Other Shores - January 2013

Retailers on the US East Coast may have less-than-ideal Christmas sales because of difficulties in getting containerized merchandise in stores in time for the holiday season. After Hurricane Sandy, more than 6,000 New York/New Jersey-bound containers were diverted to other ports and many ocean carriers declared force majeure, abrogating their responsibility to deliver containers to the original destination port. Importers had to pick up their boxes at their own cost (although some carriers generously offered to relay containers back to New York/New Jersey at a cost of around $750 per box.) Worse, there was an acute shortage of trailers.

West Coast labor unrest quieted without too many container ships being diverted elsewhere or sitting at anchor but expect labor problems on the Gulf and East Coasts in 2013.

The Panama Canal moved a record 333.7 million Panama Canal tons last fiscal year. (In million Panama Canal tons, full container ships, 119.8; dry bulkers, 83.4; tankers, 51.6)

One expert said gas and oil projects historically deliver 20 to 30 percent less than promised, largely due to a lack of engineering graduates, who shy away from what they see as “a sunset industry.”

For a while, bargain hunters could pick up a secondhand VLCC crude-oil carrier for only $54.5 million.

Will water levels fall so low that parts of the Mississippi River will be closed to barge traffic? The Coast Guard says no; other entities fear yes. As this is being written, the situation is iffy. A National Weather Service hydrologist predicted lower water levels, possibly below nine feet, unless there are heavy rains or snow upstream. An increased flow from the Missouri River, which feeds into the Mississippi, would help but the Corps of Engineers is bound by law to refuse requests to release more water, and that alone may close the Mississippi. Meanwhile, barge drafts are being limited to eight feet (instead of the usual nine feet) with one expert noting that it is not economically sensible to reduce drafts farther, and some future shipments have been cancelled. There is a race to get grain to Gulf ports for overseas shipment, and a year ago, the River was at flood stage!

China confirmed that it is building large amphibious-warfare ships. Said the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, “Some of our analysts believe that once China and Japan start a military confrontation, China will be able to use this type of naval vessel in amphibious battles against Okinawa and the Japanese homeland.” On state-owned TV, an admiral bragged, “With the amphibious assault ships in our hands, our Navy will be capable of delivering power to any nation within the three island chains in the Pacific. (The so-called “island chains” include the US and Australia.)

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

In nasty weather, the coal-carrying Volgo Balt 199 sank while waiting to transit the Bosphorus and a coastal safety boat, part of the subsequent rescue operations, hit rocks and also sank with loss of two of its crew of four. Three from the ship were rescued but another ten died. The car carrier Baltic Ace sank after colliding with the container ship Corvus J. about 25 miles NW of Westkapelle, The Netherlands. Eleven crewmen and 1,415 vehicles went down with the carrier. Passing fairway buoys on the wrong side can put you aground. So learned the bulker Trans Agila in the Kalmar Sound SW of the Kronogrund and north of Sweden‘s Olands Bridge. It suffered hull damage and water ingress but got free. After going south about a mile, it was intentionally grounded to keep it from sinking.

In Germany in thick fog with visibility less than 100 meters, the coaster Telamon collided with the ferry Nordenham on the Weser. One woman was hurt. The Telamon continued on to hit an anchored dredger. Also in Germany and in the same dense fog, the coaster Katharina Siemer collided with the coaster Angon in the North West Anchorage off Brunbuttel. The Angon suffered enough damage to its starboard side that it took on water. (Judging from AIS tracks, Angon was under way at the time of collision while Katharina Siemer was either anchored or drifting.) The small container ship Cecilia allided head-on with the Sluiskil Bridge in Holland and damaged the bascule bridge’s mechanism. In the Bahamas, the container ship MSC Eugenia holed a bunker-oil tank after striking an object in Freeport harbor. The ship was taken offshore while divers set to work to patch the slowly leaking hole. At Vancouver, the bulk carrier Cape Apricot wiped out 100 meters of a causeway at Westshore Terminals, severing the only link with one of the terminal’s two loading berths. The causeway carried a road, a coal-carrying conveyor belt, electricity, water, and other services. Repairs could take months and so Westshore Terminal, North America’s largest coal-exporting facility, will not ship out the anticipated 33 million tons in the coming year. (Coal, particularly metallurgical coal, is British Columbia’s largest export.)

While trying to avoid a fishing boat, the container ship Hanjin Geneva ran aground on a sandbar at the Prince Rupert harbor entrance in British Columbia. Tugs refloated the ship on the next high tide. (In spite of its Asiatic name, the vessel is German-flagged.) 

Off Holland’s coast, the geared bulker Ocean Victory ran over a buoy. Its chain became entangled in the bulker’s propeller, jamming the main engine to a stop and damaging the propeller. Wind was pushing the vessel toward the beach and various rescue craft futilely tried to hold the bulker. Its crew finally managed to drop an anchor and several tugs soon arrived to relieve the bulker of its misery. In a Singapore shipyard, a test on the drill platform Noble Regina Allen went wrong when the jacking mechanism for one of three lifting legs failed and the platform sharply listed to one side. Ninety workers were hurt, some seriously.

In Hartford County, Missouri, a chain broke while removing a four-to-five-ton towboat propeller and it fell, crushing the pelvis of a worker standing several feet away. He died of his injuries. A crewman on the grain-carrying Tecumseh accidentally died while the freighter was docked at Thunder Bay, Ontario and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada decided the circumstances of his death warranted an investigation. (The 29,984 -dwt, US-built ship was formerly the Mexican-flagged Sugar Islander II and carried sugar. Its bridge wings were trimmed back to satisfy St Lawrence Seaway regulations.) In West Virginia at the Robinson Run coal mine, a bulldozer and its operator slid into a slurry pit when an embankment he was constructing collapsed. Rescuers determined that they were 25-30 feet down in the slurry but it was too thick for a rescue diver. A barge was trucked in, sheet pilings were driven around the dozer, and the search began. Five days after the accident, the body of the operator was found inside the cab when divers peeled back the roof of the dozer.

An Alaskan-based Coast Guard chopper medevaced a crewman from the container ship COSCO Long Beach approximately 200 miles south of Kodiak. He was suffering from abdominal pains.

Gray Fleets

Does it pay a nation to acquire the most-advanced warships if not enough qualified operators can be found to man them operationally? That is a question that is plaguing Norway (five advanced frigates of the Fridtjof Nansen class) and Australia (its six Collins-class submarines), Canada, the UK, USA, New Zealand, and other navies. Swapping a crew in and out of ships as they deploy helps solve the problem but it’s hard on the personnel.

On the day the US Navy officially took the aircraft carrier Enterprise out of service after 51 years in the fleet, the Navy announced that its name won’t be long-absent from the fleet. The third Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, CVN-80, will become the ninth ship in the Navy’s history to be named Enterprise.

The US Navy fired the top two administrators (president and provost) of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, for mismanagement and fostering an atmosphere of defying Navy rules and regulations. (The details are juicy but far too long for this column.)

The US Navy's IT network is targeted by 110,000 attacks every hour. That translates to 1,833 attacks per minute or some 96.36 billion attacks every year.

The Coast Guard cutter USCGC Halibut became suspicious of a panga-type small boat off Southern California and sent its RHIB, its blue light flashing, to investigate. The panga maneuvered sharply and struck the approaching RHIB at high speed. One of the RHIB’s two-man crew, the cutter’s executive officer, suffered massive head trauma that caused his death. The panga was stopped by other Coast Guard assets and its crew of two were detained.

After a seaman was critically injured when he got between a berthing (mooring) line and a winch on Landing Ship Tank RSS Endeavour, the Singapore Navy ordered a 48-hour safety time-out (aka “stand-down”) for its frigates, missile corvettes, and landing ships tank.

White Fleets

While heading for the North Cape at the northern tip of Norway, the heating system on the cruise ship Amadea broke down when the temperature in Olso was -18 (Celsius, one presumes) and so the ship headed to Bremerhaven for repairs. Most (95 percent) of the passengers stayed with the ship although cabin temperatures were 9C. For their bravery, they received a refund of 130 percent of their fares and the crew was put off duty for a while.

The former cruise ship Explorer is now the nautical platform for the Semester at Sea program, carrying college students to foreign shores. During a stop at the Island of Dominica, some students went on a snorkeling excursion. The captain of the boat went off to get food and upon his return somehow backed over several students in the water. A female student was dead upon arrival at a hospital.

Due to high winds, the Pacific Princess ran over the harbor-marking buoy while entering the port of Yalta. The damaged buoy sank. The Celebrity Reflection had to skip a stop at Tenerife in the Canary Islands after a mechanical problem slowed the ship. The Costa Pacifica suffered minor damage when it collided with a berthing structure called a "dolphin" at Marseille. A strong gust of wind was blamed and there was a one-day delay in a Mediterranean cruise.

Those That Go Back and Forth

The Washington State ferry Walla Walla went abruptly out of service during routine maintenance in the engineroom. State workers were cleaning a drive motor commutator when something went terribly wrong. The resulting temperatures of over 2,600°F melted brass and steel components of the motor. A spare motor may be installable but otherwise the 1972-built ferry will have to wait for General Electric to build a new motor, and that might take two years. 

But that wasn’t the state ferry system’s only problem. One of its captains slept over on the Whidbey Island ferry Cathlamet at Clinton and was supposed to take out the adjacent sister ferry Kittitas early next morning. He overslept and the Cathlamet sailed on time but had to return to Clinton due to a “personnel issue” (the over-sleeping captain). That put the schedules of both ferries back by about twenty minutes. A ferry spokeswoman said the incident apparently had nothing to do with recent minimum-staffing problems. (In 2011 when union and Washington State Ferry officials couldn’t agree on manning levels for the ferries, they let the Coast Guard decide. It established minimum manning levels and union members started failing to show up for work, each no-show meaning a ferry couldn’t sail. In October, the Coast Guard issued revised guidance that mandated more mariners on nine ferries in four classes, and no-shows have drastically dropped. The company does not yet know how it will pay for the additional mannings. Cuts in sailings may be the answer.)

Luckily, a midwife, an OB/GYN nurse, and two EMTs were on a Bainbridge-to-Seattle ferry when a passenger went into labor. The result, a first for the ferry company, was a girl named Lucy.

The Japanese ferry Ginga, carrying 162 high-school students and teachers on a school trip, ran aground on the shoals off Suo-Oshima town, Yamaguchi Prefecture. The efficient Japanese Coast Guard soon rescued them but the school trip was truncated. In Iceland, a heavy current suddenly drove the ro/pax Herjolfur against the breakwater at Landeyjarhofn. An examination at the pier revealed substantial damage to a screw and the ship proceeded to Westman Islands using only the starboard propeller. Mooring lines snapped due to strong winds and the cruise ferry Baltic Queen smashed into a pier at Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Some superficial damage. In northern Germany, the smallish UK-flagged container ship Kitty C. collided with the canal ferry Swinemunde moored at the Brunsbüttel fishery quay, probably due to human error. The ferry crew saw the collision coming and jumped ashore. The ferry’s pilothouse was bent to one side and numerous pilings will have to be replaced. In the middle of the English Channel, separate fights on the Holland-bound ferry Pride of Rotterdam sent two men with serious injuries to a Dutch hospital. One fight was over a piece of pizza in which one man injured his neck while falling down a flight of stairs. The second fight involved four men and ended with an 18-year-old being stabbed in the neck with a piece of glass.

Near Pingshan village in Anhua County in China, a river vessel capsized, tossing four trucks and eleven people into the stream. Three persons were rescued and the vessel’s owner and “driver” were detained by local police. And. perhaps presaging a long-overdue crackdown on corruption, six local officials were removed from their posts.

Over the Veterans’ Day weekend, a New London, Connecticut ferry company came to the rescue of Long Islanders and New Yorkers plagued by no gas or long gas-station lines after Hurricane Sandy’s visit. It offered free one-way passage across Long Island Sound and even provided directions to local gas stations in and around New London.

Legal Matters

A ship’s agent was asked to supply tidal information for an arriving ship. He scanned the wrong tide table (a corner of a page was folded over, hiding the year). The ship had excessive draft upon arrival and could only unload a few hours each day and had to shift anchorage three times in four days. The agent settled with the owner for the additional costs to the tune of $120,000.

The US Customs and Border Protection seized 35,000 imported rubber ducks in the port of Los Angeles/Long Beach. They contain an excess amount of phthalate, making them potentially harmful to the health and safety of children. 

Nature

Sponges are harmless, aren’t they? Well, the harp sponge (Chondrocladi lyra), found in the depths off California, is carnivorous, using elaborate harp-shaped arrays (they are well-worth Googling) to catch tiny crustaceans and wrapping them in a membrane before digestion starts. And its sexual behavior is interesting too. (Actually, a dozen or more carnivorous sponges have been identified to date, all members of the same family.)

Corals threatened by approaching toxic algae call for help by releasing specific chemicals and its inch-long resident gobie fish respond by immediately attacking the algae. As one report explained it, “The symbiotic relationship between fish and the coral on which they live is the first known example of one species chemically signaling a consumer species to remove competitors. It is similar to the symbiotic relationship between Acacia trees and mutualist ants, in which the ants receive food and shelter while protecting the trees from both competitors and consumers.”

Despite its fearsome name and appearance, the small deep-sea vampire squid is the only non-predatory squid identified to date. In fact, it eats “marine snow,” the tiny particles that drift downward towards the bottom. Its feed falls onto three categories: particles from dead bodies, fecal (poop from small coepods), and snot (debris from animals that use gelatin-like mucus nets to catch prey).

Metal-Bashing

An American shipping company (Totem Ocean Trailer Express) will have two 3,100-TEU container ships built that will be powered by LNG. They will be the first of the kind in the world.

Russia started construction of the second LK-25-class diesel-electric icebreaker, with the “25” standing for its power output of 25 megawatts. The vessels will feature 150-ton cranes for underwater work in the oilfield and pipeline industries. Although touted as “the largest icebreaker in the history of the Russian shipbuilding industry," these icebreakers are far less powerful than planned icebreakers with up to 100 megawatts from double nuclear reactors. [In general, Russia divides its icebreakers into several classes: nuclear-powered, multi-purpose; diesel-powered; icebreakers for non-Arctic conditions (non-Arctic=Baltic Sea?); auxiliary; harbor, and shallow-water.]

Too much tonnage and a weak rupee dampened the enthusiasm of India’s ship-scrappers for new deals.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

A revised South Korean law calls for new ocean-going construction to have built-in citadels where crews can retreat from boarding pirates.

Nigeria, Somalia, and the Far East were, pirate-wise, quiet last month and the major piracy effort was off the coast of Vietnam, where the small Malaysian chemical tanker Zafirah was hi-jacked by up to eleven knife and pistol-wielding pirates. It was later recaptured by Vietnamese marine police with its name changed to MD Feahorse, and a fishing vessel came across its crew of nine, all unhurt, in a liferaft.

A Nigerian pirate described the business of ship hijacking as “highly lucrative” and said that “Nigeria today had some 1,250 trained pirates and 3,000 high-caliber military weapons… There can be no successful vessel hijacking in West Africa, or Africa as a whole, without inputs from Nigerian oil mafias, including top government functionaries.” Helping is that Nigeria’s security forces suffer from under-funding, a lack of hardware, vessels and maintenance, and problems with discipline and corruption. Add to them grudge attacks that stem from personal conflict, envy, disputes over payments and contracts and turf wars between gangs of bunkering thieves.

Odd Bits and Headshakers

Three of Denmark’s formerly state-owned icebreakers, Thorbjoørn, Danbjøorn, and Isbjoørn, have seen so little use in the last sixteen years that they are for sale. (Bjørn is a Nordic male given name or, less often, a surname meaning the animal “bear.”)

In the last dozen years, there have been 410 engineroom fires, with cruise ships having the highest number (90) or about eight a year. Most ships have CO2 fire-extinguishing systems but CO2 is deadly for humans so there is always a race between getting personnel out of machinery spaces before the CO2 system is triggered. A master’s dilemna: save your crew or imperil your passengers by tardy firefighting? (There are firefighting systems, such as water misting, that are safe for people in the fire space.)

The French skipper of the racing yacht Safran was intent on breaking his own record for sailing around the UK and Ireland but he sailed the wrong way in a traffic-separation lane in the English Channel and forced ships to take action to avoid him. He told the French Coastguard he was trying to set a record and would not alter course. A British court later fined him £9,381 plus costs of £4,125.

Other Shores - December 2012

The current global marine insurance market has the capacity for $1.1 to $1.2 billion of coverage but the risk presented by a single large container ship could be larger. A loaded 18,000-TEU box ship could have a total value of maybe $2.3 billion. In contrast, the hull and machinery and insured value of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, currently the biggest marine insurance loss in history, was $500 million.

India’s Supreme Court banned all mining operations and transportation of iron ore, a $4.5 billion-per-year business, in Goa. A report estimated that the exchequer had lost Rs35,000 crore (US$6.3 billion) due to illegal mining in the last 12 years.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

In the Russian Far East, an EPIRB from the bulker Amurskaya started bleeping for help and then the ship sank with its crew. The vessel was undermanned, overloaded with 700 tons of gold ore, and had left port without proper clearances.

In the UK, the master of the reefer Springbok pleaded guilty to three charges (failure to keep a good lookout, failure to ascertain that risk of collision existed, and a failure to keep clear of a vessel being overtaken). Because visibility in the English Channel had improved, he had dismissed the lookout and proceeded at 18-20 knots. He spent the next twenty minutes chatting with a son and brother-in-law when he suddenly saw through the ship’s forward cranes the fast-approaching stern of the small LNG carrier Gas Arctic (7-8 knots), which was desperately altering course to avoid the coming collision. However, they did collide. He was fined £1,500 plus costs of £1,000. In 2003 at Singapore, a small timber carrier named Springbok was T-boned by an LPG carrier named Gas Roman. The collision welded the two ships together and salvors separated them with difficulty and some trepidation. Different ships, different owners, but much similarity in names.

The smallish Wilson Avonmouth gently grounded north of Elsinore. (If that name is vaguely familiar, get out your copy of “Hamlet.”) The vessel traffic service had noted that the coaster was heading for a problem and tried to call the ship on VHF. No answer so the VTS took actions involving a helicopter and the Swedish Coast Guard in hopes of getting the ship to anchor but no luck. The master was intoxicated. The container ship Fremantle Express ran onto rocks and its starboard anchor while entering Puerto Cortes in Honduras. No leaks or structural damage, and the ship was freed the next day by two tugs. In Alaska, the small tugboat Capt Hendren had just finished a summer of dredging for gold when it ran up on some rocks two miles outside of St. Michael, It got off a day or two later. In India, the chemical tanker Pratibha Cauvery was pushed aground at Chennai by Cyclone Nilam and the crew tried to get ashore in a lifeboat. It capsized and eighteen were rescued but four others went missing.

The container ship Deike Rickmers arrived at Cape Town with dense smoke arising from a probable fire in a container. Last summer’s fire on the container ship MSC Flaminia claimed one more life, raising the death toll to three. A Filipino crewmember died in a hospital in Portugal from severe burns sustained during the fire.

Three walkers were 3,000 feet up the munro (any mountain in Scotland with a height over 3,000 feet or 914.4 m) Beinn a’Chroin in the Trossachs when a cloud rolled in and they were lost. Poorly equipped except for a smartphone and whistle, they asked for help. A Royal Navy helicopter was diverted from a training flight but decided it didn’t want to operate in thick cloud. A crewman hiked up the munro and found the stranded walkers about 15 minutes later, uninjured, but cold. Visibility topside was about 40 meters and the whistle provided useful vectoring information for the chopper crewman. On the other side of the world, Typhoon Son Tinh separated the jack-up drill rig GSF Key Hawaii from its tugboat. As the rig approached the shore of Ha Mai Island, a Vietnamese military chopper evacuated all 35 workers on board. In the dark of night, a helicopter from the USS McCampbell spotted five Filipino fishermen standing on the roof of their sinking boat because one of them was repeatedly flashing a lighter. The destroyer took them to Manila.

An argument on the tug Nicole at Manila turned ugly and the quartermaster hacked the chief engineer to death with a bolo. At Tampa, the geared bulker Honesty Ocean was unloading bundles of 4-inch pipes with a ship’s crane when a bundle broke apart, showering pipes into the hold, on the ship’s deck, and onto the pier. Four stevedores were trapped under the pipes in the hold. One died and another was seriously injured. In Alaska near Skagway, a fisherman fell off the fishing boat Darlin’ Michelle. Shipmates tossed him a life ring and tried several times to pull him aboard but his lifejacket broke and so he died. A mechanic was killed while performing maintenance on a crane at Oakland, California. He was about 250 feet up when the trolley moved and he was crushed between a cable and the body of the crane. About 90 miles SE of Cape Hatteras and pretty much in the path of Hurricane Sandy, the made-for-a-movie replica square-rigger HMS Bounty ran into trouble and sank. Fourteen made it into liferafts but two missed a raft when the Bounty rolled. One was later located, survival-suited but comatose and unresponsive. She was Claudene Christian, a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, the original Bounty’s chief mutineer. Still missing was Capt Robin Waldridge, a vastly experienced skipper of replica ships like the Bounty. The master of the Saudi Arabia-flagged tug Resolve Guardian died, probably of a heart attack, while the tug was en route from India to a Pakistani port. A South Korean Coast Guard small boat capsized while rescuing 15 of the Malaysian freighter Shinline’s crew and five of the just-rescued died. On the LPG carrier Maharshi Krishnatreya, five died when they accidentally inhaled gas from a leaking pipe.'

At Loch Lomond, an unconfirmed report stated that more than 100 vessels had been stolen after dark, taken out to an island and stripped that night, and then sunk. One of the custodians of the Mersey Heritage Trust’s Baltic trader tall ship Zebu attempted to mount his bike on a pontoon (float) alongside the dock wall. But he lost his balance and fell head first into the narrow gap between the pontoon and quay and became trapped under it. The Zebu’s safety officer immediately jumped in and pulled him out. He was rushed to Liverpool Royal Infirmary where he was admitted to intensive care suffering from secondary drowning. He recovered sufficiently to come out of intensive care but his condition then deteriorated and he died.

Gray Fleets

Off Florida, the submarine USS Montpelier rose to periscope depth in the path of the cruiser USS San Jacinto. Their meeting crushed the cruiser’s sonar dome.

The USS John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group had barely arrived in the Middle East when its commander, a rear admiral, was temporarily reassigned because of an "inappropriate leadership judgment" during the deployment. The CO of the Navy’s Southwest Regional Maintenance Center was relieved of command for mismanagement and misuse of funds. And the commanding officer of the frigate USS Vandergrift took photos during a three-day “happy” visit with the ever-convivial Russians at Vladivostok and posted them on the 7^th Fleet’s own Facebook page. He was promptly relieved of command for “demonstrating poor leadership and failure to ensure the proper conduct of his wardroom officers.” Three of his senior officers were relieved of duty “for personal conduct involving use of alcohol and not adhering to established liberty policies."

The commanding officer of the landing ship dock USS Harpers Ferry was hospitalized after a motorcycle accident while commuting home from work. His executive officer took over. At Mayport, Florida, a Royal Navy officer died after falling off a hoisted-out landing craft on HMS Ocean and landing on another landing craft below.

To raise £5,000 for the British Limbless Ex-Service Men's Association a Royal Navy diver ran the Great South Run while wearing 200 pounds of antique diving gear. He figured he could run a mile in an hour and a half so race organizers allowed him to run the ten miles over three days and start two days before the race itself. (For those who really must know, yes, he wore a catheter.)

White Fleets

The ex-master of the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia sued his ex-employer for wrongful termination of his job. In Western Australian waters, a helicopter from the frigate HMAS Toowomba was training off Fremantle when it was diverted to pick up an elderly man off the Sea Princess. He was suffering from acute stomach pains. Serious damage was discovered on the Ventura, 116,017 gross tons and built in 2007, after it hit bad weather in the Bay of Biscay. A crack at least two inches wide ran across the full width of an upper deck. (The cruise ship and its passengers made it safely to Southampton.)

Off Cape Town, an un-named catamaran capsized near Hout Bay and a crewman went missing. Passengers said he had given his lifejacket to a youngster. His body was found the next day. The boat was carrying 38 people to Duiker Island, a popular destination for seal spotting. A mock cannon exploded on a mock pirate ship carrying 26 tourists near the island of Kos in the south Aegean Sea. The explosion killed the master and injured five tourists, none seriously. A relative of the dead master got the ship back to port. In Vietnam’s scenic Ha Long Bay, five tourists died when their boat collided with another and capsized. None were wearing lifejackets and there was no safety or medical equipment on board. After a similar accident killed five tourists last year, safety standards for tour boats were implemented but their enforcement seems to have been haphazard if at all.

Those That Go Back and Forth

Gusts of wind caused the ro/ro ferry Napoleon Bonaparte to break its moorings at Marseille and it ended up aground and leaning heavily on a dock. That ripped an underwater breach in the hull about 30 meters long. The ferry was out of service for the winter. A female deckhand on the Alaska Marine Highway’s Columbia was injured at Fairhaven, Washington when a cable supporting a passenger ramp snapped and it buckled and collapsed. She fell about 20 feet onto the ramp and suffered multiple injuries. Due to bad weather conditions, the ro/pax Pride of Burgundy collided with the similar ferry Berlioz off Calais. The PoB had damage to its starboard bridge wing. On Lake Erie, the small ro/ro ferry Jimann got stuck on a sandbar only two hundred meters from its terminus at Leamington, Ontario. Thirty-three crew and passengers, including an infant, spent the night on board and the next day a tugboat pulled it free. Many on Pelee Island breathed a sigh of relief because the ferry was due to bring over six hundred hunters for the Island’s annual pheasant shoot. The Washington State ferries have minimum staffing and, if a crewman doesn’t show up for work, the ferry doesn’t sail. There were dozens of such cancellations this summer (up from four last year) and company officials are talking with unions whether union members might be unhappy (as in “work slowdown”).

In the Egyptian province of Beheira, a minibus rolled off a ferry into the Nile and fourteen workers died. In the US or perhaps Canada, another minivan knocked down a raised ramp and rolled off Horne’s ferry while it crossed the St Lawrence River between Cape Vincent in Jefferson County, New York and Wolfe Island, Ontario. The three occupants standing nearby weren’t hurt but ferry’s master/owner Horne was hospitalized for a possible heart attack. And the next day the company’s website announced, “We must close early this year due to low water levels.”

Energy

A 13.8-megawatt solar power plant has been operating at the US Navy’s China Lake research center in the Mojave Desert since January. It will save the Navy about $13 million a year because the maker of the solar units got to install its units if it sold electricity to the Navy at below the current rates.

The US Navy signed an agreement with a privately owned company for the development of advanced biofuels and bioenergy for use throughout the US military. The company will build a sustainable bio-refinery at US Naval Base Ventura County that will produce biofuels and bioenergy at prices competitive with unsubsidized conventional fuel and power. Construction of the plant will be partially funded by the California Energy Commission.

Nature

An Australian-Bahraini team of coral-reef rebuilders has been using realistic molded-concrete replicas of coral heads but may switch to more-complex heads printed by a 3-D printer.

Scientists are working on ways to “see” through the icy crust on an ocean to explore what is underneath. A major problem is the sea is on Europa, a moon of Jupiter some 390 million miles from Earth.

Metal-Bashing and Salvage

Three laborers died when steel plates fell on them from a ship’s deck at the Gadani scrapping yard on the Balochistan coast in Pakistan. In India, Asia's largest ship breaking yard, Alang, was closed as a protest against the arrest of company officials in connection with death of six laborers in a blast on a oil tanker being dismantled. Those arrested were booked for culpable homicide not amounting to murder and negligent conduct with respect to fire rather than the more-usual charge of negligence, and they could get life imprisonment.

To eliminate pollution sources Russia may hire international salvage companies to raise two old nuclear submarines. While being towed to a dismantling site, B-159 (originally K-159), a November-class submarine, sank in the Barents Sea in 2003 with nine of her crew and 1,760 lbs. (800 kg) of spent nuclear fuel. K-27 was an experimental attack submarine built in 1962 and decommissioned in 1979 due to her troublesome nuclear reactors. Nine of her crew died when fuel elements failed. Her reactor compartment was sealed and the submarine was scuttled in the eastern Kara Sea in 1982.

The sunken ro/ro ferry Bahuga Jaya may remain at the bottom of Sunda Strait at a depth of 76 meters and with strong underwater currents along with what is now believed to be the bodies of 43 passengers. Rescue authorities said it would be “inefficient” to raise it to the surface. (A salvor might have a different opinion.)

“Bottom suction” is often a limiting factor when refloating a grounded vessel. At Valencia, the grounded bulker Celia broke bottom suction by using its cranes to swing two heavy containers from one side to the other while the tug Punta Mayor pulled. Everything worked and all that remained were a damage assessment and an investigation into why the ship had gone aground almost a month earlier.

Human Imports

As many as 130 people may have drowned off the coast of southern Bangladesh after a boat carrying passengers trying to illegally get into Malaysia sank in the Bay of Bengal. Only six survivors were found. At least 61 people died when a boat believed to be carrying illegal Syrians and Palestinians migrants sank off the coast of Turkey. A boat carrying as many as 100 Tunisian migrants ran into trouble in the Mediterranean and at least 56 people were rescued, some from the sea and others from the small and uninhabited Sicilian island of Lampione

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

West Africa was the month’s piracy hot spot. Seven non-Nigerian mariners were kidnapped from the anchor-handler Bourbon Liberty 249 off Nigeria while another nine crewmen, reportedly all Nigerians, were left on board. The vessel was soon located at Bonny Island and the captives were released two weeks later, probably after ransoms were paid. The comment was made that “this attack was a ‘departure against the usual pattern of piracy’ in the Gulf of Guinea.”

The Aframax tanker Orfeas quietly left the anchorage at Abidjan, probably hijacked and heading for Lagos, Nigeria. About three days later, the tanker was released minus a goodly part of its cargo of 32,068 tons of gasoline.

Odd Bits and Headshakers

The US Coast Guard conducted an extensive search off Mobile, Alabama for a Filipino sailor from the containership MSC Tokyo. He had been told to recover the Jacob’s ladder after the pilot arrived. The ladder was down and a shoe was on the deck so it was believed he fell overboard. Four days later, he was found in a downtown Mobile hotel.

The Statute of Liberty will soon have a rival. In 2014, a giant Ferris wheel will open near the Staten Island ferry terminal. The wheel will be 625 feet high while London’s famed London Eye wheel is only 443 feet tall. (I once asked a carnie operator why they bothered erecting a Ferris wheel when few rode on it. He said attendance was always way down unless the Ferris wheel showed above the trees.)

Actor Sir Alec Guinness said, “I gave my best performances during the war trying to be an officer and a gentleman.” (He was commanding officer of a landing craft or two during World War II with several combat landings to his credit.)

In the UK, the Strood is an ancient causeway (originally built by the Saxons in about 680 AD) that connects the Essex mainland with Mersea Island, about a half-mile offshore. The causeway (now paved) is low-lying and is regularly inundated by high tide. Most locals carry a tide table to avoid being embarrassed or inconvenienced but one elderly woman forgot that detail and was stranded. She got out of her car and was swept away. A nearby recovery truck was called and rescued her but within half an hour there were seven more vehicles trapped on the flooded road. Nine forgetful adults and a toddler were rescued.

At San Rafael in California, a backhoe excavator on a barge was cleaning silt from a canal when the crew spotted a nearby apartment on fire. Moving in, the operator tried to dump dredge buckets of water on the fire but was too far away. He then dredged his way closer. The fire was effectively knocked down when local firefighters arrived.

A Senatorial candidate in Connecticut ran a television ad promoting his efforts to create jobs at the state's sub-maker, General Dynamics' Electric Boat of Groton. Inadvertently, it featured a Norwegian submarine.

Was the homophone accidental or not? A marine technology magazine creatively used the English language when it printed that one company had “developed a way to take fish awful and make a world-class fertilizer.”

Other Shores - November 2012

Neil Armstrong’s cremated remains were dropped at an unknown location into the Atlantic Ocean during a Navy burial-at-sea military service aboard the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea.

The ship’s master was not included when the crew of the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia was awarded Lloyd's List "Seafarer of the Year" award for 2012 for displaying "true examples of courage and professionalism" during the dangerous night evacuation of the ship.

Opening of the widened Panama Canal in 2015 will lead to “fierce” competition among US ports for inbound containers but should present opportunities for increasing exports. But probable after-effects from a possible longshoremen’s strike at East and Gulf coast container ports next year are already causing shippers to review their plans on how to best use the Canal.

US crude-oil and product imports hit the lowest levels in a decade but tanker exports of products were booming.

About two-thirds of the US has been enduring drought conditions and the cost might be $77 billion, making the drought the third-costliest natural disaster in US history after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and another devastating drought in 1988.

About every three days, a cargo vessel, tanker, or passenger ship is involved in an accident somewhere in the Baltic Sea. Last year, 121 ships ran aground, collided, caught fire, or were involved in some other type of mishap.

An international tug company cited lower volumes of shipping and increased costs as reasons for upping towage fees at one Australian port by a whopping 54 percent. (The tug company has no competitors at that port.)

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

Off Valencia, the smallish container ships Celia and BSLE Sunrise dragged their anchors and went aground in a violent rainstorm with heavy swell and wind gusts to 77 km/h (about 48 mph). Welding sparked a fire that killed five crewmen and a fireman on a tanker possibly named the Shun Cheng while it was anchored in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam. At New Orleans, authorities notified anchored ships that their rudders may have set into the soft mud near the riverbanks while swinging at anchorage but no damage to steering apparatus was anticipated. Blamed was low-water conditions on the Mississippi. At Finnsnesrenna in Norway, the small Straumvik carrying 380 tons of salmon and a crew of four ran aground after passing the fairway light on the wrong side. It suffered a gash in a ballast tank. The news account did not specify whether the salmon were alive or dead.

It is embarrassing when your car hits a police vehicle so imagine the feelings on the Canadian laker John D. Leitch when it struck a pier and a Lorain County Sheriff’s Office boat while traveling the Black River near Lorain. Ohio. Breathalyzer tests of the captain and crewmembers were negative.

Fire broke out in a container carrying hazardous and toxic substances so the Amsterdam Bridge was moved to the outer anchorage at Mumbai Port for some serious firefighting. Most of the ship-based conflagration was extinguished within three days but containers smoldered on for at least another month. A major fire ravaged the New Zealand-based fishing vessel Amaltal Columbia at sea but the vessel was safely towed into Lyttelton.

About forty miles off South Devon, the master of the German-owned coaster Krempertor went down into a hold to investigate an alarm that was sounding. He died of injuries suffered in a fall there. Police treated the accident as “avoidable.” About 900 km east of Japan, the 119-ton tuna-fishing vessel Horiei was run down by the 25,000-ton bulker Nikkei Tiger. The larger vessel could find only nine of 22 fishermen. The smallish sand-carrying Fairland ran aground in the Demerara (think rum because that’s where it comes from) River in eastern Guyana. During efforts to free the ship, it was necessary to move a crane and a hydraulic line burst, causing the crane’s boom to fall and hit a plank that struck the chief mate on his leg. He fell, fatally hitting his head.

At the Port of Indiana, the laker Algoma Transport was unloading 26,000 tons of iron ore concentrate onto a pier when the pier started cracking and collapsing. Loading stopped. In the south China port of Gaolan, while being unloaded from the semi-submersible heavy-lift ship Zhen Hua 12, a 1,700-ton unloader fell into the water and hit the ship, punching two holes in its hull. Mis-ballasting of the ship as the unloader was being moved ashore was the probable cause. The unloader may have been one of seven coal unloaders recently bought by the port.

In the South China Sea, the tug Swiber Charlton spotted and picked up a floating Thai fisherman. Little else is known except his name was Montri Srirak and he summed up his gratitude by saying, “I am thankful that Swiber Charlton saved my life. Everyone treated me well." In Alaska, a forward-deployed Coast Guard helicopter took a male with heart-attack symptoms off the Harvey Spirit, a 245-foot offshore supply boat some 134 miles west of Barrow. Off Cornwall, a lone yachtsman fell off the Regulus but he had a personal electronic locator beacon on him and was picked up by a Royal Navy helicopter an hour later. In South Carolina in Charleston harbor, a Coast Guard small boat took a crewman off the geared bulker Clipper Tenacious after he started suffering abdominal pains as the ship neared port. On the other side of the world in the Java Sea, the bulker Clipper Mayflower picked up two injured survivors of a sunken immigrant boat and later received praise for its role as on-site communications coordinator. The remaining 78 survivors were picked up by Australian defense vessels and taken to Christmas Island for sorting out.(One might assume the two Clippers are fleetmates but the Mayflower is Danish-owned and the Tenacious is owned out of Nassau. Both are Bahamas-flagged, however.)

Gray Fleets

Airships were in the news last month. The US Navy is back into operating blimps – well, at least one blimp. The East Coast-based non-rigid airship MZ-3A is a manned platform for testing sensors that could be used on a future US Army airship. (The US Army ordered "up to three" of Northrop Grumman's Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicles (LEMV) in a $517m deal in 2010. They should see service in Afghanistan this year.)

The Thai Army seems to have purchased an airship back in 2009. It is not yet operational but could be by November. Critics claimed its sensors cannot see into Thailand’s deep jungles because the system was designed for desert regions such as Afghanistan. It is known that fixes were needed to US-supplied cameras and a video streaming system.

Finally, the Royal Navy was briefed on possible British-built airships for surveillance and supply carrying. At only £50 million each and filled with an explosion-proof 60 percent helium / 40 percent air mix, an airship could carry 150 commandos and their boats or 50 tons of supplies. Best of all, it could even be remotely operated as a drone.

There are no color bars in the US Navy, at least in the upper ranks. Rear Adm. Brian Brown relieved Rear Adm. Jonathan White as head of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command.

The CO of the nuclear submarine USS Pittsburgh was relieved of command of the sub a week after taking command. He had dumped his mistress by sending her an email from a fictitious fellow-worker saying he had unexpectedly died. She learned the truth when she visited his former residence to offer condolences and was told he had moved to Connecticut to take command of a submarine. Charges included dereliction of duty, adultery, and unbecoming conduct.

The US Navy awarded a $94 million contract for advance planning and preliminary execution of fire-restoration efforts on USS Miami. The sub was damaged in a fire in May while it was drydocked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, and estimates of repair costs are currently at the $650 million level.

The US Military Sealift Command uses civilians to operate many non-combat Navy and governmental vessels. Most MSC ships can be identified by the USNS prefix to their names but four retain the USS prefix and remain in commission because they have a US Navy Captain in charge. They are the submarine tenders USS Frank Cable and USS Emory S. Land, the command ship USS Mount Whitney, and the newly created Afloat Forward Staging Base (Interim) USS Ponce.

The Royal Navy’s Sea King helicopters will be taken out of service in 2016, leaving as much as a four-year gap in airborne early warning capability until 2020 when replacement airborne surveillance and control helicopters should become operational.

The Iranian Kilo-class attack submarine Tareq needed repairs but the original Russian builders declined the work (no comment) so Iranian personnel repaired the radars, pneumatic and compressor systems, pumps, engines, telecommunications, and other systems.

Delivery to the Indian Navy of the aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya (formerly the Russian Navy’s Admiral Gorshkov) has been deferred yet again to October 2013. On sea trials, seven out of eight boilers providing propulsion steam were defective. Why, one may ask? Read on! According to a Russian spokesman, India had refused to use asbestos as a means to protect the boilers from heat, fearing that the material was dangerous for the crew and the boilers’ designer had to use firebrick, which proved not sufficiently heatproof. (Firebrick is used to line boilers and asbestos is used externally to keep heat in pipes and people from being burned by hot surfaces.)

In spite of Congressional disapproval, the US Navy is dead-set on achieving non-dependence on fossil fuels. US Navy scientists are hot on the trail on making fuel from seawater. Extract carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas from seawater and then use catalysts to convert them into J5 jet fuel. (J5 has been proposed as the energy source for all Navy operations, including fighter jets as well as shipboard boilers, diesels, and marine gas turbines.) One drawback to the process is that producing the hydrogen “requires nearly 60 percent of the amount of energy that would be stored in the liquid hydrocarbon fuel” but nuclear-powered ships could produce a lot of electricity and seawater is cheap.

And is the unused runway on Ford Island at Pearl Harbor a significant historical site that should be preserved as a memorial to Dec 7, 1941 or can it be used as the site of a 60,000-panel solar-panel farm? The runway and the rest of Ford Island were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 but the Navy says, “it is an inactive space that is ideally located and sized“ and it is “critically important to achieving renewable energy mandates.”

White Fleets

Several cruise lines eliminated planned calls at North African ports because of Muslim protests about an anti-Islamic film posted on the Internet.

In Maine, a cruise-ship tender carrying 93 passengers from the cruise ship Celebrity Summit ran abruptly aground at night on a remote shoal off Bar. Harbor. The whale-watch boat Bay King III and the pilot boat Frenchman Bay took off the passengers and two crewmembers. In Vietnam, five Taiwanese tourists heading back to their ship died when their tender named Paradise collided with the tourist boat Dong Phong 02. Thirteen other tourists survived their expulsion from paradise. In Bermuda, passengers watched mooring lines snap as 45-knot winds (52 miles per hour) pushed the Norwegian Star into the Explorer of the Seas at the next berth. Two tugs eventually pushed the Norwegian Star back into position. Both vessels suffered some hull damage. (Two of Bermuda’s three government tugs were recently out of service.) Off Portugal, the Queen Victoria suffered problems in one propulsion unit so the cruise ship headed for Bremerhaven for repairs that would enable it to achieve the speeds required on its next cruise.

A Portuguese cruise company went into bankruptcy when three of its five ships were arrested, and those arrests stranded at least 550 Ukrainian, Indonesian, and Portuguese seafarers without their pay. The 1948-built Athena was originally the Swedish Stockholm that infamously collided with the Italian liner Andrea Doria in 1956. The Princess Danae was converted from the cargo liner Port Melbourne, and in September this year the Yugoslavian-built Arion, although highly rated by some passengers, was named the “worst-performing small cruise ship” among 300 cruise ships.

Those That Go Back and Forth

At Hong Kong off Lamma Island, the ferry-turned-into-excursion boat-for-a-night Lamma IV and the ferry Sea Smooth collided although the night was clear. The damaged ferry continued on, its master fearing it might sink. The other, smaller vessel was holed in its engineroom and quickly sank stern-first with only its bow thrusting upwards above water. It had been chartered to take company employees and their families to watch fireworks celebrating China’s National Day and thirty-seven of them died while 100-plus were taken to local hospitals. (A nine-year-old later died of her injuries.) Crewmembers from both vessels were arrested, and even the highest levels of disciplined Hong Kong were upset and stunned by the rare accident.

On the Mahakam River in Indonesia’s portion of Borneo island the wooden ferryboat Surya Indah carrying 97 crew and passengers upstream hit a log and sank. Twenty-two people died and at least fourteen others were missing. 
“The ship was made in 2001 and is really seaworthy. According to the boat manifest, the passengers only numbered 40 and there were 10 tons of goods,” explained port official. But other reports said 112 people might have been on board. Off Sumatra, the ro/pax Bahuga Jaya sank after colliding with the LPG-carrying Norgas Cathinka. The tanker left the scene because its master though leaking gas might cause a catastrophic explosion and fire. Eight died, 207 were rescued, and the master and chief officer of the Norgas Cathinka were accused of negligence. The accident led to increased calls for a bridge connecting Java and Sumatra. In New Zealand, a ferry serving Waiheke Island inadvertently surged forward (a crew-at-the-throttle goof) and the gangway broke, leaving a man dangling off the bow and in the water, Luckily, his four-year-old son wasn’t involved. The new freight ferry Huelin Dispatch touched bottom hard enough to cause leaks. It was on its maiden voyage from Southampton to the Channel Islands.

Legal Matters

Arresting a nation’s largest sail-training vessel in a foreign country will get attention. That happened to the Argentine Navy’s square-rigged Libertad in Ghana. The court order was sought by creditors suing Argentina in international courts after Argentina declared a world-record sovereign debt default during an economic meltdown a decade ago. Bondholders want to recover the full value of the defaulted bonds and have sought to freeze state assets. The Libertad qualified as such.

Nature

Although fishing was stopped three years ago, sonar surveys by an experienced fisherman revealed that the fish populations of tilapia and sardines in the Sea of Galilee (aka Lake Kinneret) have risen to “very optimistic” levels.

Shell had hoped to do some serious drilling in the Alaskan Arctic but decided to limit efforts to drilling shallow “top holes” that won’t reach oil-bearing depths and wait for next year.

Could rising sea temperatures be melting methane hydrates, which remain frozen in a seabed under very low temperatures and very high pressures? Scientists investigated methane vents near Spitzbergen and decided that at least some of the gas outlets had been active for a long time since carbonate deposits, which form when microorganisms convert the escaping methane, were found on the vents.

Metal Bashing

What keeps some ships afloat? You might be surprised. After 51 years of distinguished service, USS Enterprise (CVN 65) will be decommissioned later this year. One of its nuclear-powerplant engineers walked under the ship while it was drydocked during a mid-life extension program many years ago. Intrigued by something sticking down, he discovered that someone had sealed a hull opening with a wooden plug. It may still be there.

The former 31-year-old former Royal Navy flagship HMS Ark Royal was sold to a Turkish scrap metal firm for £3 million. Alternative bids would have turned the warship into a diving reef, a helipad in the Thames, a museum, or a casino were “judged either not feasible or appropriate, or carried too much risk.” The Ark Royal was withdrawn from service last year five years early as part of sweeping military cutbacks.

Imports

A boat carrying illegal emigrants sank halfway to its destination of Lampedusa Island and Italian authorities arrested two survivors, probably the master and his assistant. That particular tragedy triggered creation of an investigative committee. On it are Italy’s Minster of the Interior and Tunisia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. (Lampedusa has become illegal immigrants’ entry to Europe and thousands of illegals are camping out on the island.)

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

The Thai Navy (using five vessels and two helicopters) plus five other governmental agencies arrested 108 Vietnamese fishermen on ten trawlers that had been catching giant cuttlefish in Thai waters.

Odd Bits and Head-Shakers

Six British and Australian adventurers will attempt to authentically re-enact Sir Ernest Shackleton's incredible boat voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia, followed by the difficult crossing of its mountainous interior. Their 22-and-a-half-foot (6.86-metre-long) boat is a precise replica of the James Caird. Her crew will also endure the hardships of that age, wearing clothing of the time. (How “authentic” can the replica voyage really be? If memory serves, the Caird’s cockpit held only three and that meant Shackleton’s off-duty men spent many hours below shivering in slimy, mouldering reindeer-skin sleeping bags awash in the bilge water, and with loose reindeer hairs everywhere including in their food and mouths. And when it came time to climb, they improvised mountain-climbing boots by carefully inserting small brass screws into the soles of their leather boots.) BTW, this replica boat is not to be confused with the state-of-the-art survey motor boat James Caird IV carried aboard HMS Protector, Britain’s Antarctic protection vessel.

A small-boater was killed in Mississippi when his 23-foot center-console fishing boat struck "an unidentified object" east of Deer Island in the Mississippi Sound. That broke his outboard motor free and it flipped up and into the boat, where the propeller hit him in the back. He died while rescuers were trying to get him to a hospital. Most probably, he hit a dredge pipe floating just below the surface that carried slurried spoils to a remote deposit site.

At one political party’s national convention, a patriotic tribute by a retired admiral to fellow veterans inadvertently featured four Soviet Navy vessels.

One sometimes wonders at the ads created by advertising agencies and reviewed and paid for by their clients. Take, for example, the current ad by an engine maker. The headline reads “Go with the generator that works as hard as you do.” The illustration shows four fishermen, seated and standing but all idly staring back at the FV’s turbulent wake.