Karin Schepers

A drunken master that had fallen asleep in the bridge is to blame for the August 2011 grounding of the Karin Schepers along the UK’s Cornish coast, according to an investigation by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch.

The Karin Schepers, an Antigua-flagged 800 teu box ship with 13 crew on board, ran aground at approximately 0536 on August 3, 2011 while in transit from Cork, Ireland to Rotterdam, Netherlands.

According to the final report, the master handed over the watch of the Karin Schepers at approximately midnight to the second officer. Over the course of the next few hours, the master returned to the bridge in regular intervals, each time showing more and more and signs of intoxication until he eventually ordered the second officer from the bridge. Shortly thereafter and alone on the bridge, the master eventually fell asleep.

The investigation revealed that the master had been asleep with no proper lookout for nearly two hours prior to grounding close to Pendeen Lighthouse, West Cornwall, England.

When Karin Schepers was just 2 miles from land, the coastguard at Falmouth Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre was alerted to its location and attempted, unsuccessfully, to contact the vessel.  By the time the vessel grounded, lifeboats, a SAR helicopter and a cliff rescue team were already ready and waiting. After numorous calls once aground, the master eventually responded to the coastguard and advised them that the crew were all safe and that the vessel would be refloated by de-ballasting.

Fortunately damage to the vessel was minimal and no one was injured, which is quite miraculous considering she blindly crossed the busy Land’s End Traffic Separation Scheme. After 50 minutes aground Karin Schepers refloated with the high tide and resumed passage under her own power.

The MAIB says that the grounding could have been avoided had additional safety barriers been in place, namely a proper lookout and had the bridge navigational watch alarm system been switched on.

The Union Moon cargo ship in front of the much larger Stena Feronia. Photo via Belfast Telegraph

UPDATE: The captain of M/V Union Moon, plead guilty to excess alcohol by the master of a ship Friday morning.  The captain, Miroslaw Pozniak, 55, from Poland, will remain in custody until at least Monday when it will be dicided if bail will be set.

Original: The captain of a cargo ship has been arrested in Northern Ireland after authorities found him to be drunk when his ship collided with a much larger passenger ferry.

The collision occurred near the mouth of Belfast Lough at about 7:45 pm local time between the 1,543 gross ton M/V Union Moon and the 21,856 gross ton Stena Feronia passenger ferry.

Lifeboats from the Bangor and Donaghadee Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), who were on a training exercise nearby, quickly rushed to the scene to assess the damage.

The Stena Feronia escaped with relatively minor damage above the water line and a bit of scare for the 51 passengers that were inbound from Liverpool to Belfast.  Luckily no injuries were reported.

The M/V Union Moon on the other hand did not fare so well.  Not only did the vessel sustain extensive damage to its bow in the collision, but the captain was arrested after failing a breathalyzer test.

BBC has reported that the Stena ferry has now docked at the Stena terminal and the Union Moon was accompanied by the coastguard back to Belfast.

The 55-year-old captain is due to appear in court Friday and has been charged with excess alcohol by the master of a ship.

Here’s a look at what the RNLI lifeboats found when the arrived on scene:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: The captain of the Maltese-flagged M/V Laconia that was arrested last week after failing a breathalyzer test was not just slightly drunk, he was extremely wasted, according to a report posted to OregonLive.com.

Georgios Choulis, the 53-year-old master of the M/V Laconia, pleaded guilty Friday to negligent operation of a commercial vessel after registering an astonishing .278 blood alcohol level.

A member of the Columbia River Bar Pilots boarded the Laconia last Tuesday as the vessel waited to enter Port of Longview. The pilot asked for the ship’s master and learned he was sick.  Notifying a U.S. Coast Guard boarding and security team, Choulis was eventually found sleeping in a berth with a nearly empty fifth of Johnnie Walker Red Label.

U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez  in Portland sentenced Choulis to a year of probation, a year off U.S. waters and a $500 fine.

From Tuesday, Feb. 28: The USCG arrested the drunk captain of a Maltese-flagged freighter while on the Columbia River near Astoria, Oregon on Tuesday.

According to the USCG report, the captain of the 738-foot M/V Laconia was taken into custody by a Coast Guard Boarding and Safety Team from Astoria after his blood-alcohol level was found to be in excess of the legal limit for commercial vessel operators.

The Coast Guard says that they were tipped off by Customs and Border Protection agents who boarded the vessel for a routine customs inspection and suspected the man had been drinking after finding open containers of alcohol in the Captain’s stateroom.

The Coast Guard boarding team conducted alcohol tests on the Captain while the Laconia remained anchored at the Astoria anchorage.  As a result of the breathalyzer test, the man was removed from the vessel and handed over to Coast Guard Investigative Service officials.  The man will be transported to the federal detention center in Portland, Ore., Wednesday.

The Laconia will have to find a replacement captain prior to departure from the Astoria anchorage.  The vessel is destined for Kalama, WA according to data from Marine Traffic.

Musta been a heck of a night for the master of the Danica Hav before he pulled out of the Swedish port of Varberg.

A few hours later he was found passed out at the wheel of his ship by Danish authorities while the ship sailed around erratically in the Great Belt Strait enroute to Lubeck, Germany.

The position of the Danica Hav when the captain was taken into custody.

***UPDATE***

The track previously reported (shown below) shows the track of the Danica Hav immediately AFTER the captain was taken into custody by Danish authorities.  This information was brought to our attention via our Facebook page.

Previously reported:

The following graphic from Marinetraffic.com shows the vessel’s path through the strait…

According to the AFP:

The captain was flown to the Roskilde police station where a blood test, taken eight hours after the arrest, showed 2.18 grams of alcohol per litre.

A judge in Holbaek ordered the captain be kept in custody for breaking maritime security law until a hearing on March 13.

A Latvian captain has been placed under arrest after his ship ran aground, allegedly while the man was drunk.  The cargo vessel ALVA was underway from Sczcecin to Gothenburg with a cargo of sodium silicate when the vessel failed to change course as it passed the Island of Hven, just north of Landskrona, Sweden, and ran aground.

A breath test conducted by the authorities revealed that the 63 year old master had been drinking, and authorities suspect that the man may have fallen asleep.  A blood sample was also taken.

Alva had a crew of six when the accident occurred.

Via Seanews Turkey

Photo Seanews Turkey

Photo Seanews Turkey

by Bob Couttie

“Capt. Cota acknowledges the lack of situational awareness and does not expect it to happen again.”
Board of Pilot Commissioners for the Bays: Investigation into the grounding of the M/V Pioneer…on 20 February 2006.

Bay pilot John Cota’s week it wasn’t, starting April 8, 2008. Since the US Department of Justice has already charged him on two criminal counts, an act likely to hinder a helpful investigation, his lawyers advised him to claim the protection under the Fifth Amendment of the US constitution against self-incrimination and declined to give testimony at the public hearings of the US National Transportation Safety Board, a protection ironically, which the US government does not want extended to non-US seafarers.

The ship’s crew, currently detained as ‘material witnesses’ for Cota’s trial did not give testimony, either.

Much of the second day of the hearing was occupied by evidence on Cota’s medical condition and previous history of alcohol abuse – he was tested for alcohol immediately after the incident and found clear. After the incident, the US Coast Guard asked Cota to surrender his mariner’s license because “the listed potential side effects of those medications and how they may or may not have some impact upon his judgment, his ability to function, cognitive ability,” said Chief of the Regional Exam Center, George Buffleben.

A medical witness, Dr. Robert Bourgeois, told the hearing “I wouldn’t want anyone taking those medicines and having to make decisions in a safety-sensitive position”. When askled if he would let his children board a bus with a driver using such medication, he said “my kids would not be on that bus”.

John Cota, call sign Romeo, was evaluated for renewal of his license in January 2007 under a system that is currently undergoing changes. However, this does call into question the effectiveness of the medical examination process.

This does not necessarily mean that Cota was suffering impairment. If he was, the hearing was told, it would be difficult for the master or officers to tell whether or not he was so impaired as to present a hazard. Under US legislation ship’s officers are required to obey the orders of the pilot unless he is clearly incompetent or incapacitated.

There has been much comment about alleged problems with the radar, AIS and ECIDS, with Cota saying that the latter was confusing. It is clear for the VDR transcript that he was struggling with both. The pilot who had conducted the Cosco Busan inbound, Captain Nyborg, had no problems with radar or AIS, and these were found to be working after the incident.

He also had little problem communicating with the Captain, Mao Cai Sun, nor with the helmsman.

Captain Nyborg did notice a problem with the ECDIS, with the track being offset to the west. Nyborg disembarked the Cosco Busan and later went to the pilot conference centre for a monthly meeting. From there he saw the ship coming away from anchorage 7 and moving towards anchorage 9, “I was surprised because I recognized her as a ship I put in Oakland, and it would be very unusual for that ship to be coming to the wrong direction unless something had happened or something was wrong, like if they had a breakdown or something” said Nyborg. Other pilots present told Nyborg about the allision.

“I tried to remember where, you know, what issues I might have had with it, and what my, you know, if I had any difficulties or, you know, bad helmsman or anything like that. Nothing stuck out in my mind except that I, I remembered that, gee, I think that ECDIS display was showing a poor course as far as — a poor planned route through Delta Echo span, and I wondered if they had tracked the same deal coming outbound,” he told investigators.

Cota arrived at the meeting looking shaken: “(He) actually sat down within 3 or 4 feet of me, and I scooted my chair over and out of concern asked him, John, how you doing? He described how he was doing. Oh, my God, John, what happened? And, and he was visibly shaken. And I said you know what you should look into that – you should look into this ECDIS display because I believe it was, it was running West of where it should have been on my inbound. And of course I didn’t need it, but if you relied on it at all maybe it ought to be something that is investigated.”

Surprisingly, or prehaps not considering the possible emotional impact of the event, Cota forgot about the meeting: “John called me last night, and he had actually — didn’t recall me telling him that. He’s like there’s rumor around that you saw this or saw that, and I’m like, John, I talked to you at the meeting. Didn’t you remember that meeting? He said, no. I was really rattled, and I probably talked to people I didn’t, I don’t remember talking to. And that’s very understandable, you know,” said Nyborg.

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Bob Couttie has written for a number of maritime industry publications, including the prestigious Lloyd’s List International daily newspaper and Lloyd’s Ship Manager magazine. His reportage on problems with ship’s officer certification examinations in the Philippines in the late 1990s influenced the adoption of computerized examinations for ship officers by the country’s Professional Regulatory Commission.

Bob currently writes and produces podcasts for The Maritime Accident Casebook