Savouring the daily delights of the maritime world
News sheets bring interesting updates on world shipping trends and activities, from gas deals to drug seizures
MANY went to the passenger terminal to see the cruise ship Queen Victoria during her stay in port over the weekend. Sadly her passengers did not see the magnificence of Table Mountain, shrouded in cloud for the duration of her stay.
In port at the same time was the French warship Tonnerre that arrived in Cape Town last Friday, escorted by the stealth frigate La Fayette.
Tonnerre was in Cape Town in June 2007 when the South African Navy was considering buying her. To test her capacity, various military vehicles were loaded and discharged, but fortunately, our hard-earned money was not spent on the vessel, and the Tricolor continued to fly at her stern.
Older Docklanders will remember the earlier visits by the modified French cruiser Jeanne D’Arc that called here during her annual around-theworld officer training voyages.
She was completed in 1931 and decommissioned in 1964 when a namesake – a helicopter cruiser – took over the role as a major training ship for French naval officers. She was withdrawn from service in 2010.
In my kortbroek days, I was among many who queued to board the old cruiser during one of her visits here in the 1950s. I can’t recall anything significant aboard the ship, probably because the matelot who conducted our tour was perhaps rather peeved that he had to show a group of youngsters around the ship, rather than being ashore savouring the delights of the tavern of the seas.
I am fortunate to savour daily the delights of the maritime world as several maritime news sheets arrive in my inbox, bringing updates on shipping trends and activities from across the globe.
Interesting photographs depict bulkers sailing from Dunedin, laden with logs for Korea, or cruise ships on their maiden voyages or new tugs with revolutionary design.
Photographs taken from Lion’s Gate Bridge in Vancouver, Canada, by a local maritime enthusiast show containerships, freighters of all descriptions and the occasional cruise ship passing under the bridge.
Frequently featured in the news sheets are specialised vessels associated with the offshore oil industry or coastal wind farms.
Among these photographs are project cargoships carrying huge blades or towers for wind turbines to be installed along the European coast; drillships, a variety of pipelayers, seismic survey vessels and heavylift vessels also appear in these news sheets, pictures that certainly would be unfamiliar to Docklanders of yesteryear.
Catching my eye in a news sheet last week was reference to a Chinese shipyard signing a deal to develop a huge liquefied natural gas carrier to move about 270 000m3 of liquefied cargo that, according to the report, translates into the equivalent of 155 million cubic metres of gas. The article says such a volume of gas could supply energy for 4.7 million households for a month.
The new mega-ship will have a capacity that is significantly greater than that of the largest LNG carrier in service. In view of the energy shortage in South Africa, gas is mooted as the fuel of the future and that the country’s ports should be geared urgently to handle large-scale gas imports.
An increasing number of reports in the news sheets show drug seizures by naval or coast guard vessels in areas ranging from the Arabian Gulf to the US Gulf and East African waters.
Last week, a US Coast Guard vessel intercepted a yacht carrying “gallons of liquid methamphetamine”. It seemed that the skipper had drunk some of the evidence before Coast Guard officers boarded the yacht.
Large caches of drugs are seized regularly by warships on anti-piracy patrols off Somalia and in the Gulf of Oman, epitomised by the 2.5 tons of hashish seized when the Canadian frigate Regina stopped a dhow.
Other interesting photographs show crews of British or Dutch warships mustered on the flight deck behind umpteen packages – totalling tons of cocaine – the bounty of raids on suspicious and often unregistered vessels hawking their evil cargoes to drug lords along the East African or Arabian Gulf coasts.
Last week, the Royal Navy’s destroyer HMS Dragon returned to Portsmouth after a seven-month deployment in the Middle East, during which the detachment of marines and others aboard conducted eight successful raids on drug smugglers that led to the seizure of drugs with a street value of about R2.5 billion.
Imagine the families whose lives would have been devastated had the anti-drug operation of the Royal Navy not had such success and had those drugs reached the streets.
And what of our navy?
They were given the slip by the Knysna cocaine smugglers and those who dumped umpteen plastic drums containing cocaine in the sea off Mossel Bay for collection by evil distributors ashore.
How many of those expensive frigates are actually operational? But as this column has lamented often, without proper aerial surveillance, the devastating drugs trade, unfettered fish poaching and other smuggling operations will continue to flourish.