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In a feature appropriately titled “Worst Case Scenario” Popular Mechanics brings us “The Coast Guard’s Most Extreme Rescue - Alaska Ranger“. They write:

“Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is the Alaska Ranger. 5, 3, 5, 3 North, 1, 6, 9, 5, 8 West… We are flooding, taking on water in our rudder room.”

It was 2:52 am on March 23, Easter morning, when Coast Guard Station Kodiak picked up the distress call from a point almost 800 miles west, in Alaska’s frigid Bering Sea.

“Roger. Good copy on position… Request to know number onboard, over.”

After a static-filled pause, the answer came through loud and clear: “Number of persons: 47.”

Capt. Peter Jacobsen was in the crowded wheelhouse of the 189-ft. fishing vessel. When the trawler’s emergency alarm had first sounded about an hour before, crew members descended below decks to see water rising fast in the ship’s stern compartments. They had pulled out a pump, but the effort soon looked futile. Now Jacobsen, 65, a veteran captain who had been fishing in the Bering Sea for 23 years, was making calls to his ship’s sister vessels, repeating the coordinates of the Ranger’s position 120 miles west of the Aleutian Island port of Dutch Harbor.

Be sure to visit our previous Alaska Ranger Coverage including commentary by Kennebec Captain titled “Sinking of the Alaska Ranger - Fishing Master vs Captain“. Then read Popular Mechanics full article which can be found HERE.

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INTERESTING LINKS:

• Interview With A Helicopter Rescue Team
• Top 10 Coast Guard Rescue Videos
• Full Alaska Ranger Coverage

MayDay Call:

 

 Alaska Ranger Mayday - Fishing Boat Sinking Offshore Alaska: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The US Cost Guard gives us their Top 10 Rescues of 2007:

1. Coast Guard rescue crews assist with over 160 rescues in the flood-ravaged Pacific Northwest.
December 3
Lewis County, Wash.

2. A Coast Guard boat crew rescues three victims moments before their capsized boat sinks.
August 11
Little Egg, N.J.

3. Coast Guard air and boat crews team up to free a sailboat pinned against jagged rocks by heavy surf.
May 27
Lopez Island, Wash.

*Our Friend Richard Rodriguez assisted on this rescue.

4. Working with local authorities, a Coast Guard air crew rescues two young boys and two men caught in the current beneath a dam.
April 6
Bay City, Texas

5. Coast Guard air crews from Florida provide humanitarian relief in the Dominican Republic after Tropical Storm Noel.
November 5
San Jose de Ocoa, Dominican Republic

6. The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Liberty rescues dozens after the cruise ship Empress of the North ran aground and began taking on water.
May 14
Icy Strait Point, Alaska

7. Coast Guard crews from across the Midwest provide mass evacuations when flooding left victims stranded and in peril in the across several.
August 23
Shelby, Ohio

8. A Coast Guard air crew rescues a woman attempting to row across the Pacific Ocean after her capsized in heavy seas.
August 24
90 miles west of Humbolt Bay, Calif.

9. A Coast Guard air crew sets an altitude record while rescuing an injured hunter from the summit of a mountain.
May 27
Brother Mountain, Wash.

10. A Coast Guard air crew rescues two men so far from shore they had to stop to refuel at a oil rig on the way back.
August 16
130 miles south of Galveston, Texas

Click above to play

The preliminary report on the Empress Of The North grounding and subsequent abandonment (no fatalities) was released by the NTSB today. The BBC reports;

Marino Cattiotti was put in charge for four hours because another navigator was ill, the National Transportation Safety Board report said.

More than 200 people were evacuated when the Empress of the North hit a rock 25 miles (40km) from Juneau.

The report called the designation of Mr Cattiotti as navigator “imprudent”.

Hull ripped

Mr Cattiotti was fresh out of a maritime academy, the National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report said.

It was his first voyage on the ship.

The report said instructors believed that “placing a recent graduate of the school with no watch experience outside of a training environment, on watch, at night, in pilotage waters, in an unfamiliar vessel, without any additional preparation and/or supervision, was imprudent”.

Mr Cattiotti had said he had not taken part in any drills or had any training on the Empress of the North.

Not that this is a surprise to gCaptain readers as we reported such in gCaptain’s 16th ever post, “Alaska Cruise Ship - New Mate, Wrong Turn” and also HERE back in May. What’s surprising is we have received insider knowledge that the Coast Guard had asked the young mate to voluntarily hand over his license and “find a new profession”. While this is standard operating procedure following an incident it is worrisome in cases like this. We are, however, happy to report that the young mate made the right choice in not handing over his license and is looking (or has found) a new job. No word on the Captain’s state of employment though.

The ship that made gCaptain famous is back in the headlines. The M/V Pasha Bulker, a 76,741 deadweight ton Panamax bulk carrier launched in 2006, is the subject of a new report from NSW Maritime of Australia. The enormous vessel first made world headlines after running aground on a popular Australian beach in June of this year and since that time rumors to the cause of here dramatic grounding have been circling the media. Today the official report has been issued. Our friend and deputy gCaptain reporter Ian points us to NSW Maritime’s Press Release;

The Pasha Bulker ran aground during the once-in-thirty year storm that struck the Central Coast and Newcastle on June 8.

The same storm took nine lives and caused damage estimated to cost $1.35 billion.

Ports Minister Joe Tripodi said the investigation found the grounding of the Pasha Bulker was caused by a combination of horrendous weather conditions and poor seamanship by the Master of the vessel.

The poor seamanship involved his actions leading up to and on the morning of June 8. Continue Reading…

We will be working with veteran maritime incident reporter Bob Couttie to keep you updated on this important news item. For those new to this site, be sure to look back at the amazing photos and some of our previous posts on this amazing story.

PASHA BULKER INVESTIGATION REPORT – FACT SHEET [Continue Reading →]

David Hindin, a gCaptain reader from the San Francisco Bay Area pointed us to this image and audio file from the New York Times. They tell us;

A small, historic cruise ship with an imperfect security record was listing dangerously after it struck ice in Antarctic waters today, with 154 passengers and crew members evacuated in a flotilla of lifeboats and inflatable boats, the cruise operator and coast guards said.

Late into the day, the small red and white ship — named the Explorer but known affectionately as “the little red ship” — was listing steeply to starboard, nearly on its side, awash in ice floes and steely gray water. The vessel — on an expedition to trace the doomed route of the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton — sent out a distress signal in the middle of the night (5:24 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time) after it began to take in water through “a fist-sized hole,” said Dan Brown, a spokesman for G.A.P. Adventures, the Toronto-based tour operator that owns and operates the ship. He said the “running assumption” is that it hit an iceberg. Water began to trickle into a cabin and eventually flooded the engine room, causing the ship to lose power.

The accident occurred well north of the Antarctic Circle in an island chain that is part of the Antarctic peninsula, which juts close to South America and has seen sharp warming of temperatures in recent years.As the satellite distress signal was being picked up by coast guard stations in Britain; Norfolk, Va.; and Ushuaia, Argentina, the ship’s 100 passengers — 14 of them American, 24 British, 17 Dutch, 12 Canadian and a smattering of other nationalities— were awakened and told to don warm clothes and life preservers, said Mark Clark, a spokesman for Britain’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which was one of the first authorities to receive the distress signal. They clambered down ladders on the ship’s side to board lifeboats.

Mr. Clark said they were taken aboard a small research vessel, the National Geographic Endeavour, that was nearby, before they were transferred to a Norwegian cruise line.

You can continue reading this NYTimes story by clicking HERE.

 

  An interview with Jon Bowermaster, who was on the scene: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(Note: We made an error, the above photo is of the EXPLORER II)

In breaking news the BBC tells us;

More than 150 tourists and crew have been rescued off Argentina from an expedition ship, after it hit ice.

The M/S Explorer began listing close to King George Island in the Antarctic Ocean, near the South Shetland Islands.

Susan Hayes, of Gap Adventures, which owns the ship, said some 100 passengers and 54 crew members were evacuated to lifeboats and then to another ship.

She said the vessel left Ushuaia on Argentina’s southern tip on 11 November on a 19-day trip to the Drake Passage.

The UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) said it was informed at 0524 GMT on Friday of the incident involving the 2,400-tonne vessel. read more…

For those curious how the editors at gCaptain research maritime incidents like the Cosco Busan’s allision with San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, here are some of the websites that provide excellent reference material.

Maritime Industry Custom Search Engine

Our first stop in researching any maritime related topic is our own Maritime Industry CSE. It’s a powerful resource since it provides search results with the aid of google’s powerful search database and algarithims. Actually the only difference between it and google.com is the fact that our tool narrows the results down and only displays sites that pertain to large ships.

*Tip: Try the “incidents” refinement to narrow down the results even further.

The Maritime Incident Casebook

If you are looking for trusted information on incidents as they happen then MAC should be your first stop. Be sure to visit their podcast section as well as their links page which contains a list of the best maritime resources for incident prevention.

Searates.com Container Shipping References

For those looking for data that specifically pertains to Container Ships, head over to Searates’ Container Ship Reference Book. Not only is it full of Web 2.0 eye candy, it also has some great hard data.

*Tip: Its shipping lines section has links to both Cosco and Hanjin. By visiting Cosco’s site you will quickly learn they have removed their official “Cosco Busan” statement from Nov 11th.

gCaptain’s Maritime News Mash-up

For breaking news your first stop should be our Maritime News Discoverer but a close second is our Maritime News Mash-up which is automatically updated with the industry’s most trusted news sources.

*Tip - Also take a look at our gCaptain News and Maritime Blog Mash-ups

The Council of American Master Mariners

For those looking for expert opinion from Ship Captain’s we hope you contact us… but your next stop should be CAMM. Contact them directly for contacts from the Maritime Expert Database.

Maritime Executive Magazine

Traditional media is know for making small errors when reporting maritime incidents. To obviate this problem subscribe to MAREX’s FREE weekly newsletter. It is published every Thursday and is written by professional journalists with maritime backgrounds. For past articles click HERE.

*Tip: If you are more interested in weekly blog postings check out Fred Fry’s Maritime Monday

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If you have a reference site of interest please submit it to our Maritime News Discoverer under the category “Links“

Breaking weather news from Russia. Bloomberg tells us;

An oil spill from a tanker that sank in a storm in waters between Russia and Ukraine threatens an “environmental catastrophe,” said Vladimir Slivyak, head of the Moscow-based Ecodefense group.

The Volgoneft-139 leaked 1,300 tons of fuel oil into the Kerch Strait linking the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, a Russian Transport Ministry spokeswoman, who declined to be identified, said in Moscow. Four other ships sank in yesterday’s storm that produced six-meter (20-foot) waves, state broadcaster Russia Today reported. Two sailors are dead and 23 are missing, it said.

“The effect will be very serious for the whole marine ecosystem, including fish, because of the high toxicity of oil products,” Slivyak said by telephone in Moscow yesterday. It will take several months to remove the oil on the surface, while the oil that sank will be “very hard” to clear, he added. Continue Reading…

1,300 tons converts to approximately 560,000 gallons of fuel oil or 10 times that which was spilt last week by the Cosco Busan in San Francisco Bay. No specifics yet but maybe Robin Storm can enlighten us.

CNN has some impressive video as well: LINK

Cargo Law brings us photos of the deadliest Gulf of Mexico offshore accident in the last 43 years; last week’s Collision of the Usumacinta MODU and the Kab 101 Light-Production rig. Bloomberg News tells us;

The collision of a Petroleos Mexicanos oil rig and a floating platform in a storm this week was the deadliest offshore accident in the Gulf of Mexico in 43 years, killing at least 19 workers and leaving four missing. The death toll is the second-worst in the Gulf, where Mexico produces most of its oil and the U.S. receives about 27 percent of its output. In 1964, an explosion on a C.P. Baker drilling barge killed 22, said Simon Marquis, a U.K.-based offshore rig researcher.

Continue reading the article by clicking HERE then head over to CargoLaw.com to see the Photos HERE.

Ok… looks like we fowled up this post (thanks CargoLaw ;).

The error was caught by Simon who runs the excellent and previously featured website Oil Rig Disasters.  Head over there for all our rig photo needs and we will try to stay with what we know (drillSHIPS) next time.

In the latest edition of our favorite Maritime Podcast Bob Couttie warns; “Ancient mariners feared the seductive call of the siren would wreck their ships, this modern mariner was seduced by the song of the SIM.”

Download the podcast; LINK

Podcast Transcript; LINK