The woman was reportedly seen climbing on a railing prior to the fall and initial reports have indicated that the she was likely intoxicated at the time of the accident.  Reuters has reported that the woman’s husband and a crewmember jumped in after her and were found swimming in the water when officers arrived.

Besides once being a former troopship during WWII, and at one time the flagship of one of the cruise industry’s most legendary companies, Cunard Line, the Queen Mary is said be teaming with paranormal activity.  Stories of hearing children crying and splashing in the pool areas are frequent.  In 1966, an engineer was crushed by a watertight door in the engine room during a fire drill, and his ghost still haunts the ship to today.  So, was this just an unfortunate accident or does the legend of the Queen Mary hauntings continue to grow?

Photo By David Krakowski

Built as the BEWA Discoverer in 1976, the vessel was sold to Adventure Cruises Inc. and renamed the World Discoverer. The ship was then put on a long term charter to Society Expeditions Cruises. With a double hull construction, the vessel was classed for periodic voyages to Antarctic Peninsula region and carried a fleet of inflatable dinghies allowing passenger to move closer to ice floes for observation. During the period from November through February, the ship conducted cruises in the Southern Hemisphere and visited places like Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, Chile, Ushuaia, Argentina.  While on a South Pacific cruise through the Soloman Islands’ Sandfly Passage in April 2000,  she quickly, and unexpectedly, developed a 20 degree list.

Captain Oliver Kruess sent a distress signal to the Solomon Islands capital Honiara and passenger ferry was dispatched to the ship to transport the passengers to safety.  All escaped without injury. The captain then brought the ship into Roderick Bay after the ship began to list 20 degrees and grounded it to avoid sinking. After an underwater survey of the ship, the World Discoverer was declared a “constructive loss” and has remained in Roderick Bay ever since. There were no reports of any oil, petroleum or other pollutant spills as a result of the impact and no reports on how much pollutant remains in her hull.

Salvage Attempt

An Australian salvage company was the first to survey the scene and, quite understandbly, found the ship ransacked by the locals and other factions. The Solomon Islands were undergoing civil war and locals had salvaged all items of potential value. Now with a 46 degree list, tidal activity further damaged the ship and the salvage company backed away from the recovery leaving the ship to rust in Roderick Bay. The ship has since became a tourist attraction with the locals of the island giving unauthorized tours and cruise ships passing by for tourists to gawk at her remains.

The ship can still be seen today on Google Maps.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via Gizmodo

Scott Haefner and a small band of photographers recently gained access to the fleet and have been documenting the fleet, rust and all, but today they announced that on May 7th they have gained permission to bring along a guests. They tell us:

Over the course of 18 months, four intrepid photographers captured exclusive, behind-the-scenes images of the decaying ghost ships moored in Suisun Bay. Known as the Mothball Fleet, these historic vessels served in four American wars, including World War II. Many of the ships captured by the photographers have since been towed to Texas, Mare Island, or Saipan for scrapping, in an ongoing effort to rid the bay of its most toxic vessels.

In association with the nonprofit, public art organization, Place in History and the artists’ hub of Workspace Limited in San Francisco, you are cordially invited to see artistic images of the mothball fleet on a large-screen, digital projector. This is the first time these photos are being shown to the public.

Learn why some of these ships were highly classified. You’ll view racks that once held submarine torpedoes, walk below the massive 16-inch deck guns of the USS Iowa battleship, and see photos of the the top secret “stealth” ship, the IX-529 Sea Shadow. Hear the history of these ships and the surreal experience of walking around the inside of their hulls—many of which have stood frozen in time for 40 years with 1940s-era artifacts inside and completely intact.

Click HERE to learn more and to sign up for the tour.

(Via TelstarLogistics)

Over the past day or so, there has been an article going around to different news sources about the hundreds of idle ships off the coast of Singapore as a result of the “steep slump in trade.” Here is a snippet of the article.

One of the largest fleets of ships ever gathered idles here, near one of the world’s busiest ports, marooned by the receding tide of trade. There may be tentative signs of economic recovery in spots around the globe, but few here.

Hundreds of cargo ships — 100,000 to 300,000 tonnes each, with the larger ones weighing more than the 130-ship Spanish Armada — seem to perch on the water rather than in it, their red rudders and bulbous noses, submerged when the vessels are loaded, sticking a few metres out of the water.

So many ships have congregated here — 735, weighing a total of more than 41 million tonnes — that shipping lines are concerned about near misses and collisions in the congested Strait of Malacca, the main shipping channel between the Indian and Pacific oceans.

The root of the problem lies in an unusually steep slump in trade, confirmed by statistics announced on Tuesday. READ FULL ARTICLE

After reading it I was thinking to myself – “Wow, hundreds of ships! Must be quite a site.”  So in standard gCaptain fashion, I turned to the internet to find pictures and thanks to Web 2.0 and the photo sharing site Flickr, I was able to find these along with a good video recently post on YouTube.

Click on image to go back to its source

Taken on March 16, 2009

Take on March 23, 2009

Taken on February 25, 2009

Taken on May 5, 2009

Taken on Dec. 1, 2008

Taken on April 20, 2009

Click here to view the embedded video.

Skip to about 02:45

While I really didn’t find the gem I was looking for, these photos give a pretty good idea of how it looks.  If you happen to have any or know of where any are, we’d be happy to share them here on the blog.  Just leave the link in the comments or send the images to info@gcaptain.com.

]]> http://gcaptain.com/idle-ships-singapore-coast/?8361/feed/ 8 http://gcaptain.com/ghosts-of-the-queen-mary/?3660 http://gcaptain.com/ghosts-of-the-queen-mary/?3660#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:23:31 +0000 Mike Schuler http://gcaptain.com/maritime/blog/?p=3660

The Queen Mary was in service for decades as both a World War II transport ship and a luxury liner. It wasn’t intended as such at the time, but the Queen Mary was named “The Grey Ghost” during the war because of the color she was painted to make her stealthy in the war-time waters.

In her time, the Queen Mary carried seasick sailors, destitute stowaways and wealthy vacationers. With this kind of history it’s not surprising she saw her own share of deaths, now a hair shy of 50. In fact, there are so many haunting that some parts of the ship are now barred from the public. But for the paranormally curious there are still haunted tours of the cabins and halls that housed death. You can also lodge at the Queen Mary but after reading this, you may have second thoughts.

Queen Mary Of the numerous deaths, there was a young seaman by the name of John Henry who lied about his age to procure a position on the Queen Mary and was soon crushed to death while trying to flee a fire. To this day, knocks and bright lights can be heard around engine room 13 where the young man met his untimely death. Ịts even been reported that the door to the engine room is sometimes hot to the touch or that mixed in with a ball of light is tendrils of smoke.

If spooky little girls like the ones in the Shinning scare you then you’ll want to stay clear of the pool area. A girl from third class thought she’d have some fun and slide down the banister but a sudden wave upset her course and she broke her neck on the fall. She now wanders the pool area and nursery looking for her doll or mommy. She is not alone though. In the 30′s and 60′s two other women met their unfortunate deaths in the pool area and are seen periodically in that area.

War always brings atrocities but how about a cook that was cooked because the troops on board didn’t like his meals? They stuffed him into the oven and burnt him alive as a lesson for bad cuisine. His screams still echo his horrible death to this day.

If you’re still feeling brave enough to consider sleeping on the Queen, there was also a reported visitor that slipped a steward some cash in exchange for finding a ‘willing’ female passenger to keep him company for the night. After stowing his luggage, a female companion was found and they retired for the night. In the morning the man was missing from the dining hall so the steward went to find him. What they found instead was the corpse of the female companion! They could not locate the male guest, his registration information for that room nor his luggage, which people swore was checked and stowed. He simply vanished and left only a trail of blood and rumors.

The Queen Mary is home to 49 deaths but she was also surrounded by death. In an attempt to avoid enemy ships, she zig zagged her way into her companion ship, nearly cutting it in half, and was forced to leave 300 survivors in the water to be eaten by sharks or drowned. It is reported that mysterious pounding on the side of the Queen Mary is those men trying to signal to come on board.

The in-house psychic, Peter James, claims that he has communicated with over 150 separate ghosts on the ship. Peter gives bi-monthly ghost tours of the ship and claims to have made numerous contact with various ghosts, including a few mentioned above. From the sheer number and type of deaths that occurred, it seems plausible.

This is surely one of the most haunted places of modern time in America.

Source: YourGhostStories.com)

It appears as though some less fortunate souls might have an alternative plan for the World Surfing Championship set to go off in Bali next month.  According to The Sydney Morning Herald:

AN ILLEGAL fishing ship whose captain is rumoured to have been murdered has thrown plans for the World Surfing Championship in Bali into chaos by running aground on the island’s best surf break.

Mystery surrounds the arrival of the Taiwanese vessel Ho Tsai Fa No. 18 off Padang Padang beach. Locals woke on Saturday to see the 30-metre-long vessel foundering on a reef, and reaped a barbecue bonanza by emptying its holds of tuna and shark.

Police are still trying to find the boat’s Indonesian crew and its Taiwanese captain, Tsai Wen-chen. Taiwanese authorities had requested Indonesia’s assistance to locate the boat several weeks ago after it failed to return from a fishing trip off Papua.

If you feel brave enough, you can catch the whole article HERE

Also check out some of our previous posts on ghost ships HERE and HERE

Our apologies to anyone looking for paranormal activity… you (probably) won’t find any here because by ghost ship we mean vessels no longer in service. In the U.S. most ghost ships are owned by the government. Know collectively as the Ghost Fleet, the official name for this collection of decommissioned ships is the Reserve Fleet. What is the purpose of keeping these ships around? Presumably by “mothballing” them the Navy has the chance to reactivate the vessels in the event of another world war. More commonly they are used as spare part depots, coral reefs, museum ships, or are eventually scrapped. Some, however, have uncertain futures as in the case of the SS Independence.

Telstar Logistics tells us;

During the last year or so a prominent new landmark has appeared on the San Francisco waterfront — and no, this time we’re not talking about that wretched skyscraper at One Rincon Hill. This point of interest is located a little farther south, in a Pier 70 berth at the historic Union Iron Works shipyard (now operated by BAE Systems). It’s a 1950s-vintage cruise ship, actually, and it’s unlikely that anyone passing through the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood in recent months would have missed the sight of the vessel’s distinctive smokestacks, which are painted in festive tropical colors.

The ship is the former SS Independence, and she’s now in retirement. Jonathan Haeber (aka Tunnelbug on Flickr) recently managed to get aboard the Independence, and he brought back an entire gallery’s worth of images for the rest of us to oogle.

Jonathan has the photos on his Flickr page but they can best be seen on THIS PHOTO SLIDESHOW (preview below).

For more details on this ship visit Telstar Logistic’s post titled, “Exploring the Ghost Ship SS Independence“.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.