Great pictures and i always enjoy a nice story from wkdivr.

 

I usually sail as the navigation officer/watch mate which is two spots under the Captain. He's my boss but I should be getting my captain's license in a few years. So as a Navigation officer if something like this happens....

That would be my fault. On a ship with a good captain the captain doesn't really do anything but manage the watch officers to make sure they are doing their jobs. The ship I just got off of the captain didn't come up to the bridge on my watch maybe but 5 times that month. Movies are a little deceiving when they show a captain on the bridge barking orders. That happens rather rarely, if the watch mate is not competent.
Ship usually carries a crew of 20+/-, far cry from the 60 +/- they had 15-20 years ago, technology is a bitch!
Here's a few pics for ya.

Tanker on the rocks.


This is the APL Panama about a year and a half ago down in Puerto Vallerta I think? She did something stupid just before coming into port and ended up washing up on the beach...funny thing about this picture, Most people won't notice but she's stuck about 40 feet in the sand. If you ever stand on a beach and let the water wash back and forth on your feet your feet are slowly gonna get buried...same thing with this ship, she just kept sinking and sinking! Took them a LONG time to figure out how to pull this thing out of there.


This is a the APL China which was my old ship. She got caught in a nasty thing called Parametric Rolling and lost about 1500 containers, was the biggest maritime insurance casualty on record where the ship didn't sink.


Hanjin Ship that caught on fire. Rumors that it might of been a terrorist attack but more than likely it was a box of fireworks that they were carrying that was too close to a Hazmat box.


Toasty huh?? Takes alot of heat to melt steel that way!


It started catching other hatches on fire as well and another box of fireworks up forward lit up too.


Ballasting issues at a dock...


Same thing different ship


T-boned a ship and took some of it's cargo. Usually when these ship's collide the force of the impact welds alot of the metal together.


Another one


Tanker that Ballasted incorrectly I assume...



Fire on the Manalani, sailed on this ship a few years after this fire, happened at the LA docks.



These next few broke in half some of them in a storm others on rocks when they either lost propulsion or error in navigation.






Sleeping at the wheel I guess, somebody wasn't paying attention the what was going on.



Again these ships are now welded together which is good because once you separate them the one that was T-boned would sink. They usually keep them like this until they can attach ballast bags or ensure the structural integrity of the water tight compartments of the vessel

 

Nice disaster pics, did you take them? So are the crew all english speaking?

 

Nah I didn't take any of them but I saw the Panama, China and Manalani in person.
The Licensed officers are usually American and the unlicensed are citizens but not so much Americans. Coast guard mandates that all American flagged vessels are crewed by american citizens but that doesn't mean they are. Lot of Filipino's, and guys from Central and South America.

 

Didnt know they were also called MahiMahi. Judging by the size of it, it is either a large Cow(adult female) or small Bull(adult male). The chicken(adolescent) dorado are the best eating. If you catch one leave it in the water and the rest of the school will hang out and let you kick the **** out of them

My dad and I did that and caught 52 of them and a small cow all from an 8' by 10" diameter piece of bamboo. They love to hang out under anything that floats and casts a shadow in the water. Damn good eating but a PITA to clean when you have a dozen king mackeral and a 85# ling to clean, talk about pig bait from the scraps

 

So I guess they don't just swap driver's licenses and insurance cards and go eat some sushi?

Man what a mess.......




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This beaching was in Ensenada on Christmas day in 2005. Some of my extended family live very close by and sent me pics when the grounding first happend. The word was they didn't want to wait for a tender to come out and navigate them into docks.
They worked to free the ship for over three months. They had to build a levy to get a tall crane in place to remove the thousands of containers first. It took months needless to say. Then they brought a "pulling barge" down from Seattle to pull the shipp off the beach and that didn't work. They finally had to do dredge under ship for weeks to finally free the ALP Panama. Quite a lot of excitement when it first happened. Little or no lost cargo as I recall.



This site has more pics and info.
http://photos.signonsandiego.com/gallery1.5/beachedship?page=1




Awesome thread Julien. Thanks for posting and welcome home.

Richard

 

Ensenada That's where it was! I had forgotten exactly where in mexico it happened. A couple buddies of mine who do the same thing as I went down there to look her over. Was pretty humbling to see her layed up on the beach like that when the guy responsible had our jobs. I worked a car ship a few years back and we took a bunch of Mazda's from Port Hueneme (USA) down to a few ports in Central america on the way to the Panama canal and eventually to Houston...running down the coast of Central america is tricky because a lot of the fishermen use wooden boats which don't reflect Radar beams. And they also don't carry navigation lights so at night it's a crap shoot not to hit them. They usually carry some newspaper and light it on fire if they see a ship coming too close to them and want to warn them of their position. Scary part is when you start seeing all these bright fires being lite up all around you out of nowhere and you get trapped in a dead end...
Here's what I mean, this is a radar shot of typical fishing boat traffic in China...

with radar's we can plan our way through fleet's of fishing vessel's and go around them if possible, sometimes it's not possible and we have to go through them at a 25 knot clip, but we try not to. Imagine heading into the the dead end that they form and not realizing it until they all start lighting newspapers when your a quarter mile away...these things don't exactly turn on a dime!
Again thanks for the welcome home Richard it's good to be back, let me know if your still in need of a shop boy!

 

The Emma Maersk is freaking huge! I see container ships all day long. I work at a paper mill that is on the Cooper River that empties into the Charleston (SC) harbor. Ever been to any ports in Charleston, SC?

 

got any pics of car ships? I've only seen about 2-3 go by here at work but, they look like a big building just laying across the water, guys at work said the toyota's car ship is the biggest one they've seen, I've been there 9yrs and yet to see that one... by the way since we are on right on the channel and on those foggy nights all you here is the horns of the big ships, Im always scared as **** to see a ship run straight into land were we are working at sometimes!!

 

Yeah, actually got off of a ship there a few years ago and a buddy picked me up and took me to lunch and then the airport. I hate you guys on the premise that you have too many hot chicks and too many ugly dudes who date them!