrested the tanker and two of the security force. The two countries then argued about where the two Italian marines should be tried.

Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
Archeologists are searching for thirteen privately owned British transport service vessels burned and sunk in Newport Harbor, Rhode Island when that port was blockaded by the French Navy in 1778. Somewhere among the wrecks is HMB Endeavour, British explorer Capt. James Cook’s vessel. Endeavour was later used as a Navy store ship and in 1775 was sold to a private owner who offered the vessel back to the British transport service under the new name of Lord Sandwich.

A recent Tanzanian government decision forced the ferry company that links Kilombero and Ulanga districts to carry only 20-foot containers and a maximum of 50 tons at a time. These restrictions are limiting shipments by Africa’s largest grower of teak. The company has a backlog of more than 100 containers and has suspended sale and export of some products.

If ships go into Arctic waters, a trade group wants to see them equipped with the crisis-management products of its members. These include a built-in system of fast oil recovery piping that would greatly simplify the removal of fuels from a stricken ship, magnetic patches to cover ice-made holes in hulls, valves that allow passage of water but not pollutants, and specialized submersible pumps.

Danish authorities noted that the small container ship Danica Hav was standing into danger at Sjællands Odde, a long peninsula on the northwest coast of Zealand. The ship didn’t answer radio calls so a rescue helicopter lowered a crewman onto the ship. He found the quite-drunk master at the wheel. A mate, roused from sleep, turned the ship aside minutes before it ran aground.

Other Shores - March 2012

The International Scene
An industry group said that the $45 million cut in the Corps of Engineers dredging budget could mean $10.5 billion in lost production and 33,800 jobs.

The owners of the stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia offered passengers $14,500 each if they promised not to sue but lawyers quickly calculated that a class-action suit might bring as much as $165,000 per.


Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Off New Zealand’s Coromandel Coast, the longliner Rebecca May began to “take on water very, very fast." The crew of three were rescued from a liferaft. The FV may have hit debris from the wrecked container ship Rena lodged on Astrolabe Reef not too many miles away. In central Philippine waters the Seaford 2 sank after hitting a floating log while heading for Antique province. Its cargo of 35,000 bags of cement failed to provide much buoyancy. In Turkey’s part of the Black Sea, the Vera radioed for help after its cargo of scrap metal shifted but the bulker had sunk by the time rescue forces arrived. Three saved, eight missing.

The small container ship Anke-Angela ran firmly aground in the Kalmar Strait between the island of Oland and the mainland of Sweden, 70 kilometers north of the Oland Bridge. Swedish authorities suspected that the two senior officers were drunk at the time of the accident and took them ashore for testing. In Ghana, the cargo ship Le Shan, loaded with dumper trucks, iron rods, and general cargo, ran aground because the master refused to hire a local pilot although instructed to do so.

On the Tennessee River, the 200-foot cargo ship Delta Mariner took out two spans of the Eggner Bridge. The vessel, which carries rocket components to Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg (California) Air Force Base, ended up anchored by the tangled mess of bent beams draped across its bow. The Coast Guard immediately closed a two-mile stretch of the River, commuters found other ways to get to work, and that weekend the Army Corps of Engineers closed the entire river when it released floodwaters from the Chickamauga Dam.

In Antarctica’s Ross Sea, the toothfishing Jung Woo No. 2 caught fire. Three died, and two seriously burned were transferred to the National Science Foundation’s research ship Nathaniel B. Palmer, which then headed for the McMurdo Base. Tank cleaning is normally routine but dangerous. Five crewmembers died and six went missing after an explosion sank the South Korean oil tanker Doola No. 3 north of Jawol Island near Incheon. It usually transports fuel oil but the crew was carrying out tank-cleaning operations after unloading 6,500 tons of gasoline at Incheon. The tanker sank in shallow water and was visible, its back broken. And, off Albania, the small product tanker Edirne sank about five kilometers from Durres after an explosion and fire. The tanker had unloaded more than 3,000 tons of fuel on the previous day. One body was found and at least two others were missing.

A stevedore acting as the ship’s boss was killed while working a ship at Pier J at Long Beach, California. He and his crew were unloading 20-foot containers with a wharf-based crane when the top 40-footer in a stack of six on the ship twisted and then fell. Everyone scattered but he couldn’t run far enough. At Immingham in the UK, a worker fell into the hull of the Panamax bulker Excalibur while shoveling coal and became fatally trapped under falling coal.

It took three Kodiak-based Coast Guard helicopters and one unsuccessful, weather-stricken flight to simultaneously rescue the crew of the grounded fishing vessel Kimberly and to pluck the survival-suited crew of the sunken fishing vessel Heritage from the water. And an Alaska-based Coast Guard chopper medevaced a 47-year-old man from the coastal freighter Coastal Trader while it was in Dead Man’s Bay. He was having trouble breathing. Elsewhere, a Coast Guard helicopter medevaced a female sailor off the amphibious warfare ship USS Bonhomme Richard while off the California coast. She was suffering from chest and back pains. Several hundred miles off Hawaii, the American-flagged container ship Horizon Reliance took three Canadian males off their battered 33-foot sailboat. In the dark of night (and wind gusting to 40 knots, 20-foot swells), the yacht slammed into the ship and soon sank. One man managed to climb a rope ladder but the other two drifted off into the night and ended upon the other side of the ship, Thanks to the strobe lights on their lifejackets, they were located but it took nearly an hour to rescue them – father (age 39), son (aged 9), and his uncle (aged 33) were safe. (Horizon Lines, operating twenty vessels, is the largest domestic shipping line in the US.)

A crankcase explosion forced the container ship Hanjin Osaka to accept a tow to Hakodate. Elsewhere, the unmanned, cargo-less container ship FAS Provence was being towed by tugs West and Izmir Bull when the condition of FAS Provence deteriorated quickly, with the vessel taking in water and listing. Since the vessel then posed a serious hazard to navigation, regular broadcasts alerted all ships in the central area of the Mediterranean of the still-floating peril. The container ship COSCO Yokohama lost about 29 containers overboard in the Gulf of Alaska while en route from China to Prince Rupert. Many other containers shifted during the storm. The dry cargo ship Ivan Vikulov became stranded in ice in late January some 60 kilometers (37 miles) off Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and then caught fire. As this report is written, it is drifting, crewless and still on fire, in heavy ice in the middle of the Azov Sea. It is one of a fleet of about forty icebound vessels waiting the arrival of icebreakers.


Gray Fleets
The US Navy has been testing methods for in-flight refueling unmanned aircraft from conventional tanker aircraft, using both drogue (Navy) and boom (Air Force) techniques. (Next, one supposes, will be unmanned tankers refueling unmanned drones?)

Eight sailors on the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard were discharged for hazing a fellow sailor, including choking him unconscious.

A US Navy diver was killed while operating from HMCS Summerside, a Royal Canadian Navy coastal defense vessel. He and the warship were participating in Bold Alligator, a multinational maritime training exercise off the US East Coast. The Summerside is described as “multi-role, multi-purpose, cost-effective” and is basically a mine-countermeasures vessel. Bold Alligator had ten nations participating, including far-off Australia and New Zealand.

The Royal Malaysian Navy lost the use of KD Mutiara, one of its two survey vessels, when a fire extensively damaged it while undergoing repairs.

The top 100 British employers of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in 2012 included the Royal Navy (in 77th spot) and the RAF in 56th position. Top employer was an accounting firm, with the UK’s Home Office as number two. The Royal Army apparently didn’t make the Top 100 list.

White Fleets
A very few hours after the cruise ship Costa Concordia departed Civitavecchia, the port for Rome, on a week-long Mediterranean cruise, the master decided to give everyone a thrill by repeating something he had already done several times. He would make a close approach to the Tyrrhenian Sea’s Isola del Gigliorderex. (It was later suggested that he was ordered to do so.) It was safe enough since the island rises precipitously from the sea and, besides, he had made similar passes before…
I have recreated what may have happened next: Whoever was in charge on the ship’s bridge was tardy in noticing a rocky outcropping and perhaps even a visible rock. Full right rudder swung the ship enough so that the deployed port stabilizer (a wing-like protuberance) missed the large boulder. But the maneuver pivoted the stern inward into the boulder. It rolled aft along the hull until it socketed itself in the hull. The 165-foot gash marking the boulder’s path was a mortal wound. Generators kicked off, either from the impact or flooding, and the ship was both dark and propulsion-less.

The Costa Concordia gradually slewed outward away from the island and slowed to a virtual stand-still. Somehow (did some heroic officer use the ship’s tunnel thrusters or were wind and currents the cause?), it made a sharp pivot in place and then slowly floated sideways back towards the island, where it grounded very close to land, wounded side outboard. The Costa Concordia slowly rolled inward until it was lying on its side. Strangely despite the earlier blackout, many lights on the ship were blazing brightly.

Over the next two hours, most of the 4,500 people on board managed to escape. But there was rampant disorder and confusion and thirty-two crew and passengers went missing. Not helping was the fact that the ship’s crew, notably including the master, failed to exercise much leadership and example. (But are senior stewardesses and cabin stewards really qualified to operate a lifeboat or direct passengers into a liferaft?) Then followed the usual statements, inquiries, posturing, and sensational revelations. Searches by divers were followed by removal of fuel oil and experts began to ponder how to salvage the ship. The Costa Concordia tragedy will be a subject of public interest for years.

Elsewhere, tourism was less dramatic. At St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, a tourist bus collided with mailboxes and a parked SUV before plunging over a ridge and some 65 feet down into thick brush. Thirteen tourists from the Serenade of the Seas were taken to a hospital and one with a broken hip stayed there with the company of a crewmember sent from the ship. A woman missed a step and fell down a flight of stairs on the Liberty of the Seas while at Port Everglades and she died of her injuries. Usually, a cruise vessel with a few sick passengers is allowed to enter a port but, based on radioed advice from a UK-based microbiologist, authorities at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands denied landing rights to the Star Princess because the remote islands were unprepared to handle an outbreak of norovirus. (About two percent of those on board were sick.)

Venice wants no more cruise liners. They bring air and water pollution (up to 30 percent of what plagues that city), and an additional two million more tourists a year into a city already under constant siege. And one resident complains that every time a cruise ship cruises by, her toilets overflow.

Those That Go Back and Forth
Because the Costa Concordia had departed from Civitavecchia near Rome, local travelers tended to be nervous. The ferry Sharden was buffeted by a violent northeast snowstorm shortly after departing Civatavecchia. It hit a breakwater, tearing an 80-foot (25 meter) gash above the waterline but none of the reportedly panicky 262 passengers were hurt. And somewhere between Active Pass and Tsawwassen in British Columbia, a middle-aged Asian jumped off the Coastal Celebration An extensive five-hour search failed to find him. In California, Taiwanese vacationers in a minivan on the Balboa Island Ferry went into the water when a black Mercedes with a stuck accelerator pedal pushed the minivan into the water. It floated just long enough for the family of four to be rescued.

Off Papua New Guinea, the ferry Rabaul Queen was travelling between Kimbe and Lae when it sent out a distress signal. Soon after, the ferry, with up to 350 on board, sank east of Lae, the South Pacific country's second-largest city and some 10 miles (16 km) from Finschhafen. Rescuers saved 238 and the number of people on board may have been lower than previously reported, perhaps only 300.

On its delivery trip from a Finnish shipyard, the new cross-Channel ferry Spirit of France had to follow an icebreaker through 100 miles of ice. The vessel joined her slightly larger sister Spirit of Britain on the Dover-Calais run. At 47,000 and 49,000 gross tons, the two ferries are slightly bigger than the Titanic’s 46,329 tons.

Legal Matters
FBI divers from the USCGC Cypress and the Canadian frigate HMCS St. John's recovered more than 6,700 kg of cocaine from a sunken semi-submersible. Scuttled by drug smugglers off Honduras, it lay 3,000 feet (more than 900 meters) deep.

In the UK, the German owners of the freighter Katja pleaded guilty and were fined £28,015 plus costs of £5,000 for overloading their vessel. As it arrived in Liverpool from the St Lawrence Seaway with a cargo of rock salt, a pilot on a passing vessel had noticed that the Plimsoll line and load lines were not visible and the vessel appeared suspiciously low in the water.

Nature
Neptune Canada is a 500-mile loop of underwater cable starting and ending at Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Multiple “observatories” feed back data on underwater ocean phenomena including audio effects. Listen to them plus the Japanese earthquake and more from worldwide stations at listentothedeep.com. (For those with national-security concerns, fear not. The sound of naval vessels is scrubbed from the recordings before they reach the Internet.)

The icebreaker USCGC Healey and the Russian ice-strengthened tanker Renda fought their way through 800 miles of tough Bering Sea ice in making an emergency delivery of 1.3 million gallons of fuel to Nome.

Fleet Air Arm mechanics found two black widow spiders on an aircraft recently back from a deployment in California. That in spite of the sterilization, or "bug-bombing" process, that aircraft and equipment undergo before returning to the UK. Not to be outdone, mechanics working on a 1964 Ford Falcon in Oxfordshire found two more black widow spiders, one under the gas tank and the other behind the dashboard. These spiders were donated to the Bristol Zoo. The car was imported from the US a year ago.


Metal Bashing
Recycling of large vessels increased to where scrappers on the Indian subcontinent were paying over $500 per ldt. And being scrapped for the first time are double-hulled VLCCs .

Imports
Singapore customs arrested five Filipino seamen for smuggling in ten packs of cigarettes even thought the men argued the butts were for personal consumption. A pack of Marlboro cigarettes in Singapore costs S$10 or around Rp 70,000, while the exact same pack in Indonesia costs only Rp 15,000.


Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Somalian pirates have erected a modern telecommunications tower in their stronghold town of Hobyo. That may give them better cell-phone communication plus limited access to possible-victims’ Automatic Identification System signals.

Identifying one Somalian pirate should be easy in the future. He has twelve toes, ten fingers, and the usual two thumbs. The polydactyl and thirteen other pirates were captured by the Royal Navy supply ship RFA Fort Victoria, part of NATO’s counter-piracy Operation Ocean Shield

Iran embarrassingly found that the US Navy is an effective substitute for the Iranian Coast Guard. The Coast Guard patrol boat Monomoy spotted flares and flashing lights in the Northern Arabian Gulf. The Iranian cargo vessel Ya-Hussayn was sinking from a flooded engineroom. The Monomoy’s small boat took two Iranian sailors from the vessel and another four from a liferaft tied to the dhow's stern. Later, after being supplied with water, blankets and halal meals, the Iranian sailors were transferred to the Iranian Coast Guard vessel Naji 7 (Some US Coast Guard vessels carry halal meals for Muslim mariners in distress.) A helicopter from the guided missile destroyer USS Dewey spotted a sinking Iranian fishing boat that two other vessels were trying to tow to safety A boarding team found one man on the Al Mamsoor while two other crew members had taken refuge on the assisting vessels. The three had fought flooding for three days. The rescue team gave the crew about 150 pounds of food, water, and other supplies (and apparently stopped the leak) before returning to the Dewey. The USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group responded to a “distressed Iranian fishing dhow” that had nine crewmembers on board. The Navy team was allowed to board the vessel and quickly repaired the engine. The Navy rescued six Iranian merchant marines from a sinking cargo ship. A Navy destroyer rescued thirteen Iranian fishermen being held hostage by Somali pirates…you get the trend here?

Danube River pirates are attacking passing tugs in Romanian waters. Armed with axes, knives and bars, groups of pirates board from small boats and steal everything they can lay their hands on – a crew’s possessions and cash, cargo, and vessel equipment including mooring lines, coils of towing lines, and power cables. In an attack on the Ukrainian tug Perm underway with barges, they threatened the skipper with a knife, and offered to toss a crewmember overboard. They demanded spirits, cigarettes, money, and fuel.


Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
The old vessels in the James River Reserve Fleet still serve their country. SEALs practice their “standard breaching” skills by blowing holes and blasting open doors during live-fire exercises on the Del Monte. The break-bulk freighter was laid down in 1968 as Delta Brazil and served in the commercial trade until 1984. After being renamed SS Del Monte (T-AK-5049), it became part of the Military Sealift Command's Ready Reserve Force.

Much territory, including Australia and Indonesia, was wracked by Tropical Cyclone Iggy. Iggy? Is that the best the cyclone-namers could come up with? (Actually, there are ten sets of names for tropical cyclones and hurricanes, one set per region such as Atlantic, Fiji Region, or Northern Indian Ocean.)

New Zealand’s wonderfully scenic Bay of Islands is an international yachting destination and a rubbish barge has served boaters’ trash-disposal and recycling needs until recently. But the barge was damaged in 2010 when a bollard was torn off, presumably by a large vessel trying to moor alongside, and it was later scrapped. The barge service had become unsustainable due to the lack of acceptance by users and the cost of emptying and maintaining the barge. Now, yachties are taking bags of rubbish ashore and leaving them indiscriminately, and recycled bottles are getting mixed with household waste. Four new land-based recycling/rubbish sites may solve this problem. Stay tuned.

In Afghanistan, an RPG smashed into the UK’s oldest military helicopter, Sea King ZA298 built in 1982, and it was badly damaged. But it was painstakingly rebuilt and now adds to its 9,000 hours of flight time. (In addition to the wound from a Taliban RPG in Iraq, it survived a two-foot hole in its rotor during the Falkland War, and was peppered with bullets while rescuing women and children in Bosnia. However, its service in North Ireland seems to been comparatively calm.)

The US Coast Guard Pipe Band (yes, there is one) wears the US Coast Guard Tartan. (All four services have their own tartans. The Coast Guard Tartan is predominantly black, white, and red.)

After the cruise ship Costa Concordia stranded itself on an Italian island, a press release from the owners quickly noted that loss-of-use of the wrecked ship would have a $90-million impact on earnings. The statement ended on a curiously optimistic note: "The vessel is expected to be out of service for the remainder of our current fiscal year….”

Other Shores - February 2012

Industry experts urged faster vessel scrappings as one solution to the overbuilding that has led to excess ships and low charter prices.

Large product tankers face competition from newbuild aframax crude-oil tankers with their clean tanks.
VLCC sailing speeds remained slow in the fourth quarter of 2011 due to high bunker prices.

New Zealand’s Ports of Auckland made a “best and final offer” to striking dockworkers. It was rejected.


Thin Places and Hard Knocks
The Turkish-flagged freighter Dogu Haslaman issued a distress signal from international waters between the Greek islands of Samos and Chios. The skipper of the half-sunk ship refused assistance from Greek authorities, saying he would wait for Turkish rescuers. (Greece and neighboring Turkey are at odds over Aegean Sea boundaries – including who has jurisdiction in search and rescue operations.) The 12-strong crew was picked up by another Turkish cargo ship. The offshore supply vessel Int'l Hunter capsized and sank 30 miles southeast of the Sabine Jetties in Port Arthur, Texas, after striking a submerged object. Four crewmembers and three passengers quickly abandoned ship. The Chinese cargo ship Changda 216 capsized off the northern Philippine province of Cagayan, killing two but thirteen others were rescued. Off Molasses Key in the Florida Keys, the 25-foot dive boat Get Wet started sinking. Two of the eight passengers were trapped in the cabin, both were unconscious when rescued, and one couldn’t be revived. The Cambodian-flagged fishing vessel Ginga sank in Russia’s La Perouse Strait, which lies between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. Three bodies were found while “two trawlers, a Russian helicopter, a rescue vessel, two steamboats, and a Japanese maritime safety department ship” searched for five possible survivors. The vessel could have been poaching in the waters on the Russian-Japanese maritime border. The crew of Russian drilling rig Kolskaya was waiting for a helicopter rescue when the rig capsized in a fierce storm about 125 miles off Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East. More than fifty of the 67 people on board died. (Only twenty should have been on board.) The rig was being towed by a tug and an icebreaker. (The rig wasn’t supposed to be towed in wintertime.) Somewhere northeast of Luzon Island, the bulker Vinalines Queen went missing on Christmas Day. One seaman was found on a raft six days later. The ship was carrying 54,400 tons of nickel ore, a known ship-killer when wet, from the Indonesian port of Morowaii to China. The ship’s owner hired ships and a helicopter to extend the initial four-day search by governmental agencies.

In spite of having a Ukrainian pilot on board, the Turkish bulker Gökay-K ran aground in the northern part of the Kerch Strait when the vessel’s draft exceeded the channel’s depth by 7.5 meters. Two tugs soon freed it. The Maltese-registered cargo ship TK Bremen ran aground off the coast of Brittany in high winds and torrential rain. The vessel, built in 1982, was too badly damaged to be towed off and the owners were given until April 6 to “deconstruct” the ship and restore the beach at Morbihan.
Thucydides (471-400 BC) supposedly wrote, “A collision at sea can ruin your entire day” and that truism is valid: Thick fog was blamed for the collision of the chemical tanker Charleston and the empty bulker Harvest Sun in the Houston Ship Channel just north of the Texas City Dike. The fog was so thick that Coast Guard investigators were unable to get to the scene. (A photo showed that the bow of a tanker was invisible from the bridge, and the fog persisted for days.) The container ship Hyundai Confidence “came in contact” with the coal-carrying bulk carrier Pacific Carrier 17.7 miles southwest of the South Korean island of Yokjido. Both heavily damaged ships remained stuck together while salvors figured out what to do next.

The Russian fishing vessel Sparta radioed for help after it was holed by ice in the Antarctic’s Ross Sea while fishing for Antarctic toothfish. The 48-metre vessel had a 30-centimeter hole in the hull 1.5 meters below the waterline and was taking on water and listing 13 degrees. It landed many of its crew of thirty-two onto the ice while efforts were made to pump out the incoming water. A RNZAF Hercules dropped pumps, fuel, and supplies after two seven-hour flights from New Zealand, and other vessels made efforts to reach the sinking vessel. The New Zealand vessel San Aspiring pulled out after its crew determined the more-than-470 nautical mile journey was too dangerous. The Norwegian vessel Sel Jevaer was only nineteen miles away but was hemmed in by ice and unable to proceed. Sparta's sister ship Chiyo Maru No. 3 slowly made its way toward the stricken vessel but remained days away and finally gave up. The Sparta’s owners chartered the big South Korean icebreaker Araon, which happened to be in a South Island port in New Zealand, and it reached the Sparta a week later, appropriately enough, on Christmas Day. A cement box inside the hull and an outside metal patch made the Sparta seaworthy, and it followed the Araon through 100 miles of ice floes to the open sea.

Three crewmembers of the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker Vaygach were killed and another was injured in an accommodations-area fire. The shallow-draft ship has 50,000 HP and is designed to break ice in rivers and estuaries. The vessel was “moored in the estuary of the Yenisei River near the village Karaul, located on the Taimyr Peninsula in the Krasnoyarsk Krai” and an extensive research revealed only that a krai is “a federal subject of Russia.” Got that?

The Dutch tug RT Leader was towing the barge H-332 laden with three used container cranes from Amsterdam to Rotterdam when one of the towering 300-ton cranes toppled into the main shipping channel from Rotterdam to Scandinavia. About a metre of the crane was above water but the new navigation hazard was buoyed-off anyhow. In heavy weather, the freighter Ostee lost two mobile homes overboard while voyaging from Hull to Gdansk so it headed for Den Helder and its anchorage to tighten lashings on three other mobile homes. In Holland’s Friesland province, the skipper of the inland container ship Fides, carrying 100 empty containers, misjudged how high water was in the Princess Margriet Canal. Several containers hit the underside of the Borgum Bridge and folded up. One container was left dangling after Fides forced its way through.

Gray Fleets
China’s homebuilt subs are loud. The subs, except for a dozen Russian-made subs, can be detected as far away as twenty-five miles in what is known as the “first convergence zone,” a ring where outward-bound sound waves pack close together. The subs include the two Jin-class ballistic-missile subs that are in service; both are louder than Russian Delta III-class submarines produced three decades ago.
The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard at Kittery, Maine sent about 350 skilled workers to its San Diego detachment and they completed an extensive Pre-Inactivation Restricted Availability on the nuclear submarine San Francisco (SSN-711) in 56,000 man-days instead of a scheduled 63,000-plus man-days, thereby saving the Navy $2.45 million. (The work consisted of alternations, repairs, maintenance and testing.)

After futilely using a helicopter and tugboats to battle a towering fire in wooden scaffolding over the Russian Delta IV missile submarine Yekaterinburg, naval authorities put out the fire by partially submerging the sub. Nine people were injured fighting the fire but there was no radiation leak. (The sub launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from the Barents Sea firing range as recently as July.)

Shortages of skilled manpower have been affecting the operational performance (particularly by its submarines) of the Royal Australian Navy so it plans to recruit surplus Royal Navy personnel. The Senior Service will eliminate 5,000 jobs, reducing its numbers to just 30,000 as part of a plan to slash the UK’s defense budget and many have the skills Australia needs. (In an interesting size comparison, the US Coast Guard had approximately 42,000 men and women on active duty, 7,500 reservists, 30,000 auxiliary members, and 7,700 full-time civilian employees as of August 2009.)

And New Zealand’s Navy is also attempting to recruit ex-Royal Navy specialists. However, submariners need not apply because New Zealand doesn’t operate subs.

The Royal Australian Navy broke a glass ceiling when it created its first female admiral. She joined the navy in 1991 as a lieutenant and is the first female sailor to take on the job of Australian Defense Force’s surgeon-general.

A retired Navy commander was sentenced to 3-1/2 years in prison for faking an injury in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon. He was awarded a Purple Heart and Meritorious Service Medal after he claimed he was injured by falling debris as he raced back into the Pentagon to help his fellow comrades. He also received $331,000 in compensation for claimed constant pain in his neck, headaches, weakness, and numbness in his left hand and elbow but, two months after the attack, he ran the New York Marathon.
Pink warships? The US Navy’s Type 2/3 Low Solar Absorbance haze gray paint often weathers to pink so the service will use a more expensive, trickier-to-apply, but better-weathering Type 5 polysiloxane paint.

White Fleets
Passengers on the cruise ship Costa Deliziosa may have thought they were about to start a round-the-world cruise from Savona, Italy but the first stop was in drydock No. 8 at the Chantier Naval de Marseille shipyard because of a major but unspecified technical problem. Many of the 2,000 passengers stayed onboard after port authority had hurriedly positioned gangways around the 320-meter drydock and arranged parking areas for tour buses and taxis. The Bahamas Celebration had an engineroom fire that was extinguished in due course but the fire left air quality so poor that the Freeport-to-Palm Beach cruise was canceled. The MSC Poesia ran aground at Port Lucaya near Freeport. Five tugs freed the vessel.

Those That Go Back and Forth
In eastern Indonesia, a wooden ferry carrying people home for the Christmas holidays sank in stormy weather. Most of the 100 passengers were rescued. At Singapore, a lorry driver was eating lunch with a colleague in the cab of his 10-ton vehicle when it started rolling off a barge. His friend jumped out to safety but he died when the lorry plunged into the sea.

Due to a propeller-pitch problem, the British Columbia ferry Coastal Inspiration rammed the dock at Duke Point at five knots, badly damaging the lower vehicle ramp. The ferry then transferred to Departure Bay so passengers and vehicles could get ashore. It will take several months to repair the dock and at least one month to fix the bow of the Coastal Inspiration because a new hinge has to be made in Germany, where the ship was built.

In Kenya at Lamu, a policeman tried to prevent an overloaded small ferry from leaving but was talked out of it by the ferry operator. Soon after, in the dark of night, the ferry collided with a vessel loaded with oil drums. At least 23 of 82 passengers died. A new water ambulance equipped with first aid facilities and oxygen tanks, a gift from an international donor, remained moored throughout the rescue – the government had provided no funds for fuel or an operator. (The worst ferry disaster was in 1987 when 4,386 men, women and children lost their lives in a huge fireball that enveloped the Philippine ferry Dona Paz after it collided with the coastal tanker Vector in the Sibuan Sea.)

A Seattle man made deliberate arrangements before jumping off the ferry Cathlamet as it ping-ponged between Clinton and Mukilteo. He mailed his house key to his parents and left his laptop computer in the apartment before quietly stepping off the ferry into the night. Passengers took flashlights and helped in an unsuccessful search.

Passengers boarded the Blue Puttees for a voyage from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland but bad weather kept the ferry in port and people on board for two days. The ferry company provided free meals and shuttles for passengers who wanted to disembark for a few hours and explore North Sydney.

Because the US Coast Guard recently raised the weight of the average adult passenger to 185 pounds from 160 pounds, the legal carrying capacity of a 2,000-passenger ferry will drop by about 250 people.
Who will harvest and process Florida’s crops in the coming years? A ferry service, starting later this year, between Tampa and the peninsula of Yucatan in Mexico, may help attract migrant workers. Currently, they are bused from Mexico to Florida, a trip taking between two and three days that costs an average of $220 per passenger. A ferry could make the 500-mile trip from the Yucatan to Tampa in about 28 hours at a cost of $190 per passenger.

In Hong Kong, popular demand meant a larger ferry was put into service to carry mourners wanting to scatter cremation ashes at sea near the West Lamma Channel or Tung Lung Channel. The free trips are operated twice a month and a funeral director is on board to assist the relatives organize memorial tributes.


Legal Matters
Federal agents were waiting when the tanker Sanko Venture docked at Corpus Christi, Texas. Two stowaways jumped overboard but were captured and agents found 94 pounds of cocaine and more than five pounds of heroin in two nylon bags.


Imports
Finnish authorities were surprised to find 160 tons of explosives mismarked as fireworks and surface-to-air missiles on the British-flagged cargo ship Thor Liberty. The ship had left the German port of Emden and stopped at Kotka in Finland to pick up a cargo of anchor chains before heading to Shanghai. The cargo was 69 legal (but improperly marked and packed) surplus German-owned Patriot missiles being sent to South Korea.

A boat carrying more than 250 people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey was heading to Australia in search of a better life but more than 200 passengers went missing when “the boat became unsteady 20 miles (32 kilometers) off Java's southern coast, people started panicking, causing it to sway violently back and forth, until finally, it capsized.” Forty-nine people were rescued, including two children, aged 8 and 10, who were found clinging to debris. Survivors said an unidentified group loaded them onto four buses and brought them to a port, promising to get them to Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Indonesian authorities arrested seven people in connection with the sinking and were questioning four others on suspicion that they helped organize the boat journey, Also questioned were three soldiers accused of receiving payment for connecting the migrants with boat owners.

Nature
Are you a scientist who wants to collect data in deep water but can’t afford the necessary mooring? There’s now a mooring-free boat-shaped buoy with a small sail. The buoy can station-keep a position within two miles in spite of rather severe weather. It can also be programmed to sail a 1,000-kilometer predefined course.

Back in May, a barge carrying 2,400 tons of brown sugar hit a bridge in Ayutthaya, Thailand and sank. The melting sugar created an oxygen-depriving pollution that killed millions of fish being raised in submerged baskets.

The geared-bulker Tycoon went ashore on West Australia’s Christmas Island. It ended up broken in half in the surf and broadside to the dock used to unload most of the island’s fresh food and supplies. The ship’s bunker oil endangered local sea birds such as the Brown Booby, Brown Noddy, Abbotts Booby, and Frigate Bird. The rare Abbott’s Booby does not breed anywhere else.

Further news on those surprising microbes that ate much of the oil BP spilled last year in the Gulf of Mexico: The presence of much gas (mainly methane, propane, and ethane) and cold temperatures (the little bugs prefer it to be cold!) were keys to their rapid consumption of the plume. Among unknowns to be studied is how this affected the oil spill.


Metal-Bashing
Indian ship-scrappers bought two double-hull VLCCs for $38 million.

A Japanese shipyard worker in Drydock No. 5 at Yokosuka Naval Base died following an accident involving a US destroyer’s anchor.


Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
In Bangladesh in Bhola province, ten pirates wounded in a gunfight with police were later beaten to death by a mob after police recovered the body of an abducted fisherman.

In the Gulf of Aden, the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker Nordic Apollo radioed that it was under attack by pirates in a small skiff and another vessel reported "suspicious activity by a skiff." A helicopter from destroyer USS Pinckney confirmed that a skiff was carrying the telltale equipment of modern pirates including several ladders, weapons, and fuel containers and the suspected pirates were seen attempting to cover their weapons with blankets and throwing the ladders overboard. As a boarding team approached, they ditched five AK-47 rifles, one rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and three RPG rounds. In the skiff were nine pirate suspects, "one grappling hook, 36 barrels of fuel, and 75 and 45 horsepower outboard engines." The American sailors deep-sixed one of the outboards – to keep the skiff from getting up enough speed to think of coming alongside another merchant ship – but left its crew enough fuel and water to return to shore.


Odd Bits and Headshakers
The mast of his 32-foot sailboat cracked and so the solo American sailor activated his EPIRB, thus ending his seventh attempt to round Cape Horn. He was 84 years old. (The Chilean Navy located him and arranged for the Japanese bulker White Kingdom to pick him up.)

Five hundred feet from its destination, a 130-foot-long 950,000-pound cylinder fell off a barge into 120 feet of water. The cylinder, about 12 feet in diameter and worth several million dollars, was on its way to BP's Cherry Point refinery in northern Puget Sound where it was to be a reactor to create low-sulfur diesel. Two large barge-mounted cranes lifted the cylinder, apparently still OK, and it was delivered to the refinery.

What may be the world’s oldest purpose-built aircraft carrier has been at the Fleet Air Arm’s museum at RNAS Yeovilton for careful restoration and preservation. The 1918 Thorneycroft Seaplane Lighter. once numbered H21, was one of fifty such barges ordered during World War I. Thorneycroft used H21 for years as a cargo barge before it was discarded to rust away on a bank of the River Thames. Towed by a destroyer, each 58-foot barge had a high-speed ship-shaped bow and a stern ramp that allowed launching for water takeoff and subsequent recovery of a Curtis H12 flying boat. Alternatively, a wooden flight deck allowed a Sopwith Camel fighter to take off. It either landed ashore or was ditched.

Technology developed to spot periscopes breaking the surface and missiles skimming across wave tops is now being used by British helicopters to detect Afghan camel trains, pickup trucks, and insurgents on foot dozens of miles away. Drug traffickers and Taliban terrorists are the main targets.