THE MYSTERIOUS VOYAGES OF US VOYAGES OF SHIPS
“THE SHIP COULD DRIFT AROUND THE ATLANTIC FOR YEARS.”
On January 23, 2013, the decommissioned passenger ship Lyubov Orlova (archive photo) was towed out of the harbor of St. John’s, Newfoundland, on its way to be scrapped in the Caribbean. But the ship parted her towline the next day and floated for another 10 days before the Canadian authorities decided she was outside territorial waters and therefore no longer their responsibility. Ever since then, as far as anyone knows, the ship has been adrift in the Atlantic. Its disappearance triggered one of the biggest searches in shipping history. On two occasions lifeboats from the 4,250-ton cruise ship seem to have sent distress signals, but searchers arriving at the recorded position found nothing. Some say the ship is now ratinfested, and others claim to have sighted it off the coast of Ireland. Belgian salvage hunter Pim de Rhodes has meanwhile abandoned the costly chase: “The ship could drift around the Atlantic for years.”
There is an unwritten law that prevails across the world’s oceans—one that is known to every captain and sailor: “Don’t give up the ship!” These dying words spoken by American Captain James Lawrence during the War of 1812 state one of the most important rules for survival on the seas of our blue planet. Even in the most violent of storms, when the giant waves are crashing over the bow, when the mast breaks, or when the engine dies, and even when there is a fire on board— a captain should never abandon his ship until the very last crew member or passenger is safe, and peril is now imminent. It’s an important directive, not so much because of the danger of drowning outright after giving up the ship, but because in many of the world’s oceans a swimmer could die of hypothermia very quickly. But even if lifeboats are available, the captain stays on the ship as long as he can.
Such rules must have been familiar to the experienced crew of a Korean fishing boat at sea in November 2008. And that made their discovery all the more surprising: a ship floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, roughly 1,650 miles southwest of Hawaii…
CAN THE CREW OF A BIG SHIP VANISH WITHOUT A TRACE?
The Korean crew approached the 50-ton fishing trawler cautiously as it rocked gently in a quiet sea. When no one responded to a radio message and since the apparently crewless vessel looked dead in the water, the Korean sailors boarded the trawler. They found no people, and three life rafts and one lifeboat were missing. A subsequent investigation revealed: The ship is the Tai Ching 21 fishing vessel, which is registered in Taiwan. The captain of the 28-member crew had given a last sign of life 12 days earlier, calling his wife in Taiwan from a satellite phone. At some point after that, the vessel had been gutted by fire and the crew of the trawler had disappeared without ever making a distress call. A 30-hour search by a U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules aircraft and a New Zealand Air Force Orion aircraft scoured 21,000 square miles of ocean but found nothing.
However Tai Ching 21 is just one of the thousands of ghost ships that are floating aimlessly on the oceans. The vessels range from private yachts with mummified sailors still on board to crewless two-masted ships that wash ashore in one piece to 250-foot tankers that float like giant pieces of driftwood on the world’s oceans—and it is rare for one of these ghost ships to be sighted from either land or sea.
These days it should be essentially impossible for a vessel to disappear: The maritime safety regulations have become so strict in recent years that the disappearance of a ship and its crew should be practically unheard of. GPS navigation systems regularly monitor a vessel’s position, satellites constantly watch the oceans to spot storms, and marine autopilot systems help ships get through bad weather and rough waters. But nevertheless: “I was shocked at the shipping-loss statistics—a vessel every day or two, somewhere in the world,” says Craig B. Smith, author of Extreme Waves. The ships might run aground, or sink in a storm, or go down after a fire or a collision. Or they simply disappear. And we’re not talking about rowboats and small fishing vessels—these are huge container ships, gigantic tankers, and massive cruise ships.
IS A CREWLESS CRUISE SHIP STILL ADRIFT IN THE ATLANTIC?
In September of 2010 the final fate of Lyubov Orlova seemed to be sealed. Anchored in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in the eastern end of Canada, the ship no longer carried the 110 passengers and the 70 crew members for which it had been designed. The vessel was in poor condition, and it took a year
and a half to locate a buyer willing to shell out $275,000 for the scrap value of the ship. After a small fire on board, it took another year for the vessel to depart under the tow of an American tugboat for its ultimate destination, a wrecking company in the Dominican Republic. But then the towline broke in rough waters, and the captainless Lyubov Orlova was suddenly adrift— and would soon become the world’s biggest ghost ship. Neither the tug nor the Canadian Coast Guard could reattach the tow, so in those heavy seas with 18-foot waves and 35-knot winds, the ship simply drifted away, its course unknown. The Canadian authorities decided that a ghost ship in international waters was no longer their responsibility, and ever since the whereabouts of that 4,250-ton titan have not been known. Well…almost. Twice in the past five years there has, indeed, been a “sign of life”: Several weeks apart, emergency beacons had sent signals identifying the location of a lifeboat from the ship. The most likely explanation: The beacons were activated automatically upon contact with water. A few hours later rescuers arrived at the scene—but they found nothing apart from vast expanses of blue water. The search for the Lyubov Orlova has meanwhile been called off because the ship is in “offline” mode. Modern vessels are equipped with an automatic identification system (AIS) in which a marine traffic-monitoring system (similar to an air traffic control system) utilizes transponders to track the position of a vessel. But because the Lyubov Orlova was destined for the scrapyard, its AIS was removed. “I think the ship could drift around the Atlantic for years. Therefore until I have more concrete evidence, I find it prudent to discontinue the search,” says Belgian salvage hunter Pim de Rhodes. That may be a wise decision. Marine researchers are increasingly focusing attention on a phenomenon they had long dismissed as a sailor’s yarn—a story that’s about as credible as the existence of mermaids…
HOW BIG CAN A ROGUE WAVE GET?
Everything happened so quickly on that September day in 1980—so fast, in fact, that the crew of MV Derbyshire
didn’t even have enough time to send a distress signal. A few minutes later, the 965-foot-long bulk carrier went down—with its cargo of 174,000 tons of iron ore and its crew of 44 people. A ship as long as three football fields that was considered to be unsinkable had vanished 230 miles from Okinawa. It took almost 14 years for the wreck to be located at a depth of 2.5 miles. But how can a ship that’s big enough to hold 15,000 double-decker buses sink in such a short time?
Investigators have come to suspect Derbyshire suffered the same fate as the passenger ship Waratah (1909), the carrier ship München (1978), and the fishing vessel Suwa Maru No. 58
(2008). All of these vessels broke up and sank within minutes of being hit by a rogue wave (an extremely large wave that emerges suddenly, also known as a monster or freak wave). And rogue waves are not just a threat to older ships. They also pose a high degree of peril for vessels of modern construction. There are two reasons: First, the size of the waves that are considered when designing a steel ship’s hull is simply not big enough. “These ships do not stand a chance against such a monster wave,” says geoscientist Wolfgang Rosenthal, a pioneer in researching rogue waves. While modern ships are designed to tolerate breaking waves up to 50 feet high that exert a maximum pressure of 3,072 pounds per square foot, the pressure of a breaking rogue wave can be almost seven times greater. And second: Modern container and cruise ships are being built wider and longer in order to make them more economically efficient. But that also makes them less responsive to the waves, thereby increasing the risk that in a worst-case scenario they’ll capsize like a toy boat in a bathtub.
But how big can a rogue wave get? And how frequently do these waves appear in the world’s oceans? Today scientists believe that rogue waves occur in deep water where they are created by such converging factors as fast currents and strong winds, which make several waves pile up into a single wave of great height. It is unclear whether the frequency and height of rogue waves are increasing as a direct result of climate change, but scientists are trying to find out. A team led by oceanographer Julian Wolfram of Heriot-watt University in the UK put sensors on an oil rig in the North Sea and discovered waves up to 100 feet high—both steeper and higher than what had been expected. Insurers are intrigued as well: Lloyd’s of London has its own “emerging risk team” to track global climate change developments. “Obviously this is an issue we are very interested in,” says Trevor Maynard of the Lloyd’s team. “We are now seeing the fingerprints of climate change on a lot of events.” “Although rogue waves are isolated phenomena, if we could continuously monitor an entire storm region, we’d undoubtedly find that their rarity has been greatly exaggerated,” says Anne Karin Magnusson of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. After having analyzed 14,000 individual waves, she estimated the biggest and steepest ones occur every 21 days, while lesssteep rogue waves can crop up twice a day in storms on the open ocean.
The self-propelled offshore drilling rig Ocean Ranger was the largest of its type when it was built in the 1970s. A semi-submersible design protected it from the waves and wind, making it far more stable than conventional drilling platforms. But on the evening of February 14, 1982, Ocean Ranger was riding out an Atlantic storm, as were two other platforms in the area, when all were struck by a rogue wave. Soon the nearby platforms and ships began hearing the radio chatter from Ocean Ranger about broken glass, water, and malfunctioning equipment. Sometime after midnight there was a report that the rig was listing, and soon after that the radio operator sent a final message that the 84 crewmen were heading to the lifeboats. Rescue efforts were started immediately, but ultimately no one was saved. Ocean Ranger had disappeared, just like the many ships each year that the ocean seems to swallow whole. Today they are either resting on the ocean floor or they have become ghost ships, hopelessly adrift on the high seas…