There is something special about small ships of yesteryear
AN IMAGE – taken from the bridge of a small containership on passage from Liverpool to Ellesmere along the Manchester Ship Canal – set my mind back a few years when many more vessels made that trip, their topmasts unstepped to allow them to pass under some of the bridges. Some had telescopic funnels that could be lowered to allow transit along that canal.
Numerous British seafarers owe their interest in a sea-going career to watching vessels manoeuvring in the narrow confines of the waterway that once helped Manchester to become an industrial hub in the British Midlands. Every ship carrying cargo through the canal these days means that dozens of trucks are removed from the roads.
Among the vessels that engendered in South African lads an interest in shipping similar to that which their Manchunian counterparts experienced were the coasters that also fascinated the younger set in smaller ports.
Before the sprawling iron ore terminal engulfed part of Saldanha Bay, coasters berthed at the fishing harbour to load fish oil and processed fish that otherwise would have been moved to Cape Town by truck.
In an interesting email over the weekend, Rob Young, retired marine director of Grindrod, reminded me of some vessels that plied the coastal routes either on charter to the coasting company, Thesen, or to their own account.
While Thesen aw aited the arrival of its new Zulu Coast and needing an urgent replacement for Basuto Coast, wrecked at Sea Point in 1954, and two other obsolete coasters that had been laid up, the company chartered the tiny vessel Frean for the Cape Town Port Nolloth trade. When Frean was wrecked near Port Nolloth’s jetty, Thesen hastily chartered the 402-deadweight Dutch coaster Cascade.
At the time, the inferior road network in Namaqualand made it preferable to use the coasters to bring in fuel and supplies for the fishing fleet and diamond mining operations in the Port Nolloth area.
The reef off Port Nolloth has always been tricky to negotiate, bringing contractors to deepen the entrance channel to give the coasters – especially the larger Zulu Coast – easier access to the jetty.
With her master carefully observing the swell and wind conditions, Cascade made the run into the entrance channel, only to puncture her engine room plating on a scraper that the contractor had forgotten to remove from the seabed!
Although her engine room flooded, buoyancy was retained as the pumps managed to keep ahead of the water ingress, and she managed to get alongside the jetty where, while her cargo was being discharged, divers plugged the gash in her hull.
In calm weather, Cascade was towed out across the bar where the larger Griqua Coast connected up to tow her to Cape Town. Later, a strong south-east gale reduced the convoy speed to almost zero, raising concerns that both ships would be driven ashore.
In desperation, Cascade’s crew managed to dry out the engineroom, warmed up the engine with water boiled in the galley by the cook, and restarted the main engine.
The tow was disconnected and she entered Cape Town harbour under her own power where she entered the 362-metre Sturrock Drydock – fortuitously vacant – for urgent repairs. As the sole occupant of the huge drydock, the 44-metre Cascade was hard to spot!
With road transport depleting coastwise cargo volumes with its swifter point-to-point haulage, and with foreign ships carrying containers between southern African ports, the traditional coasters were swept from the sea.
Apart from a feeder service to move containerised German car parts from Port Elizabeth to East London, and a regional feeder service, the days of easily identifiable coastal shipping services are sadly over.