Other Shores - August 2012

Piracy attacks fell for the first time in five years but the number of seafarers dying tripled in the last two years.

Will the longshoremen on the US East Coast strike this fall? Many shippers think so. And the uncertainty created by a squabble between Oregon unions as to who plugs in refrigerated containers caused shippers in Idaho to use trucking rather than barges.

Congress mandated (but did not fund the $16 billion estimated cost) 100 percent scanning in foreign ports of all US-bound maritime containers. The Department of Homeland Security officially notified Congress that 100 percent scanning is neither the most efficient nor the cost-effective way to protect against nuclear terrorism so the July 1 deadline was deferred for two years.

The US Navy is going ahead with plans to convert much of its fleet to biofuels (currently at $26 a gallon) despite opposition from members of Congress who say it is the wrong thing to do at a time when the US military faces nearly $500 billion in budget cuts.

In a precedent-setting case, a former chief officer was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars after he claimed that he had suffered heart damage as a result of working 16 hours a day at sea and had to take early retirement at the age of 54.

The US was willing to lend Great Britain the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima if the UK lost use of its aircraft carriers HMS Hermes or HMS Invincible during the 1982 Falkland War. Guidance was provided by President Reagan who stated, "Give Maggie everything she needs to get on with it."

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

In the West Philippine Sea, the Filipino fishing boat AXL John was run down by a ship. A survivor said it had the words “Hong Kong” on its transom. Authorities said the Hong Kong-based bulker Peach Mountain was the only ship in the area but the survivor wasn’t sure it was the Peach Mountain that hit his F/V. The incident threatened to complicate the dispute over Scarborough Shoal, which both countries claim.

In the Sea of Japan, about 100 nm south of Nkhodka while en route to Okhotsk Sea for fishing, the Russian oceanic trawler/fish factory Ardatov caught fire. The crew put out the fire but all power was lost and the salvage tug Lazurit took the F/V in tow, probably for Nakhodka. In Olso Fjord, the three-masted superyacht Eos, valued at $150 million, caught fire while at anchor. All 18 on board were evacuated and the vessel was moved closer to shore for more-effective firefighting. The big yacht features the DynaRig sail system, described later.

A worker on the break-bulk (un-containerized general cargo) cargo ship Thorco Atlantic docked in the Houston Ship Channel died following a fall into a cargo bay. At Anchorage, Alaska, a security guard died when he drove his truck off a pier.

The Coast Guard rescued four fishermen from the 58-foot Quest. Three were in a liferaft and one was in the water when the rescue chopper arrived 17 miles off Westport, Washington. While 725 miles southwest of Alaska’s Dutch Harbor, the container ship Santa Rufina needed medical help for a 37-year-old ship’s engineer suffering a head wound and back pain. His evacuation was coordinated through the rescue coordination center in Bremen, Germany but it was an Alaskan-based Coast Guard chopper that made the flight after the ship had moved within helicopter range. Anther Alaskan chopper took a female passenger suffering from heart problems and difficulty in breathing off the Celebrity Century.

At St Louis, a worker on a towboat spotted a bass boat carrying five people pinned against a barge by the Mississippi River’s current. Getting into a small boat with a fellow worker, he went to the rescue. He fell overboard when one of the young children fell from the boat. The rescuer lifted the toddler into its mother’s arms but was then sucked under the barge. He died of his injuries but everyone else was safe.

AMVER (originally the Atlantic Merchant Vessel Emergency Reporting System) is a voluntary worldwide network of ships that will go to the rescue of mariners when requested by the US Coast Guard. (Other nations have similar systems and they cooperate nicely.) Some 40 miles west off the coast of La Playa, Mexico, a California yachtsman was whale-watching when a whale came up under (or onto – reports differed) his 50-foot sailboat Reflection and broke off the rudder and propeller and the boat started taking on water. He activated his EPIRB and three hours later a Coast Guard HC-130 was overhead. Meanwhile, the geared bulker Ocean Virgo was only 60 miles away and responding to an AMVER request for a rescue. The yachtsman, who lost his boat, was nearing the end of a twelve-year circumnavigation. Farther west, the Golden Eagle II, a Honolulu–based fishing vessel caught fire 316 miles northeast of Johnston Island. Alerted by two EPIRBs and a radioed report from an onboard NOAA fisheries observer, the Coast Guard asked the AMVER-registered Panamanian-flagged wood chip carrier Forestal Diamante to help. The 751-foot ship was 60 miles from the distress location and it picked up the seven on board the F/V. The bulker was heading for Japan but it might have dropped them off at Guam. (Incidentally, the Coast Guard had radioed a photo of the F/V so the freighter could identify it.) Last to be rescued by an AMVER ship were two men even farther west. They and their 23-foot skiff were reported overdue on a voyage from Namwin Atoll to Weno, Chuuk (the “Truk” of World War II fame). The AMVER-participating bulker Solar Africa was able to locate them and then sailed towards Chuuk to meet a local fishing vessel for a people-transfer.

Two sailboats returning from the Newport-Bermuda Race needed help. The Norwegian Star picked six off the 41-foot Avenir after it lost its rudder and a jury rudder system failed to work about 230 miles northwest of Bermuda. About the same time, a crewmember on the 42-foot Convictus Maximus suffered a head injury with possible spinal damage, and the sloop headed back to Bermuda, escorted by the Norwegian crude-oil tanker SKS Satilla. (In 2009 off Galveston, Texas, this 159,000-ton tanker ran over the remains of the mobile offshore drilling rig Ensco 74, sunk during Hurricane Ike in September 2008, and that allision badly ripped the underbelly of the tanker. No oil was spilt, however, because of the tanker’s double hull.)

It was a routine tow of a barge from Florida’s Captiva Island to Cancun but the tug (name never specified) sank due to Tropical Storm Debby. Explained one crewman later, ”The rain was so tremendous. It was like a zillion marbles…. We’ve lost power, our filters are clogged, our engines are running at less than half throttle and we have to abandon our load and find help because we are headed for the center of the Gulf of Mexico.” The two boarded a liferaft and it was their home for the next nine days. They ate fish and carefully rationed the raft’s emergency water supply. Meanwhile the Coast Guard found the barge, capsized but floating with its bow sticking vertically upward, and families began planning funerals. Then along came the tug Rikki S….

The container ship Algarrobo arrived at Auckland from Brisbane and Singapore after sustaining hull cracks in a storm off Australia. Inspection revealed finger-wide cracks in deck coamings on both sides of the vessel and so authorities ruled that the vessel must be completely unloaded before heading for an Asian shipyard for repairs. (This Algarrobo was built in 2009. It replaced an earlier oil/ore-carrier of the same name that disappeared without trace in 1990 while carrying iron ore from Chile for Japan.) In Denmark, the tug Skuld was towing a drill rig into Esbjerg when its engine failed and it collided with the rig and badly holed itself. Two other tugs involved in the rig-tow quickly lashed themselves to the sinking Skuld and carried it to an Esbjerg quay and the waiting pumps of local fire engines.

Gray Fleets

Off the US West Coast, the amphibious assault ship USS Essex, based in Japan for the last twelve years and overdue for a maintenance spell, was lining up for refueling when it collided with the replenishment oiler USNS Yukon due to a steering failure. Compounding the incident was “a breakdown in command and control, in bridge resource management, and in communication between the two ships.” Damage will keep both ships in repair yards for months. The commanding officer of the Essex was relieved of command for “loss of confidence in his ability to command.” No information was released about what happened to the oiler’s civilian master’s career.

The Royal Australian Navy will hire the Spanish Navy’s combat supply ship Cantabria to supply training-exercise support for one year.

The remains of the World War I British submarine HMS E14 were found only 800 feet from the Turkish town of Kumkale’s beach. In January 1918, the sub had maneuvered twenty miles through dense minefields in the heavily fortified Dardanelles – the narrow straits between modern-day Turkey’s European and Asian coasts, on a mission to sink the flagship of the Turkish fleet. Not finding it, the sub attacked a Turkish merchant ship. A torpedo’s premature explosion forced the sub to surface and Turkish guns sank it. The sub’s commanding officer knew his submarine could not reach the open sea and directed it towards a nearby beach in an effort to save the crew. The Victoria Cross was awarded posthumously. Earlier, during the Gallipoli campaign, the sub’s then-CO was also awarded the VC for sinking an Ottoman gunboat and a troop ship and disabling a warship while deep in enemy territory.

Royal Navy divers, highly trained in identifying underwater enemy mines, joined the Dubai Police search for a missing British Navy sailor who was “poured” into a taxi by shipmates for return to his ship but was never seen again. The search will focus on the waters around Port Rashid, the area where his ship, HMS Westminster, was berthed.

White Fleets

In May, 2010, the cruise ship Clipper Adventure ran aground on an uncharted rock shelf in Coronation Gulf, near Kugluktuk, Nunavut. No one was injured but passengers and crew were forced to stay on the stranded ship for almost two days until a Canadian icebreaker took them to Kugluktuk. It took more than two weeks before the cruise ship was refloated and taken to a shipyard in Poland for repairs. Now, the owners are suing the Canadian government for $12 million for salvage and repair costs, another $2.6 million for loss of business, and a mere $350,000 for other costs. The suit was based on a claim that the government knew about the ledge since September 2007 but failed to inform mariners. The captain claimed his chart showed 29 meters of water where there were actually only three meters. The government counter-sued for nearly half a million for expenses of the icebreaker Amundsen, which rescued the cruise ship’s 128 passengers, and the Sir Wilfred Laurier (a nav-aids tender and light icebreaker), which monitored the salvage operation.

Those That Go Back and Forth

A fire shut down BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train service between San Francisco and Oakland. Starting at a senior housing construction site, the fire spread to BART property, damaging track insulators, communications cables, electrical cables, and other trackside equipment. Several ferry companies put additional boats into service and, apparently quite smoothly, handled passenger loads up to five times the norm until rail service was restored.

In Europe, the fast ferry Condor Express experienced high winds while sailing from Poole to Jersey via Guernsey but when winds of about 65 knots hit the ferry near Alderney, three crew were injured and 25 cars were damaged.

In the UK, music-lovers hoping to attend the Isle of Wight Festival were stranded on three ferries that were unable to unload cars because massive rains had turned parking lots into mud baths. Vehicle traffic was totally blocked as far back as Fishbourne.

In Indonesia, the manifest of the wooden ferry Putri Ayu listed 27 people on board when the ship departed from Ambon toward Namrole in the neighboring district of Buru Selatan. But twelve survived, fourteen bodies were recovered, and another 44 were missing after the ferry capsized and sank in rough weather and high waves.

Legal Matters

Aircraft carriers do not normally participate in anti-drug operations but the carrier USS Nimitz, cruiser USS Princeton, and various US Coast Guard and Mexican Navy vessels recovered 19,000 pounds of marijuana dumped overboard by two small boats about 85 miles off the Mexican coast in international waters.

Nature

Sea levels along the US East Coast are rising three to four times faster than globally, with a 600-mile stretch from Cape Hatteras, NC to north of Boston being a hot-spot. (We’re talking about 2-4 millimeters per year vs an average global 1-mm rise). The hot-spot may be due to slowing of Atlantic Ocean circulation.

US Navy scientists have developed a solar cell that works in thirty feet (nine meters) of water. Sunlight does not penetrate far into water so ordinary solar cells using crystalline silicon are of little use. The Navy’s cells use gallium indium phosphide, which works best for wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers, the typical range of light found underwater.

A British university is designing the world’s first 100 percent fossil fuel-free sailing cargo ships. The propulsion system would use an engine fueled by waste-derived liquid methane (from pig manure, perhaps?) and the square-sailed DynaRig system. It has rotatable masts, fixed yards, and sails that furl into the mast and is used on the 305-foot (93 meters) Eos and the 2006-built, “proof-of-concept” 290-foot (88 meters) Maltese Falcon superyachts. (The traditional sail names are still used, with the Courses on the bottom, then the Topsails, the Gallants, and finally the Royals.)

Metal-Bashing

Salvage of the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia has started and a salvor boldly stated, "We aim to get it upright at the start of this winter and refloat in early 2013." The operation is expected to cost more than $300 million. Time-lapse coverage of the salvage is available at http://thelastsalute.eu during Italian daylight hours. The rock imbedded into the side of the wreck will be removed and made into a memorial to the 32 who died.

Asiatic ship scrappers were busy enough that prices offered were low. Several dry vessels only fetched prices in the mid-to-high $300s per ldt, with tankers fetching $20 or $30 more up to $400 per ldt.
In Texas, the 100-year-old battleship USS Texas, now a battle memorial at San Jacinto and flagship of the Texas Navy, was in danger of sinking from sudden leaks. The memorial was closed to the public while repairs were made. At Philadelphia, curators warned that the waterlines plates of the protected cruiser USS Olympia were dangerously thin and actually leaking. Commissioned in 1895, this vessel became famous as the flagship of Commodore George Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Imports

The empty Honduran-flagged coaster Jireh ran up on the shore of Puerto Rico’s Mona Island. On the vessel were five crewmembers and 79 undocumented Haitians. The island, only 38 miles from the Dominican Republic, is a popular destination for Cuban illegals because under the US government’s so-called wet foot/dry foot immigration policy, any Cuban who makes it to shore ("dry feet") on US property gets a chance to remain in the United States and qualify for expedited "legal permanent resident" status and, eventually, US citizenship. The uninhabited island, about midway between Mayaguez, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, is a nature preserve and the reefs around the island are popular dive sites and the island remained pristine since the vessel leaked no oil.

A small Haitian wooden boat carrying US-bound illegal migrants capsized to the south of Hawksbill Key in the Bahamas. Only five of 28 Haitians survived. The dead included the captain’s five children and he was wanted by police for questioning.

A Sri Lankan refugee boat carrying perhaps 200 people issued a distress call and then capsized off Australia's remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. At least ninety people drowned but the few survivors were wearing lifejackets. A week later, a similar refugee boat sank off the northwest of Australia, 107 nautical miles from Christmas Island and about 13 nautical miles from the previous sinking, and ten died. (In the first six months of this year, 62 vessels carrying 4,484 boatpeople were intercepted off Australia.)

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

It was not a good month for regional piracy-fighters. When the UAE government suddenly withdrew funding, a private firm providing training departed and the UN-encouraged Puntland Maritime Police Force, an armed counter-piracy militia operating inside the Somali state, ceased operations. More than 600 Somali soldiers had been actively targeting pirate activity. And, in a protest over pay, the Yemeni Coast Guard, trained by Royal Navy personnel in recent years, blocked four main ports, including Aden and the Red Sea ports of Mokha, Hodeidah, and Saleef. One authority sadly noted, “The YCG was becoming quite effective in providing support for international counter-piracy actions, particularly where its own fishing and other vessels were involved.”

Three organizations use ships from about thirty-six nations to fight piracy in the Combined Maritime Forces; EU NAVFOR (Operation Atalanta); and NATO (Operation Ocean Shield incorporating both NATO and non-NATO ships). Warships range from US aircraft carriers to a Seychelles’ coastguard patrol boat.

Odd Bits and Head-Shaker

China’s research submersible Jiaolong descended below 7,000 meters. "Breaking the 7,000-meter mark means China has obtained the capability of exploring 99.8 percent of the deep ocean with manned submersibles," stated the on-scene commander. Only twelve operational manned submersibles throughout the world can descend to 1,000 meters and even fewer can dive deeper. Before China's successful dives, only manned submersibles of the United States, Japan, France and Russia have dived below 6,000 meters.

Deep-six something and it’s gone forever, right? Not always. Bottom-scouring by cruise-ship bow thrusters at Seattle’s piers 90 and 91 uncovered a metallic object that police divers doing a routine security sweep recognized as ammo. They quickly surfaced, ”beating their bubbles to the surface,” as one later described it. A detailed and cautious two-year cleanup of the area, used by the US Navy from 1936 through the late Sixties, revealed much junk but only a few small explosive devices (fuses). Also found was much carelessly discarded kitchenware, some old (Navy), some modern (cruise ships).

At Port Newark in New Jersey, a Coast Guard boarding team on the Ville D'Aquarius heard knocking. It continued for six hours, gradually fading until it stopped. More than 160 containers were unloaded and searched by humans, dogs, and an X-ray machine but no stowaways were found and the ship was released to sail to Norfolk. Its last stop had been in Egypt.

The new superintendent of the US Merchant Marine Academy is a retired Army colonel, most recently a professor teaching international relations.

Other Shores – July 2012

The US Navy has been a leader in using green fuels and this summer an entire aircraft carrier strike group will be experimentally powered by 450,000 gallons of fuel made from chicken fat and other waste greases, algae, and perhaps even mustard seeds. But it may be the last time the Navy ever uses biofuels. The House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying any alternative fuel that costs more than a “traditional fossil fuel” – and environmentally friendly fuels cost about four times more than the traditional fuels made from “dirty” petroleum.

“It's cheaper to ship three bushels of grain – that would be about 180 pounds – from Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico by water than it is to buy a first-class postage stamp…. each barge holds 1,200 tons, that's equivalent to 60 semi-trailer trucks worth of material. Twelve barges are pushed out at a time. So, a towboat with a crew of 10 is pushing the equivalent of 720 semis trailer trucks. That's why it's cheap," explained a Midwest shipping expert.

When the engine of the bulker ID Integrity failed while well off Australia’s shores, greenies got publicly worried that the drifting ship would mess up the Great Barrier Reef. Australia’s premier wasn’t worried, though. “The green groups’ theory is that the more ships that you have going around then the more accidents you have,’’ he said. “If that was the case then people would be involved in far more plane crashes today than we saw 20 years ago, and clearly that’s not the case.”

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In the Solomons, the interisland freighter Solfish 001 sank and four days later a search plane spotted survivors in life rafts. Forty-nine were picked up by the Micronesian Pride.

In thick fog, the Japanese fishing trawler Eihatsu Maru plowed up onto Cape Town’s exclusive Clifton Beach and subsequently was driven farther ashore. An attempt by the Smit Amandla, one of the world’s most powerful tugs, failed when the tow wire snapped and another attempt failed when a shipboard fitting started to rip away. Installation of a special bracket solved that problem and the FV was eventually removed.

Although two tugs were assisting, the palm oil-laden tanker Stena Conqueror somehow managed to chew up a wooden pier at Brake (a small river port south of Bremenhaven).

An explosion caused by welding on the container ship MSC Idil left it drifting and listing off Puerto Rico. Hull cracks let in water but no oil escaped. A US salvage firm made temporary repairs and, eleven days after the explosion, the ship continued to Freeport, Bahamas for further assessments of the ship’s condition.

At Gdynia in Poland, three technical-types were injured, two seriously, when the container ship Stena Spirit allided with a container crane and caused it to collapse. The three men were unfortunate enough to be working on the crane at the time. A longshoreman was killed while unloading bananas at Port Manatee, Florida when a 5,500-pound crane basket fell on him. In Texas, at a Houston Ship Channel work site, a forklift was loading a truck when a pipe rolled off the forks and killed the truck driver standing on the other side of his vehicle. In Seattle, two workers were killed on the same day. One collapsed while power washing a large fishing boat and may have been the victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. The other was a forklift driver who was crushed between a forklift and a container. In British Columbia’s famed and feared Skookumchuck Narrows, where water levels can differ by two meters from one end to the other and currents can exceed 19 mph, two female volunteers died when a Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue rigid-bottom inflatable flipped during a training session. They were trapped underneath. Two male trainees were saved by a nearby boat.

White Fleets
In Wenzhou City, part of China’s Zhejiang Province, four tugboats were pulling the newbuild floating hotel No. 7 Mingzhu Cruise when it grazed the underside of the Wenzhou Highway Bridge, setting the suspension central span swaying. The master later admitted that he had forgotten to take into consideration the lack of passengers and the high tide. The unpowered, seven-deck (seven story?) vessel suffered damage to its two funnels.

Miss the newly compulsory pre-sailing muster drill on a cruise ship now and you will be sent ashore. Even if you are 90 and your wife is 84. Happened on the Seabourn Sojourn recently. (She refused to attend because “she had done it before.”)

Those That Go Back and Forth
At Poole in Dorset, the owner of the small motorboat Katie Emma dropped off his son and a male friend onto the Sandbanks chain ferry to make free use of its toilets. When the engine of the small craft failed, a strong tide threatened to suck it under the ferry and a girlfriend became stranded on a narrow ledge on the ferry. The Poole inshore lifeboat came to the rescue, she was coaxed off her perch, and one assumes the boys weren’t left on the ferry.

It took a barge-mounted crane to remove the fast ferry Maverick Dos, which was completely out of the water atop the small Balearic Island of Sa Torreta. It had run up there at night while carrying 21 passengers from Ibiza to Formentera. (One was slightly injured.)

A woman jumped off the Seattle-Bremerton auto ferry. The ferry crew, well trained for such common events, quickly got her back on board and the ferry returned to Seattle and a waiting ambulance. At Quincy, Massachusetts, a tank-truck driver died after he opened a gate so he could refuel a ferry and the truck rolled back, pinning him between it and the gate.

In the UK, a mourning party was respectfully scattering the ashes of a deceased off the stern of the Shields river ferry when some ashes blew over nearby passengers. One protested to a conductor and was told to ”get a life.” The party had notified ferry officials before boarding the ferry.

Nature
Five non-West Virginians protested mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia by locking themselves onto a barge at Kanawa County, West Virginia. They carried a banner saying, “Coal leaves, cancer stays.” No word on whether the banner itself stayed behind when they were arrested for trespassing and obstruction of justice.

In Sweden south of Öland, Greenpeace activists boarded the icebreaker Nordica to protest Shell’s plans to drill oil wells in the Far North. The Nordica, under contract to Shell, was heading to Alaska to join sister ship Fennica in supporting the drillships Kulluk and Noble Discoverer that will drill five exploratory wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Odd Bits and Headshakers
The pilot in control of the container ship Cosco Busan in 2009 when it sideswiped a San Francisco bridge in heavy fog and caused a massive oil spill wants his license back so he can become a tugboat captain. So far, the Coast Guard has said NO.

The search for missing aviatrix Amelia Earhart resumes this summer with some US government support. The focus will be on a steep and craggy underwater mountainside to the west of the island of Nikumaroro, a former British colony that is today part of the republic of Kiribati. British colonial records in Fiji reported the discovery of the partial skeleton of a castaway who perished shortly before the island was settled in 1938. The site was dotted with the remains of small fires on which birds, fish, turtles, and even rats had been cooked. Previous research trips have turned up parts of aluminum skin from an aircraft, plexiglass from a cockpit, a zip made in Pennsylvania in the mid-1930s, a broken pocketknife of the same make as listed in an inventory of Earhart's aircraft, and the remains of a 1930s woman's compact.

An upside-down catamaran that washed ashore at Surfside Beach in South Carolina was identified as the racing sailboat Région Aquitaine - Port Médoc that had flipped while returning from a race to the Bahamas in December, 2010. The crew was rescued.

The stately row barge leading the Queen’s Pageant on the Thames was not as ancient as it appeared. True, it has eighteen rowers but it also has two electric motors. And it was launched only two months ago. Owned by a maritime corporation, its commodious deckhouse will see usage in royal occasions and corporate events.

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.