Could South Africa be option for virus-struck cruise destinations?

scribe wonders whether these ships are loaded too quickly in Brazil, where the loading rate – using two ship loaders – can reach 24 000 tons an hour. Unless the loading sequence is such that the weight of the cargo is distributed uniformly and timeously among the holds, such a loading rate could cause sudden hull stresses, that in turn bring immediate or latent metallurgical failure manifested in hull fractures.

Salvage is often thought of as a dramatic rush to drag a ship away from a lee shore in wild weather and mountainous seas.

A more inconspicuous form of salvage is taking place along the KwaZulu-Natal coast and even further afield, as teams of workers scour beaches looking for tiny, almost transparent plastic nurdles, each smaller than a grain of rice.

These nurdles came from two containers that were lost overboard from a ship that broke her moorings and went sail-about in Durban harbour during a wild storm in 2017.

Packets of nurdles ruptured, releasing billions of them into the water, and, carried before the strong wind and counter currents, many washed ashore along the northern KZN coast. An article suggests that some have now reached the Australian coast.

Given the peril of plastic pollution of the seas, perhaps plastic should be shipped in blocks, and not as tiny nurdles in flimsy packets.

As predicted in this column in December, the US Navy could not have the Chinese and Russian warships exercising with the South African Navy without one of their own ships paying a visit. Hence, the destroyer USS Carney will arrive in Cape Town next Sunday and sail on Tuesday. She will also visit Simon’s Town.

lIngpen is the author of eight maritime books and a freelance journalist