Other Shores - October 2012

Per his wishes, Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, will be buried at sea. The US Navy confirmed it would perform the ceremony, but would not say where, when, or from which ship or whether the burial will be a full-body burial or a dropping of ashes.

Commercial fishing is the deadliest job in the United States, topped by the fishermen in the Northeast's multi-species groundfish (cod, haddock, etc.) and Atlantic-scallop fisheries. They are 37 times more likely to die on the job than a police officer.

Because there are too many of the largest tankers (the VLCC) and competition has become cut-throat, owners lose an estimated $5,700 each day during the return voyage a tanker makes after each hopefully profitable Mid East-to-Japan voyage. (That figure ignores any benefits from slow steaming.)

Double hulls decrease the chances that oil and other contaminants can get into the sea. Required after enactment of Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (when many foreign experts scoffed at the US insistence on double hulling), they cost more to build and take up valuable cargo space. Experience soon showed that it was difficult, and therefore expensive, to control and repair corrosion damage in the intra-hull void spaces and it also became clear that the service life of double-hulled ships might be shorter than of equivalent single-hull ships. Recently, government attention has focused on the energy and air-pollution aspects, and OPA 90 may end up being rewritten.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

Off Cuba about 500 meters offshore between Mariel and Vista al Mar, the container ship Hansa Berlin ran aground. The crewmembers were evacuated by helicopter and were lodged in a hotel in Havana. In New Orleans, two tugs waiting for possible work quietly sank one night. A lone watchman escaped safely. The owner is a marine-salvage firm and will probably use one of its derrick barges to refloat the two tugs. In Chile, the bulker Ocean Breeze went ashore after its anchor chain broke. Parallel to the beach, the stranded ship provided spectators with spectacular sights as surf-created spray spouted many times higher than the mast tops.

At Singapore, the bulk carrier Sunny Horizon collided with the LPG gas carrier DL Salvia in the Temasek Fairway, about 700 meters east of Sultan Shoal. The bunker tank on DL Salvia was breached but less than 60 metric tons of bunker escaped.

When the bulker Lucy Oldendorff arrived at Tauranga, New Zealand, the crew reported there had been a fire in a hold carrying palm kernels four days earlier but they had extinguished it with CO2. But smoke started coming from the same hold and so conditions there were monitored by infrared cameras and smoke detectors while the ship’s crew removed the palm kernels by crane. In the end, shorebased firefighters were needed. In a Croatian repair yard, sparks from welding started a fire on the crude-oil tanker Nordic Passat and three welders had to be rescued by firefighters. At Lyttelton (the port for Christchurch) in New Zealand, firefighters cut a hole in the side of the drydocked trawler Ocean Breeze to get at a fire inside. It burned for twelve hours and leaking ammonia remained a peril afterwards.

Alaskan Coast Guard medevacs are usually featured here but other Coasties were busy A chopper medevaced a young woman off the Carnival Elation some 250 miles south of Mobile, Alabama. Her kidneys had failed after missing a routine dialysis treatment. And another Alaskan chopper lifted the chief mate off the tanker Dreggen after he suffered a groin injury when his pants got “caught in a spindle.” (No further explanation was available.) But the Alaskan Coast Guard choppers were busy too. In one day they did two medevacs of mariners with heart attack symptoms on container ships. One was on the BBC Denmark originally about 585 miles southwest of Dutch Harbor and the next was on the APL China originally about 420 miles southwest of Kodiak. (In both cases, the ships steamed closer so as to reduce the range.) Then an Alaskan chopper took an elderly female off the Diamond Princess. She was showing signs of a possible blocked femoral artery. Elsewhere, some seventy miles off Cornwall in sea state 8, forty-foot (12m) swells, and atrocious visibility, a Royal Navy helicopter finally managed to find a 20-foot sailboat after searching for over an hour when the lone sailor lit off a flare. He had injured an ankle while trying to repair mast and rigging. In his haste to get off, he jumped overboard, and that did not make this rescue any easier. Closer to shore, the cross-Channel ferry Armorique and the container ship Maersk Patras stood by as a Royal Navy helicopter lifted the crew of the sunken Brixham-based fishing vessel Chloe T from a liferaft. In Switzerland, a survey boat with four aboard was mapping the Rhine River near Basel’s port when it ran into a Belgian container barge. A Swiss helicopter plucked three surveyors out of the River but one died of his injuries. In the Seychelles, the three-man crew of the ferry Le Cerf were rescued by a searching yacht four hours after the ferry sank. They had used their cell phones to direct rescuers but it was the glare of a searchlight that helped make the final connection.

Typhoon Bolaven broke the empty bulker Pacific Carrier in half while it was anchored in South Korea. The vessel was in lay-up after a collision with the container ship Hyundai Confidence last year.

In Baltimore, the tanker Wawasan Ruby was heading for a berth in Curtis Bay when it hit a coal-loading structure. The resulting “substantial damage” was estimated at $5 million in repairs and lost business. In New York harbor, a couple fishing from their modest dinghy had to jump into Jamaica Bay when they were run down by a 600-hp NYPD patrol boat. They claimed both coppers were using their cellphones but one officer explained he ran into their boat while turning his head “to look at the rear of the vessel to ensure his wake was reduced.”  The couple are suing. It took the artist a year to create a giant horseshoe crab sculpture and arrange for its sinking as part of an artificial reef off New Jersey but a strap broke as it was being lowered to the bottom and it flipped upside. Then two small supporting barges landed on top of it. But it still attracts fish, and that was the idea. Liberia’s president was denied an afternoon cruise when the gangway of the coastal transport Diallo & Macedo jammed. His day was doubly worse because he had to wait for an hour after his arrival before two tugboats brought the vessel to the pier.

Gray Fleets

In the Arabian Sea, thirteen starving crewmen radioed a passing US Naval patrol plane for help because pirates had stripped the Iranian dhow Pavam of its supplies. The destroyer USS Hue City provided medical help for two of the crew plus 50 gallons of fuel, 70 gallons of water, and food. (If you are curious about Arabian diets, the “food” consisted of four bags of rice and six cans of kidney beans.)

The guided-missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill responded to a distress radio call from the bulker Belde, and rendered medical assistance approximately 110 miles north of Socotra Island, Oman. The injury was caused in a cargo-handling accident. An embarked helicopter took the injured man to an Oman medical facility for treatment.

The commanding officer of the ballistic-missile submarine USS Rhode Island became aware of onboard cheating problems during training examinations for nuclear-submarine operations and he temporarily relieved of duty one of his engineers. After investigations, he was reinstated without disciplinary action.

The US Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship has a “core” crew of forty to operate its highly automated systems but a Navy study revealed that the crew was over-taxed in port and exhausted underway. More berths have been added but it is not clear whether the crew size will be increased

The world’s oldest commissioned warship, the frigate USS Constitution, set sail once again, this time using three sails and travelling 1,100 yards in seventeen minutes. The event commemorated the 200th anniversary of her victory over the British frigate HMS Guerriere during the War of 1812, the first time a United States ship defeated a Royal Navy frigate of nearly equal size. It was also the battle in which the ship earned her nickname of “Old Ironsides.” The last preceding sail was in 1997 during its 200^th birthday and six sails were set then. During a 1927-1934 nation-wide tour by Ironsides, a full set of sails was installed but they were set just once and, by chance or plan, that day was dead calm.

The Royal Navy discovered that it had overpaid more than 400 tars and wants the money back. Current service people will have their pay docked up to four days a month until each debt (up to £17,000) is paid.

The Dutch Navy will search for the wreck of the Dundee-based World War Two submarine O-13 (Onderzeeboot 13) that disappeared more than 70 years ago. It escaped from Holland during the German invasion in May 1940 to join the Royal Navy but failed to return from a mission in the North Sea a month later.

An inquest revealed the intimate details of a suicide on the minesweeper HMS Cattistock. A British seaman shot himself in the head on the minesweeper HMS Hurworth in February of 2010 and that devastated a close friend. He sought counseling and was taking sleeping pills and anti-depressants but when he was cruelly taunted by senior shipmates (“not shot yourself yet?” for example), he also shot himself.

White Fleets

The cruise ship Volendam was among ships that responded when the far-smaller (79-foot overall) sightseeing vessel Baranoff Winds ran aground in Alaska’s Glacier Bay. The Volendam took off seventy of the 76 persons aboard. Back in the US mainland, the coastal cruise ship Yorktown ran aground in the Detroit River, giving its 120 passengers something extra for their money. A tugboat soon pulled it free. On Ontario’s Lake Simcoe, the excursion vessel Serendipity Princess caught the corner of a dock and stopped dead. People went flying and two were taken to a hospital. The boat has a capacity of 265 passengers and tours Kempenfelt Bay off Lake Simcoe every day. In Venice, wind gusts up to 70 miles per hour pulled the Carnival Breeze away from the pier during embarkation but nobody was on the gangways at the time. Tugs re-docked the ship about an hour later.

The Jewel of the Seas hit an overhead power cable while sailing into the port of Klaksvik in the Faroe Islands of Denmark. A seaman was injured by falling debris and the mast and equipment on it suffered too. A company spokeswoman later explained,” All the navigational tools and charts we use to plan our voyage, including information we obtained from the local port authorities and harbor master in advance of our arrival, indicated we had enough clearance to pass under the cable."  

Touring the US Inland rivers will be the new paddlewheel steamer Queen of the Mississippi as soon as it is christened.

Those That Go Back and Forth

In Boston’s outer harbor, Nix’s Mate has a beacon marking a cross-channel connecting the two main shipping channels. It is a mini-island made from granite blocks and is topped with a prominent pyramidal beacon. It’s big for a beacon but a master-in-training managed to run the fast catamaran ferry Provincetown II aground on it with a screech. (Thick fog and perhaps radar’s minimum-range limitation were mostly to blame.) None of the 149 on board was harmed and the company quickly explained, “The fault is ours completely, and we bear the responsibility fully.” (Nix’s Mate was originally eleven or twelve acres in extent but got smaller as ballast and, later, slate were mined. In the 1700’s it was a place where pirates were executed and their bodies then gibbeted. One was pirate chief William Fly who scolded the hangman for incorrectly securing his noose, then re-tied it himself.)

In Pakistan, outlaws who use Tarbela Lake to smuggle timber have expanded their activities. Three outlaw passengers on a ferry on the River Indus suddenly drew guns and relieved nearly thirty passengers of their cash, mobile phones, wristwatches, and other valuables. Then they forced the ferry to sail close to the riverbank and hopped ashore.

In China, a ferry carrying nineteen struck an obstacle in the turbulent Xiyang River in the Guangnan county of Yunnan province and capsized. Six went missing. And elsewhere in that massive nation, a ferry carrying 21 people and 10 vehicles sank. Four days later, three bodies, a truck, a taxi, and a Honda SUV had been retrieved. In southern China in Xishuangbanna on the rain-swollen Mekong River, a ferry capsized when caught in the strong current and swept off course. The ferry was overloaded with motorcycles and other cargo plus 23 people, mostly Burmese schoolchildren. The fourteen missing included nine schoolkids. Finally, the Yangtze claimed thirteen lives and some trucks when a not-overloaded ferry carrying 21 people sank in Anhui province.

In the Philippines, the Super Shuttle Ferry 15 lost power one night and drifted ashore off the town of Merida in Leyte. Most passengers were transferred to the Super Shuttle Ferry 23 but six remained on board since they drove embarked trucks.  Super Shuttle 23 returned to the scene to attempt to free its fleetmate.

Nature 

Drought in the US Midwest meant less water for the rivers and less grain to be barged, Unless it really rains upstream, the Mississippi River is expected to stay low through October but will not reach record lows. But water levels got low enough that a river bottom wedge of saltwater started creeping upstream, threatening the water supply for New Orleans. The US Army Corps of engineers quickly constructed a temporary underwater barrier sill at Mile 64 Above the Head of the Passes.) The sill was sized so that a draft of 45 feet is maintained for shipping. Similar sills were built in 1988 and 1999.

In New Zealand, ironsands from its beaches are wet into a slurry and pumped to an offshore tanker and they are important in making superior types of steel in Japan and China. But Kiwis could be $1.3 billion richer if the Chatham Rock Phosphate resource was developed, said an economic research agency. All that would be needed would be to mine the 25 million-ton rock phosphate deposit—but it is 400 meters deep on the Chatham Rise, only 450 km from New Zealand and 150 km from the Chatham Islands.

And there are even more ways Kiwis could get rich. There are commercial mineral deposits on the Campbell Plateau, and potentially valuable sites lie along several arcs of active and extinct seabed volcanic activity. Their active underwater volcanoes, or “black smokers,” present a tantalizing long-term prospect because their polymetallic sulphide “smoke” contains iron, manganese, gold, silver, copper, and zinc, and the smokers’ deposits are self-replenishing.

Metal-Bashing

Removal of the cruise ship Costa Concordia from its rocky berth near Giglio, Italy will take longer than previously announced.  Look for it to be afloat again some time next Spring.

Imports

A refugee boat with 150 on board capsized and sank west of Java. Searchers found only 55 survivors. To give an idea of the resources used, here were the searching vessels (figures in parentheses are the number of survivors picked up): HMAS Maitland (34), APL Bahrain (15), AS Carelia (4), Gwendolyn (1), Da Qing Xia (1), Chemroute, Forever South West, Voyage Explorer, Frontier Coronet, Pelafigue Tide, World Swan. Vessel types included a patrol boat, several container ships, a tanker, bulkers, and an anchor-handler.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

Off Somalia, piracy was virtually nil, with no attacks against commercial vessels and only one attack on a local dhow. (It was thwarted by naval forces.) But one hostage was executed on the bulker Orna, which was hijacked off Seychelles in 2010 and is being used as a pirate mothership. "The killing was a message to the owners of the ship who paid no heed to our ransom demands," explained a pirate commander.

The Gulf of Guinea off Africa’s west coast was the piracy hot spot. Hijacking product tankers off Nigeria must be profitable because three hijackings took place. First was the Energy Centurion, and about 3,000 tons of gas oil (worth about US$3 million) and ship’s equipment and crew valuables were stolen before the ship was released. Next was an unidentified Greek-operated oil tanker seized off Togo. Last was the Abu Dhabi Star, whose crew took to a citadel while radioing for help. The pirates fled when the Nigerian Navy (or Togolese Navy; accounts vary) intervened. All three hijackings may be the work of one sophisticated crime cartel, and hijacked cargoes are often unloaded to another tanker and sold on the region’s illegal fuel market.

Odd Bits and Head-Shakers

To dock the ever-larger container ships coming into service, some harbor tugs being built in the US will have massive bollard pulls of more than 90 tons. (In 1979, Falmouth Towage Company, a firm in the southwest of England, had five respectably competent tugs with a combined bollard pull of just 70 tons. But ships were far smaller then.)

A new anti-fouling treatment being tested on the Dutch salvage tug Willem-B Sr is a self-adhesive textured film, not a chemical that has to be re-applied periodically. The short fibers of the film provide a physical barrier to mussels, barnacles, and algae.

During equipment testing, the commercial research ship Falkor spotted the wreck of ship Terra Nova, a whaler, sealer, and polar exploration ship that sank off the southern coast of Greenland in September, 1943, after being damaged by ice while carrying military supplies. A century ago, the historic exploration vessel carried Captain Robert Scott to the Antarctic for his doomed and fruitless expedition to the South Pole.

Retrieving HMS Hood’s bell was postponed due to bad weather and strong currents after ten days of attempts from billionaire Paul Allen’s mega-yacht Octopus. HMS Hood was sunk in the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland by plunging fire from the German battleship Bismarck on 24 May 1941. (However, many believe it was an 8-inch shell from the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen that actually caused the Hood to blow up.)

The Brit was UK-bound from the Azores but he and his sailboat Elixir had been beaten-up by ten days of bad weather. His Mayday call was answered by the Russian destroyer Vice-Admiral Kulakov. Its crew repaired his electronics and got the engine started (they couldn’t do much for a torn mainsail) while the yachtsman gulped down hot food and drugs and then motored onwards. The Russians also notified the British coastguard of the situation and the indomitable lone sailor was later taken off by a coastguard cutter. He was 83 years old.   

Other Shores – September 2012

The UK’s oldest shipping company, Stephenson Clarke, founded in 1730 and affectionately known to generations of seafarers as Stevie Clarke’s, went into bankruptcy.

The Zanzibar Minister for Infrastructure and Communication tendered his resignation after the ferry Karama Star sank with loss of 94 lives. Nine months earlier, the ferry M/V Spice Islanders sank. The death toll then was 2976 people.

Larger numbers of humpback whales stayed later in Western Antarctic waters than usual. Less ice? More krill? Nobody knows for sure.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In China at Zhenjiang Port, the iron ore-carrying bulker Changqing 16 abruptly rolled over and sank. Fifteen persons were rescued, two children died, and seven were missing.

The tugboat Sun Fat 3 struck the cargo ship Infinite Hope 1.4 nautical miles east of Tanjung Pungga, Malaysia and was swamped. The tug’s crew of seven took to a liferaft from which they were rescued by the cargo ship. (This is the same area where authorities recovered a hijacked tug and barge last October.)

On the Parana Guazu River, part of a natural border for Ecuador, navigation in the Martin Garcia Channel was blocked for some days when the tanker FR8 Endurance ran aground. (In 2008, the same vessel had a temporary loss of steering while inbound to Houston.)

Following a repair operation on the Sat3-Safe cable between South Africa and Europe, the cable ship Chamarel caught fire in the bridge area, firefighting efforts failed, and it was abandon-ship time. A Namibian fishing boat took aboard the crew of 56 and the still-burning cable ship drifted towards Namibia’s infamous Skeleton Coast. In mid-Atlantic fire broke out in containers on the MSC Flaminia and eventually the crew had to abandon ship. Three large seagoing tugs fought the fire while towing the ship toward shore. Almost a month later, the four ships are still offshore and have yet to receive permission to enter a sheltered area or an emergency port.

A British report stated that an AB on the berthed container ship Tempanos at Felixstowe apparently took a shortcut using a hatch cover laid across a hold last December. He slipped on ice and fell 25 meters to his death. In Oregon, a crewman died when he fell off the stern of the sternwheeler Queen of the West while the vessel was moored at Ranier. And a worker was unplugging cables on a ship being scrapped in Chittagong when he slipped and fell. Seriously injured, he was rushed to Chittagong Medical College Hospital where he died about an hour later.

Not far from Perth, a massive search paid off when an Australian news helicopter spotted a naked man floating on his back and waving for help. A large hammerhead shark slowly circled him 20 meters away. The 49-year-old man had been in the water for 22 hours after his small boat had capsized. One companion was later rescued but died in a hospital. A third man was missing. In Alaska, a Coast Guard chopper took an unconscious and unresponsive female off the Norwegian Pearl 23 miles west of Juneau. A 50-year-old man suffered third-degree burns while trying to extinguish a fire on the container ship Jupiter 30 miles west of San Diego and the Coast Guard choppered him to a hospital. An Alaskan Coast Guard small boat rescued a man in the water, He had been tending his near-shore crab pots from a canoe and got a pot line wound around his leg. Only his lifejacket saved him. On Long Island Sound near Stamford, a motorboat overturned, trapping two underneath the hull in an air pocket. Rescue divers had a hard time persuading the girl to re-enter the water and one diver said the conversations between the victims and the rescuers were strange and, psychologically, it was something for which they could never trained. Two other yachties were found clinging to the keel and a fifth went missing. Near Dutch Harbor in Alaska, the Coast Guard icebreaker Alex Healey took the sailboat Nkhovazi with two British nationals aboard in tow after it became obvious that its broken steering and subsequent attempts at improvisation were ineffective. An Alaskan Coast Guard HC-130 flew two orphaned and badly malnourished walrus calves from Barrow to Anchorage after wildlife officials decided they were in need of immediate veterinary assistance. “Even though this is a unique case, it aligns with our Coast Guard roles and missions,” explained the air station commander.

At Portsmouth in the UK, two men entered the water to save two youngsters, aged 4 and 10, in trouble. The kids and one man made it ashore but the other rescuer disappeared.

Gray Fleets
A Chinese frigate that had been discouraging Philippine fishing boats from entering disputed waters in the South China Sea ran aground near Half Moon Shoal in the Spratly Islands. The warship was described by Western diplomats as being “thoroughly stuck.”

A contract worker set two fires on the nuclear submarine USS Miami to get out of work because he was suffering from anxiety and having problems with his ex-girlfriend. One fire quickly got out of control and the steel hull trapped heat, causing superheated smoke and a stubborn fire that kept more than 100 firefighters busy for hours. The damage estimate was $400 million. He set a smaller fire to external timbers because he got anxious after a text-message exchange with the ex-girlfriend about her current boyfriend. He had been hired to strip paint off the sub, undergoing maintenance at the Kittery Naval Shipyard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Navy had originally thought the big fire had started in a vacuum cleaner.

The US Senate’s appropriations subcommittee reversed the Navy's proposal to prematurely retire seven cruisers and two amphibious ships. The guided missile destroyer USS James E. Williams plucked ten men from the sea near a burning Iranian-flagged dhow. Not far away, a night-time collision in the Strait of Hormuz between the guided-missile destroyer USS Porter and the bulk oil tanker Otowasan left a gaping hole in the warship’s stern while the tanker and all persons involved were unharmed. The Porter moved under its own power to Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates, for assessment and repair. And at Hong Kong, a sailor fell off the flight deck of the USS George Washington and died when he hit a service barge.

The US Navy will gender-neutralize its newest carriers by removing urinals from berthing spaces. Two of several obvious reasons why are that urinal drainpipes clog more often than toilet drains do and urinals are smellier and more expensive to maintain.

Want to buy a Type 42 British destroyer? You can if you are a government. HMS York and HMS Edinburg are available.

Ukraine’s only submarine, the Zaporozhye, submerged in the Black Sea for the first time in 18 years. Built forty years ago as a Soviet-era Foxtrot-class diesel-electric submarine, it was recently refitted by Russian engineers.

White Fleets
Getting to an airport or going on a tour may be the most-dangerous part of a cruise. In Alaska, a kayaking accident killed a passenger from the cruise ship Rhapsody of the Seas. A family rented tandem kayaks for a tour of Mendenhall Lake, they got a safety briefing, and then set out. One man apparently became fatigued and was unable to paddle. The group tied their kayaks together and then the man was somehow in the water. The group flagged down a passing canoeist but it took 30 minutes to get the family to a beach and that was too late. In the Caribbean, 36 passengers from the Freedom of the Seas got a scare when a defective tour bus landed in a ditch at St Martin. Six people were injured, the worst with a broken wrist, and they were taken to a local hospital Guest-care team members and a ship’s doctor remained with the passengers during their stay at the hospital and all returned to the ship the same day. The Carnival Spirit was among responding vessels when a float on a small seaplane failed upon landing on Tracy Arm, south of Juneau, Alaska. The two occupants were uninjured. And automatic sprinklers quickly killed a cabin fire on the Crown Princess. No injuries but some damage.

Those That Go Back and Forth
The Manly ferry Collary struck an unknown object in spite of extra lookouts (it is the whale season in Sydney Harbor) and a propeller blade was bent. Soon after, a humpback and its calf left the harbor and were spotted heading north, both with nasty gashes in their topside blubber. No-one knows whether the two incidents are connected, the propeller showed no signs of blubber, and can cutting into the blubber of a whale or two bend a blade?

The fast ferry Rich Passage I has been doing low-wake research on its four daily Bremerton-Seattle runs but even low ticket prices haven’t attracted enough passengers to provide the desired full loads.

A woman exited, probably by jumping, a ferry between Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island in Texas. No foul play was suspected.

In southern Myanmar, the double-decked Irrawaddy River ferry Mya Min Aung developed engine trouble, drifted downstream through rapid waters in heavy rain, and hit several docked vessels before sinking. At least ten died including five university football players and their coach but 73 others were rescued.

In the Philippines, the often-renamed ro/pax Super Shuttle Roro 1 ran aground two nautical miles off Agoho Point, Tablas and holed itself. It also somehow had a fire in the superstructure and that killed one passenger. Rescued from liferafts, however, were 56 other passengers and 48 crewmembers but none of the 16 vehicles onboard.

Energy Usage
The magic words” “shale” and “fracking” have made it possible for the US to start exporting natural gas next year. Profits might be high; natural gas was recently fetching $2.87 a million BTU in the US while prices abroad were about $10 (Europe) and $17 (Japan). But don’t forget the expenses of gasification and liquefaction, shipping, etc.

Export of petroleum distillates from the US reached new levels (980,000 barrels a day in April) due to demand from Europe and Central and South Americas while imports into the US reached the lowest level in over two years.

The carrier USS Nimitz and other ships burned 900,000 gallons of a 50-50 blend of advanced biofuels and traditional petroleum-based fuel during this summer’s RIMPAC Exercise. (Operations use more than 50 million gallons of fuel each month.) And the US Air Force is also exploring the reliability of biofuels. It recently bought 11,000 gallons of alcohol-to-jet fuel at $59 a gallon.

The US House-approved version of the $608 billion defense spending bill cut $70 million from the Obama administration's request for domestic development of biofuels production but a US Senate subcommittee approved funding for the US Navy’s adoption of biofuels and the goal is that the American fleets will run on biofuels by 2020. The US set that “green” target date to reduce the military's environmental footprint and continue operations worldwide in spite of any fossil-fuel shortages. The US Navy Secretary later explained, "We're not doing it to be faddish, we're not doing it to be green, we're not doing it for any other reason except it takes care of a military vulnerability that we have."

The Royal Australian Navy signed an agreement that will give it access to the US Navy’s biofuel technology.

Nature
When a Royal Navy survey ship discovered a previously uncharted underwater Red Sea mountain the size of the rock of Gibraltar, it found that Yemeni fishermen already knew of the mount— a dhow was anchored there. The seamount, only 131 feet below the surface, poses no danger to ships but could embarrass a submarine.

Scientists have been exploring the use of species-specific robotic fish to lead fish away from oil spills and other aquatic dangers (or to fish traps?). To date, there has been some success traffic-directing zebrafish and golden shiners.

A Royal New Zealand Air Force plane spotted a massive floating raft of pumice about 250 by 30 miles in extent. Using satellite photos, scientists decided that the pumice probably came from the Havre Seamount and associated the eruption with a recent cluster of earthquakes in the Kermadec Islands about 1,000 km north of New Zealand.

In places in the US, there wasn’t much of a winter last year and now the Lower Mississippi River is feeling the results and business is suffering. Flooding to record levels last year, this year the River has dropped more than fifty feet, to the point where the grounding of the Bootsie B and its tow of 28 barges closed the River for some time. Long-range predictions in August showed the River might drop another two or three feet. (About 60 percent of the nation's grain, 22 percent of its oil and gas, and 20 percent of the nation's coal goes down the river.) However, the Upper Mississippi River is a series of pools behind dams and is less-affected. And 100 miles of the Platte River in Nebraska dried up. Because of a massive, nearly nationwide drought. (The Platte is not used by barges.)

Sunken Things and Salvage
In 1944 off Nantucket Island, the U-505 torpedoed the American tanker SS Pan Pennsylvania and three destroyer escorts then attacked the U-boat. It hid under the sinking tanker but the USS Joyce saw it on its sonar and its depth charges forced the sub to surface, There, the Germans manned deck guns and fought it out with the USS Gandy until it rammed the sub. When the USS Peterson then hit the U-boat with more depth charges, the Germans set off scuttling charges and abandoned-ship. Now, U-505 has been located by a private group.

In New Zealand out on Astrolabe Reef, an American salvage company will cut up and helicopter away the bow section of the wrecked container ship Rena down to one metre below low water. And in apologies to Kiwis, the owner’s rep said the ship's owners and insurers had spent $200 million so far on the salvage operation, with $70 million being spent in the local economy.

What happens to salvaged butterfat? If it came off the Rena, it will be recycled into biodiesel fuel.

Billionaire (Microsoft co-founder) Paul Allen will underwrite an UK Government-sanctioned expedition to recover the bell of the battle cruiser HMS Hood, sunk in Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland by the Nazi warships during World War II. His mega-yacht (414 feet long) Octopus will act as the base ship but it is not clear whether its submarine and remotely controlled vehicle will be used. Its two helicopters might see some use too.

Metal-Bashing 
A Korean shipbuilder has started construction of the first of twenty containerships for a Danish shipping company. At 18,000 TEU each will be the world’s largest box ship. Delivery will start in the second half of 2013.

The world's first nuclear-powered cruiser, the USS Long Beach, was recently put up for auction with an opening bid of only $150. It was the last such US vessel with teakwood decks.

The US Coast Guard’s new fast-response cutter USCGC Bernard C. Webber went back to the builders because paint, in patches up to 18 square feet, had peeled off. High humidity and poor ventilation while being painted were blamed for the failure of the final coat to cling to the primer.

Russia is building a 12,000-hp spill-response and salvage icebreaker with an asymmetrical hull (flat on one side) and three azimuthing drives that can drive the ’breaker in any direction. When moving sideways, the 250-foot-long ship would clear a 250-foot channel through 0.6-metre ice.

Piracy, Terrorism, and Nasties
Sentences for piracy worldwide range from four years to life imprisonment, with sentences in Africa and Europe tending to be below the world average while those in the US and the Seychelles are far stiffer.

The founder of anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd brags about operating outside the law, both organizationally and personally. He recently forfeited bail after being held under house arrest for 70 days in Germany (something about fighting extradition to Costa Rico to face decades-old charges.) His bail-jumping so invigorated a whale-watch outfit in Alaska that it announced it will publically back the “beleaguered” captain now that “governments are going after Captain Paul personally rather than his cause or movement alone.”

Near the UAE port of Jebel Ali, the naval security detail on the replenishment ship USNS Rappahannock put .50-caliber rounds into a small approaching fishing boat after it ignored repeated warnings of multiple types. One fisherman was killed and three others inured, and Dubai’s police chief rejected the US explanation and will now deal with the case as a murder.

Odd Bits
Members of a high-school class in Capistrano, California constructed three model boats they hoped to sail to the Hawaiian Islands. All three ran aground on the first try but later the 92-pound Kanaloa, was 32.1 miles from San Diego when it ran into an incoming tanker. The model was retrieved by an escorting tug for yet another try after repairs are made.

The Enterprise Land Mobile Radio system, used by the military to coordinate responses with civil emergency workers, operates on radio frequencies between 380 and 399.9 megahertz. The system at the Naval Submarine Base at New London, Connecticut works but has also has been blocking the radio signals that open and close garage doors.

In England on the Solent, the gravel-carrying powered barge Goole Star spotted a man swimming without a lifejacket. He had fallen off his 26-foot sailboat Rascal and it was sailing off on autopilot. Amazingly, the yachtsman felt well enough to get aboard his recovered yacht and four hours later he sailed up alongside the barge and handed back the loaned clothes – plus a bottle of whisky.

Ever wonder why the cargo ship BBC Steinhoff ran aground last year, blocking the South Shore Canal of the St Lawrence Seaway? A report noted that the steersman’s stand was offset and when the pilot requested the helmsman steer for a certain object, the course taken did not coincide with the ship’s centerline. Then, as the ship neared the entrance to a narrower part of the channel, bank suction pulled it off course, a sheer that could not be countered in time.

Head-Shakers 
A Cuban married to a Russian woman must leave Russia every 30 days so he traveled to Finland on a ferry. But storms delayed his return to Russia and upon arrival he learned his Russian visa had expired. Back to Finland, only to find his Finnish visa had expired. He spent the next 47 days on the ferry, volunteering as waiter, to pay his passage, until the Russians finally allowed him back in. He is now trying to establish permanent Russian residency.

Rescuers took an exhausted, wet, and cold 50-year-old man off a construction barge near the Dumbarton Bridge in San Francisco Bay. His boat had become disabled and he tried to swim to shore while towing the boat.

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.