Easy to forget just how large the world’s oceans are at times.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51534957

I watched a program recently that included a clip of a plane flying from NY to LA. It was over mountains at the time and there were just mountains as far as the eye could see in any direction.

Imagine living in a counrty so big that can happen.

I watched a program recently that included a clip of a plane flying from NY to LA. It was over mountains at the time and there were just mountains as far as the eye could see in any direction.

Imagine living in a counrty so big that can happen.

There are many lost aircraft all over North America, some have been lost for decades, and not all of them in forests, either. The desert and mountain areas are vast, and once an aircraft hits the ground, especially if it breaks up, it’s effectively invisible, unless a hiker or someone out in the boondocks for whatever stumbles across the remains.
I’ve flown from Minneapolis-St Paul to Denver, flying over the big flat bit in the middle, and from 35,000 feet looking straight down you can see roads running in a dead straight line all the way to the horizon, which from that height is a long way.
From a U.K. perspective (ha!) it’s really difficult to get a sense of the scale of the place.

Why didn’t “someone” take the thing in tow in the week or so before it got stuck on rocks, its drift must have been reasonably predictable? (I can guess reasons but does anyone actually know?)

No one knew it was there until it hit the rocks. Been abandoned for some time…

LHR – SFO flies over a huge chunk of Canada where there’s SFA. For hours.

I’ve cycled across the USA Great Plains through Kansas and eastern Colorado. A week or so without a hill. Feels like a grass ocean. It isn’t completely flat but is in places so close to totally flat I could only tell when I was reaching the top of a slight rise because there was a mast placed there. Wind direction was always more important than any slope.

On the plains the local roads are laid out on 1 mile grids. The east west roads often run for miles in a completely straight line. The north south roads need a dog leg every 24 miles to account for the curvature of the earth.

More detailed explanation

https://www.wired.com/2016/04/kansas-roads-goofy-nature-always-pwns-logic/

^^ Ha. Never knew that.👍

This is a typical example of a STW thread.

You come to read about a ghost ship and learn why Kansas has occasionally kinked roads.

Brilliant. 🙂

A nice visualisation of North American “remoteness”

Why didn’t “someone” take the thing in tow in the week or so before it got stuck on rocks, its drift must have been reasonably predictable? (I can guess reasons but does anyone actually know?)

Who’s going to pay?

Who knew where it was?

Why would you think it was easy to predict it’s drift?

It’s quite a job to get onboard a unmanned dead ship at sea.

Who’s going to pay?

Whoever thinks it’s gonna end up as their problem on their land.

Who knew where it was?

I’m guessing this is the key. I always assumed there was some kind of Radar watch on the air/sea approaches to the UK. Maybe not 24/7 but something like Southampton VTS/Portsmouth QHM/CG keeping a good enough watch to spot a drifting ship. Based on this incident I guess that’s not the case.

Why would you think it was easy to predict it’s drift?

I’m not 100pc sure about tides but with SW prevailing winds by the time it’s 20 miles off I’d havbe thought it’s pretty likely to hit Ireland or the UK. Certainly there’s enough risk that you’d start to track it. (If you knew it was there which takes us to your previous point.) SAR teams have software that give a very good idea where something in the water will end up. But you wouldn’t even need that – if it’s upwind of Ireland theres a very strong chance it’s gonna hit Ireland or the UK – you can calculate the tide on a bit of paper in five minutes (or roughly in your head) but if it’s close enough you need to do that you proably want to start getting a tug ready.

It’s quite a job to get onboard a unmanned dead ship at sea.

Whereas recovering a ship from an inaccessible rocky shoreline is a doddle!

Years ago we flew to America and the flight went over Greenland before coming down the Canadian east coast, it was mile after mile of frozen desolation, it seem like ages before any signs of habitation were picked up.  It really highlighted how small our country is.

Flying over Mongolia was similar. Go to sleep, wake up hours later and it’s still empty Mongolia down there.

America really freaked me out at times. I’ve never felt so lonely and exposed. When you spend your whole life on a claustrophobic little island those wide open spaces are overwhelming.

In the desert we’d be driving along and realise we couldn’t see a single object in any direction. Trees, hills, fences, nothing, all the way to the horizon for 360 degrees. We kept pulling over just to get out and stand in the middle of the biggest environment we’d ever seen.

I love it that a thread about a drifting ship has ‘drifted’. 🙂

Who knew where it was?

This is what I don’t get.

You can “tag” a whale or shark or an otter, but there’s no way of finding space and powering a tracker, of some kind, on a 70m ship ?

I’m guessing this is the key. I always assumed there was some kind of Radar watch on the air/sea approaches to the UK. Maybe not 24/7 but something like Southampton VTS/Portsmouth QHM/CG keeping a good enough watch to spot a drifting ship. Based on this incident I guess that’s not the case.

The air is relatively easy. The sea not so much. Why do you think aircraft fly low level to avoid radar?
How many radar stations and operators would you need to cover the whole coast? You would still only get limited range, it’s all dependent on height of eye.
A VTS is only managing traffic on the approaches and within their harbour limits.

I’m not 100pc sure about tides but with SW prevailing winds by the time it’s 20 miles off I’d havbe thought it’s pretty likely to hit Ireland or the UK. Certainly there’s enough risk that you’d start to track it. (If you knew it was there which takes us to your previous point.)

So as you now have a network of radar stations tracking hundreds of ships looking for 1 that is unmanned and drifting, once you spot it 20 miles off, what do you do?
You need a salvage crew to get onboard and rig a tow in a howling gale. A salvage crew only goes onboard to save a ship because they take a payment based on the value of the ship and cargo. This ship is worthless. So you have to pay them. Where are you going to get them from?
You also need a suitable tug and probably a helicopter.
Is there a suitable tug withing a few hours of your location? Unlikely unless you are on the East coast of the UK.

Whereas recovering a ship from an inaccessible rocky shoreline is a doddle!

No it’s not. However, it doesn’t involve risking peoples lives boarding a a dead ship in a howling gales.

TLDR: It’s such a rare event that there is no sense in being prepared to respond to it. The Irish government will put a tender out for a wreck removal and someone will cut it up and shift it for a few million. A lot cheaper than a network of radars and tug boats.

HMS protector encountered it ~6 months ago although sound likes they didnt board.

Two days ago @hmsprotector discovered this apparently abandoned Merchant Vessel whilst mid-Atlantic. We closed the vessel to make contact and offer our assistance, but no one replied! Whilst investigations continue we’re unable to give you more detail on this strange event.🌊🚢🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/x29sB5IF06

— HMS Protector (@hmsprotector) September 2, 2019

You can “tag” a whale or shark or an otter, but there’s no way of finding space and powering a tracker, of some kind, on a 70m ship ?

All ships have “trackers” when they are operating. Marine Traffic

However, this was unmanned and a dead ship. The lights were out.

HMS protector encountered it ~6 months ago although sound likes they didnt board.

Why would they? What could they do?

The lack of objects when you are out on the plains or deserts can be disorienting, very much like being at sea. We were driving down through the Mojave desert to get to Joshua Tree NP and turned a bend in the road. At this point we could see the next bend on the other side of the valley.

“How far to that bend?”

“A couple of miles.”

“More like ten”

9.8 miles later we got to the bend. There was just nothing for your eye to latch onto to give a sense of scale.

Conversely I hitched from the Shawangunks cliffs in mid-state New York up to North Conway nr Mt Washington – 300 miles of trees. Very pretty trees as it was fall and happened to be “peak foliage” weekend, but 300 miles of them, jeez.

me: I’m guessing this is the key. I always assumed there was some kind of Radar watch on the air/sea approaches to the UK. Maybe not 24/7 but something like Southampton VTS/Portsmouth QHM/CG keeping a good enough watch to spot a drifting ship. Based on this incident I guess that’s not the case.

gobuchul:The air is relatively easy. The sea not so much. Why do you think aircraft fly low level to avoid radar?
How many radar stations and operators would you need to cover the whole coast? You would still only get limited range, it’s all dependent on height of eye.
A VTS is only managing traffic on the approaches and within their harbour limits.

So as you now have a network of radar stations tracking hundreds of ships looking for 1 that is unmanned and drifting, once you spot it 20 miles off, what do you do?
You need a salvage crew to get onboard and rig a tow in a howling gale. A salvage crew only goes onboard to save a ship because they take a payment based on the value of the ship and cargo. This ship is worthless. So you have to pay them. Where are you going to get them from?
You also need a suitable tug and probably a helicopter.
Is there a suitable tug withing a few hours of your location? Unlikely unless you are on the East coast of the UK.

Thanks, but there’s only so much time I’m willing to commit to considering something I vaguely assumed might happen but then realized didn’t.

Why would they? What could they do?

i wasn’t suggesting they should have.

edit: but if it were me, i’d probably go and have a look around…

At least check the fridge?

Just to stick my professional oar in:

Beyond the radar horizon, at best 30-40 miles from a shore station is virtually impossible.

Drift of a vessel is very hard to predict due to wind and current. Especially one that is a dead ship.

Getting onboard a drifting vessel to take it on tow, is very tricky without help from the crew (who were not there anymore). Not to say downright dangerous if the weather is not flat calm.

On the ship front the problem is that it has no value. Any one who rescued it would have kept for free.

Oil tankers have to lodge funds for rescue and clean up. Presumably cargo ships don’t.

My big world moment was in Sahara. We settled for the night in a flat hard packed area. You could run as far as you liked with your eyes shut!

On the ship front the problem is that it has no value

Wouldn’t it be worth someone grabbing it for scrap value?

Where are Somalian pirates when you need them?

They would have boarded that ship no bother. 🙂

Wouldn’t it be worth someone grabbing it for scrap value?

Open water tugs are expensive, decommissioning in the UK is expensive. Beaching in South Asia is much cheaper as its unregulated.

Salvaging ships and aircraft is a knife-edge business, a bit like mining and quarrying, because the costs increase so fast with remoteness and difficulty and the value of the commodity fluctuates. In a small way you can see this if you walk around the slate quarries above Llanberis; the higher you climb the more intact the machinery as the effort and cost of stealing it increases.

For anybody who is interested there’s a fascinating book about the salvage of the German High Seas fleet from Scapa Flow called Cox’s Navy. Even there, the most difficult battle-cruisers were too expensive to recover and Cox only broke even.

How does a ship just end up abandoned?

Ran out of fuel? Sinking? Pirates?

It’s not like the crew can jump off and walk to the nearest pub and get a lift home?

On the remoteness front, I always think back to Australia. So many vistas where you couldn’t see the hand of man. Just nature.

Since then I always get a kick when I look out and can’t see anything man made on the horizon.

Not all ships are owned by big companies with huge reserves; I bet the majority are owned by individuals, some quite dodgy. The owner runs out of money or goes to prison or dies and abandons his crew; there are plenty of boats tied up in ports around the world with crews languishing on board unable to get home. It’s the maritime equivalent of those broken down JCBs you see around farms; the detritus of failed projects or mental and physical health breakdown. On my regular cycling routes around the Ribble Valley I can think of three new-built but abandoned houses, which have never been occupied and are slowly rotting away through neglect; I guess the owners fell foul of planning regs or died or went to prison or emigrated.

How does a ship just end up abandoned?

Probably just broke down and wasn’t economical to rescue it. There isn’t an AA for ships.

To scrap it and recover any value would mean towing it from Ireland to South Asia. Which is a long way and a lot of fuel oil.

Shipping is done on incredibly tight margings, the likes of Maersk make their profits by running the biggest most efficient ships, smaller operators make their profits by bangernomics, buy a ship almost at the end of it’s life, register it in some 3rd world backwater (preferably with no coastline for even fewer regulations) hope it doesn’t break down, make some money, and then scrap it for what you paid for it.

Even in good condition that ship was probably worth <£1million, have a quick google, loads of websites selling all sorts of ships!

I got curious about this back when the U.S. impounded a North Korean ship taking weapons to the Middle East. I think one of their tactics for avoiding getting caught was to transfer the cargo at sea. I wondered why they didn’t just track every ship that ever docked in North Korea and keep logs of any other ships that had approached them. Then I checked Wikipedia and found that there are about 50000 merchant ships (and obviously millions of smaller coastal vessels), and that the oceans cover about 350 million square kilometers. So, if all the ships put to sea at the same time and dispersed evenly, each ship would have about 7000 square kilometers of ocean to itself, so they would be 80 km or so apart. That’s a lot of ocean to monitor for one little ship.

Just look at Marine Traffic and scroll out for an idea of how many ships there are!

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-11.1/centery:36.2/zoom:3

https://www.thejournal.ie/ghost-ship-cork-5009861-Feb2020/

More detail of the back story of the ship here.

On a related note there are thousands of shipping containers floating around the place (many only just under the surface of the sea), they’re quite a hazard to shipping.

They’ve fallen off container ships on storms and it’s simply not economical to recover them. So they (and their contents) end up drifting around, sometimes for months before they eventually sink. There was a transatlantic yacht race where one of the yachts smacked into a container that was “floating” a foot or so below the waves. Wrote off the yacht.

There was a transatlantic yacht race where one of the yachts smacked into a container that was “floating” a foot or so below the waves. Wrote off the yacht.

Its fairly frequent infact, most purpose built racing yachts have a sacrificial bow section to try and mitigate the risk but it doesn’t stop it taking the keel off.

And they can last for years too, they’re watertight so youre waiting for them to either rust or the seals to perish which can be a very long time.

You occasionally see stories of a container load of brand new crt monitors or dot matrix printers washing up decades after they were lost.

Not a container but I was once water-skiing on Loch Brittle (don’t ask!) when the towing RIB hit a barely-floating railway sleeper. Or planed over it at speed and the outboard motor hit the sleeper. The resulting flip almost took the motor 360 degrees through the floorboards.

I was swimming (front crawl) in Lake Constance and hit my hand on a semi submerged bit of drift wood that was just below the surface. Ripped my nail half off. Was rank and hurt lots!