On missing container ships

[richandlori]

if we started to limit things where the phrase "any idiot..." could be used....no one would ever be allowed to leave their house...in fact...no one would ever be born...the Government would outlaw having kids.

[James V]

It is best to avoid them and be seen. The AIS system can be bought for $ 3000 + and will let you know where any of the ships on the system are going. However it is only VHF range. Nice with lots of ships around.

Keeping a watch and letting them know that you are there. VHF contact can be tried. At night a Big spot light shown on the big boat and slowly moved to your boat deck and kept moving until you get a response on the VHF. This does work.

White parachute flares will also work.

[Catigale]

There is an interesting part in the safety report that talks about the limit of an effective watch and the effect of sleep deprivation...the take home is more than 2 hours at the helm for most people is fine at sea, but not safe in traffic...I would have argued this point with my vast hours at sea against their 200 years of information gathering and investigations...

good food for thought...in traffic, must have two people up at helm at all times methinks...

[kmclemore]

Speaking of container ships...

In this photo released by the U.S. Coast Guard, the Singapore flagged vessel Cougar Ace is shown disabled and listing 90 degrees to its port side about 230 miles south of the Aleutian Islands off the Alaskan coast on Monday, July 24, 2006. The Coast Guard and the Alaska Air National Guard were sending aircraft Monday to rescue 22 crew members aboard an Asian cargo ship taking on water south of the Aleutian Islands. The 654-foot Cougar Ace, which was carrying nearly 5,000 cars from Japan to Canada, had rolled practically onto its side.

Can you say "Damaged Cars For Sale... CHEAP"?

The tricky bit is going to be getting them all out!

[ssichler]

It is best to avoid them and be seen. The AIS system can be bought for $ 3000 + and will let you know where any of the ships on the system are going. However it is only VHF range. Nice with lots of ships around.

.

Looks like AIS monitoring can actually be added for under $200 bucks if you already have a PC navigation set-up. Of course you would need to be awake to utilize.

AIS Link

[KayakDan]

Ok,now on my signal,everyone run to the starboard side and hold on!

"Hi,this is Fred,your car salesperson. I'm afraid your new Toyota will take a bit longer than we expected."

[Frank C]

Wow ... 5,000 cars in one ship ... that's a bunch!

If you figure about a million bucks for the ocean crossing (excluding insurance?)
it's only $200 per car ... GM allocates 3x that just to move my pickup from Detroit to SF.

[Night Sailor]

Another argument for an open cockpit instead of full enclosures is that if you can't see or hear or feel the big shlp coming, sometimes you can smell it if you are downwind. Diesel or coal yes, but if it's 20,000 sheep in deck containers coming in from NZ or AUS you can smell them before they come over the horizon. That's when you drop the sails and use all the horses on the stern to get clean air to breath.

[Dimitri-2000X-Tampa]

Well, its clear that the car carrying ship should have had a water ballast for self righting capability

I wonder if any water got into the companionway hatch...

A few thousand people standing on the starboard rudder ought to pop that baby right up!

Frank, might only be $200 from Japan to the U.S., but then they are gonna charge you another $450 to take it from Long Beach to SF..

[kmclemore]

Good time to clean & paint the bottom on that tanker, though, eh?

[Tony D-26X_SusieQ]

Gee! 150 feet above the water line, 15 feet below the waterline... What could have possibly caused that ship to roll over?

[Frank C]

Looks like AIS monitoring can actually be added for under $200 bucks
if you already have a PC navigation set-up.
[url=http://www.navsoftware.com/
sr161.php?px_source=google&px_campaign=
google:search:522923287:sr161:ais%20receiver&px_medium=search&px_phrase=
ais%20receiver&WT.srch=1]
Nav Software[/url]

Of course you would need to be awake to utilize.

OFF-TOPIC: Not picking on you Scott, just explaining the BBCode for benefit of all. You could easily restore this page to its "flexible width" so that it can auto-adjust to any screen size. Just edit your post, above, to include a short name (like Nav Software) instead of that long URL link.

The BBCode is shown with line breaks in above quote. The BBCode help page is available as a lower-left link in the page where you enter any new post. Removing the above line breaks will result in:
Nav Software


ON-TOPIC: Seems to me that this AIS system is a safety-mandatory enhancement for any of us in coastal waters, Gt Lakes, and fog-compromised areas. Too bad it requires a laptop. Just a guess, it will soon become an option on the mass-market GPS chartplotters .... hope so!

[kmclemore]

Also off-topic, but I'll put in another plug for "BBCode", an add-on for Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape. It gives you a nifty menu so you can add links, bold, italics and all the other BBcode options.... makes it sooooo easy!

[LOUIS B HOLUB]

Amazing that the entire ship didnt "turtle" with a side board of 150' above water

Makes me sorta squint an eye in wonderment watching some of the tall vacation cruise multi-level ships with all that "top side weight" with several thousand passengers aboard .... what if a wind, or a wave, or a buncha folks run to one side for a look-see, or ... whatever else ...

[Andy26M]

I had the great privilege of sailing a brand new ship through the St. Lawrence back in 1994, and I definitely remember some hairy areas and tense moments - many of them dealing with sailing vessels - and that ship was only 225 feet long with very high maneuverability (MCM - Mine Countermeasures Ship)! When you add the fact that there is a current as well as the channel being narrow, the big container ship really has very few options in a case like this. The average "man on the street" is not very aware of how truly non-maneuverable some of these huge ships are, or how massive the effect of a seemingly small current can be on a large ship (rule of thumb on a tanker-type vessel is that 1 knot of current produces the same effect as 30 knots of wind).

Bottom line for me is: stay clear of channels as much as possible, and when in a channel turn down the music and turn up the VHF!

As to the big car carrier that seems like it should have "turtled" - one of the most fascinating subjects of study I've found is bouyancy and things like righting moments, metacentric heights, etc. that determine things like why certain ships can heel further than others, etc.

Here's an interesting tidbit relating to capsizing ships: on one of my older ships, we had gun mounts sitting relatively high off the water (weight high = less stability as we Mac sailors know!). The maximum heel angle from which that ship would recover was documented as 55 degrees (i.e. if you took a 56 degree roll you should expect the ship to continue over onto her side or upside down). However, the gun mounts were designed to fall off at 54 degrees - the "downhill" mount would fall over the side, thereby removing several tons of weight high on the ship and changing the righting moment enough that the maximum heel on that side of the ship would increase to around 60 degrees. Have you ever heard of a "gun tub" on a warship? It was called that because in essence the gun was a separate unit sitting in a "tub" on deck, and the shape of the gun and tub would decide how far over you could go before the gun fell out (it also made maintenance easy because essentially you just had to unplug the control and power lines, unbolt some retaining bolts and alignment bolts, and you could crane the whole gun mount off the ship).

- Andy26M