Testing northern ice-bound waters
KEEPING many of the Newlands rugby faithful at home, the depression that passed through the Cape on Saturday evening dented the effects of the drought – and whipped up wild conditions out in the Atlantic.
Those aboard some 80 ships off the Cape on Saturday night would have had a rough time, but mariners are a resilient lot, enduring all types of weather and sea states.
A ship’s officer who frequently passed through the Red Sea told me of the incredible heat they encountered on virtually every trip. Another who was in the Arabian Gulf only weeks ago has similar memories of stifling heat, especially when on the fo’c’sle during harbour stations. “Those at harbour stations down aft,” he said, “at least had shade from containers.”
Since the inception of South Africa’s Antarctic base in 1962 and the associated passages down south by the successive polar supply vessels, hundreds of local seafarers have endured all that the Southern Ocean could throw at them, as well as Antarctic temperatures. Simultaneously, they have been awed by the beauty of the ice and the wealth of sea creatures they observed when passing though those unspoiled high latitudes.
Indeed, mariners are among those fortunate souls whose profession sometimes takes them to most interesting and unusual places. In 1981, the crew aboard Unicorn Lines’ Sezela had the voyage of a lifetime when the Durban-registered coaster carried a cargo of pipes from Durban to oil prospectors working near the Peruvian port of Iquitos, the ultimate head of navigation on the Amazon River, a fascinating story in itself.
Other seafarers have served in ships trading to Polynesian archipelagos, those remnants of volcanic upheavals now skirted by coral reefs, forming exquisite lagoons whose turquoise waters teem with life.
During their regular voyages in the 1960s, Safmarine’s freighters on the US trade would have called at 15 ports from Trinidad, through Central America and Mexico to the US Gulf. Ships moved up the Mississippi to Baton Rouge, before heading across the US Gulf to round the Florida Peninsula to call at several east coast ports, including New York or Boston.
After about six weeks on the US coast, the ships finally set course for Cape Town.
For the crew, it was hard work as some of those calls along the US coast lasted only a few hours and, on some occasions, a ship was in two ports on the same day. In other ports, vessels spent a week or more, allowing runs ashore for most of the crew.
Tinged probably with a good dose of apprehension, a yearning for new experiences among those aboard the containership Venta Maersk will be fulfilled.
Having called at Vladivostok, Russia’s most easterly port, the Danish vessel is heading for the massive, modern container terminal at Busan in Korea, after which she is scheduled to undertake a pioneering voyage that will see her pass through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska. Then, laden with a variety of containerised cargo, she will steam via the north-east passage (north of Russia) to St Petersburg at the head of the Gulf of Finland in the extreme western part of Russia.
Named after a Lithuanian river and completed earlier this year for service between the Baltic area and the rest of Europe, Venta Maersk is one of four ice-class 200m container ships built at Zhoushan in China. Unlike most contemporary ships, this class of vessel has no bulbous bow and instead has a stubby Maierform bow for movement through ice.
The north-east passage and the north-west passage (north of Canada) are displaying definite signs of receding coverage of summer ice and hence receive much attention from folks interested in climate change. (Sceptics like me wonder whether the current ice retreat is not a cyclic phenomenon that is more apparent from constant observations by satellites and on-site glaciological surveys that were impossible in former years.)
Opening on a limited scale to general shipping during the northern hemisphere’s summer, the two sea routes have potential for greater use by ships that will benefit from about a two-week saving in time for voyages between the extremities of the passages. Although there will be saving on fuel and canal transit tariffs that would have been incurred had the vessels used either the Suez Canal or Panama Canal, additional insurance premiums and charges for the services of Russian icebreakers will be payable for ships on the polar routes.
An increasing number of ships are using the north-east passage. However, because of the presence of ice and frequent fog, progress may be slow at times, especially as weather forecasting and iceberg monitoring along the Russian coast are perhaps not as accurate as elsewhere.
Although some hydrographic surveys have been completed, the route is probably not fully surveyed. With these adversities in mind, the master’s standing orders during the voyage will be explicit and no doubt, the navigation officers aboard Venta Maersk will be particularly vigilant.
Maersk Line has been careful to emphasise that this is an exploratory voyage and every aspect of the operation will be subjected to intensive debriefing. Among matters that will attract special interest will be the effects of the extreme temperatures on the cargo in the non-insulated containers carried on deck and, I suspect, they will also pay close attention to the potential environmental hazards that could occur with more ships using the route.
Specialised gas carriers began using the north-east passage on a regular basis this year to move LNG from Sabetta, a new, purpose-built gas terminal on the Yamal Peninsula in the Russian Arctic, to China.
Remarkably, all components of the infrastructure at Sabetta were brought in by sea, generating convoys of ice-strengthened heavylift ships carrying enormous modules for the LNG facilities. To move the gas, a fleet of 15 specially designed ice-strengthened LNG carriers – with the latest navigational aids and other equipment for polar navigation – is under construction at the Daewoo shipyard in Korea.
Regular readers will recall my account of being aboard one of these gas tankers while in Korea last year. They are highly sophisticated vessels with a conventional forward-facing wheelhouse that is linked directly to another facing aft. While her ice-breaker bow will cope with relatively thin ice as the weight of the ship breaks ice, three huge azipods protruding below the hull at the stern add a further ice-breaking capacity.
For thicker ice up to about 2.1m thick, the ship is turned, using her azipods that then break the ice, literally carving a passage through the ice for her to move astern at about five knots.
When winter ice becomes too thick even for these vessels to get through, they will take the gas to a west-European port for trans-shipment into conventional gassers for onward shipment to China via Suez.
The first gas consignment from Yamal to be shipped via the northeast passage arrived in China in one of these custom-built LNG carriers last month.
Challenges unique to shipping operations in such a pristine and inhospitable environment will need to be addressed before the northeast passage becomes a new “silk route” between the Occident and the Orient.
The voyages of Venta Maersk, the gas carriers and other ships along that passage will determine its future – as will the level of Russian enthusiasm to service the route.