32


FREIGHT BREAK Honesty is the best policy


Cast your mind back to the Napoli, and the TV pictures of brand new BMW motorbikes being wheeled off a Devon beach after the stricken


vessel had


disgorged much of its cargo. The Marine and Coastguard Agency’s Philip Naylor told the Coastlink conference in Liverpool recently that, predictably, most people


didn’t bother to declare the bikes, arguing that there was no way the state was going to get their hands on them. But a few conscientious souls did so. The Receiver of Wreck told them to wash them down and keep them in a secure place while officaldom decided what to do with them. In the event, as the insurers


Lost box finds new role


Speaking of boxes falling off ships, seven years ago, a container fell from the deck of the Med Taipei en route from San Francisco to Los Angeles when the ship hit a patch of bad weather. Nothing so remarkable there but this lost box was destined to play a vital role in scientific research. A few


months later, researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute came across it on the ocean bed while they were placing sensors for a survey of the ocean floor within a local marine sanctuary.


With the help of a large undersea robot, they are now producing the first in-depth


Old lady returns home


A cargo ship has returned to the Royal Docks in east London, for the first time in over 30 years. Unfortunately for water freight protagonists, this is not the start of a revival of commercial traffic on the Thames, as the SS Robin,will be


a museum piece. The SS Robin Trust is to start internal restoration of the 300-tonne


ship as a floating


museum. Built at nearby Blackwall, east London, and launched in 1890, she has already had an


A problem of geography into


Living history


Two World Wars, the break up of the British Empire, votes for women, man on the moon and the invention of television, the internet, mobile phones and SatNavs – that’s quite a lot to take in in one lifetime. Retired Manchester Ship Canal deputy chief engineer Len Jones, born in 1911 – the year Titanic was launched - celebrated his 100th birthday with a trip on the tug ’The Viceroy’, sailing from from QEII dock at Ellesmere Port, which he helped design and


Mud-men construct.


Len joined the Manchester Ship Canal Company as a 15-year-old in June 1927,


and apart from four years in the late 1930s, he worked for the Ship Canal Company until retiring in July 1975.


I’ve always had a bit of a downer on satnavs; basically, they’re for wimps who have never bothered to learn to read maps properly. (Which is probably why I can spend a good hour trying to get of the centre of Croydon). But slavishly


following your sat-nav’s directions can get you


ISSUE 4 2011


had written the cargo off and the cargo owners had no further interest in them, in due course the new owners received the keys and all the paperwork from the manufacturers, allowing them to legally register them on the roads, says Naylor. “But anyone who hadn’t done so would have little option but to break them up for spares and see what they could get for them on E-Bay.”


(excuse the pun) study of a lost shipping container, and its effect on the ocean environment. In many respects, we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the deep ocean floor. So far, the lost box has attracted sea cucumbers and a species of pink crabs, along with a species of snail that lays 5-6-inch high egg sacks.


extensive external refurbishment. Incredibly, she was in commercial service for 80 years, trading for much of her life as the Maria in Spain, before returning to the country of her birth in the 1970s. Will Maersk’s Triple E class ships still be operating in 2090, we wonder?


trouble. A report reaches


us from Washington state in the US of three women whose 4x4 ended up in a lake after they were directed down a boat-ramp in the middle of the night. They survived but had to watch their expensive vehicle disappear underneath the water.


But depending on which internet report you read, there was an identical incident in Mexico – which I suppose you could just about put down to an amazing coincidence.


But yet another


said it happened at Washington in North-east England, which is surely taking coincidence too far. Could this be an urban myth in the making?


Marmite bans – you either love ‘em or hate ‘em


I must confess that I have never eaten Marmite. When I was a kid, my sister was a big fan but that rotting-corpse-buried-beneath- the-floorboards stench was always enough to dissuade me. Now, it seems, the Denmark has banned Marmite, not because of the awful pong, but on the grounds that its added vitamins and minerals break local food safety laws.


The organisers of the Coastlink conference probably thought they were being pretty adventurous in staging their event on a boat chugging down the Manchester Ship Canal recently. But now it seems that the mud-and-music festival of Glastonbury is becoming a forum from the freight industry, if the evidence of a recent meeting with Daniel Clarke of freight software supplier CargoWise, brought back by our publisher John Saunders, is to be believed. Not sure if the idea will catch on, though.


Caught short


The Danish authorities say that their permission must be obtained before products with such


additives can be local


market, although the European Commission is looking into the matter to see if it breaks EU free movement of goods rules. Expats in Denmark were meanwhile reported to be threatening a civil disobedience campaign. I for one won’t be joining them on the


barricades. How ironic, then that Denmark is the easiest EU country to buy hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin, at least according to a European Commission survey on 15 to 24 year olds’ attitudes to drug use. If they’re really serious about clamping down on harmful substances, perhaps the authorities should redirect their attentions elsewhere.


Meanwhile, the tide of corporate sponsorship rolls on in Glastonbury, as this still from the TV coverage of the event shows - though Bono probably thought he was about to be busted by the FBI. But we’ll have to take a break from the music scene next year as there will be no Glastonbury. Apparently, it’s because the Olympics will use up the nation’s entire stock of portable loos. I kid you not.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32