Crash hobbles Cal Maritime ship on training cruise
Hundreds of students on board a California State University Maritime Academy ship for a two-month training cruise got the lesson of their lives as the vessel glided toward a Barbados port and smashed into a crane that sent a mast careening onto the ship’s top deck.
No one was hurt in the Tuesday morning crash. But the 270 students — who had left the Cal Maritime campus in Vallejo May 5 — watched in horror as their ship slid, unstoppable, toward the colossal orange crane that bent over the water in their direction. They gasped as the two metal behemoths collided with a crunch that snapped the ship’s mast like a chopped-down tree.
Instead of enjoying their island port of call, the students spent two days repairing the mast with help from the 58 faculty and staff and handful of experienced mariners on board the Golden Bear training ship.
They never set foot on Barbados.
“I give you my assurance that the vessel is not severely damaged and will be perfectly capable of finishing the cruise safely,” Capt. Sam Pecota, the campus’ former academic dean, said Wednesday in a statement.
The Golden Bear was not under Pecota’s control at the time of the collision, said Bobby King, Cal Maritime’s spokesman. As happens when a ship prepares to dock, a local pilot boards the ship and guides it to port behind a tugboat.
King said an investigation into the incident by multiple agencies — including the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Maritime Administration and the school — has already begun.
“We aren’t looking for blame,” said Thomas Cropper, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral who is Cal Maritime’s president. “We try to understand causes so that we can eliminate future problems.” The ship is a 500-foot former research vessel, launched in 1987, that the Navy used to map the ocean floor. The Navy still owns the ship that Cal Maritime began using in 1996 for training runs that used to be twice a year. Lately, they are an annual event.
Most of the students on board will graduate not only with a bachelor’s degree, but a Coast Guard license. Many hope to become ship captains or maritime engineers, among other seafaring careers.
Meanwhile, the training trip will go on. The students will sail to Lisbon, Portugal, the Azores and the Everglades before ending the cruise on July 1 in Galveston, Texas.
“I’ve never remotely had anything like this happen,” King, the campus spokesman, said of the crash. “It could have been much worse. But it’s part of the learning — it’s not ideal. But things do happen at sea. Things that are beyond your control.
“There certainly is an opportunity to learn something as a result of this.”