yea, it tooks hours with hack saw blades after torches i think to cut the 6 or 8’’ cylinder on that centre board. then they knocked the bow thruster off going over to lake washington… it was still one of the best ships NOAA ever had and certainly the most budget minded.
as for the Fennica… splash zone!!, isn’t registered tons lighter than the ship, as a general rule? if in this case, & despite owned by big oil it’ll prob have to get to a canada port or somewhere for a fix, they’ll prob want to cut out a hunk too.
’’’
Splash Zone is the answer.
Been a while since I was up there, but skippers of medium-sized (250 ft) Factory Trawlers (fishboat, no pilot required),used to think it worth going the extra distance around the West side of Hog Island, where 1/4 mile off, there is easily twice the depth of the 7 1/2 - 8 fathoms that is charted in the channel to the East.
Your 100% correct. The only boats I see routinely transit the east side are under 125’ in length.
Here is the chart again with the AIS tracks
The narrative that the Fennica hit an “uncharted shoal” is bogus. The shoal is that “finger” or ridge that extends in a SE direction from Hog Island and it very clearly is charted.
The chart is also accurate in the sense that the difference between the charted depths and the actual depths are within the margin of error for a pre-1940 survey.
On the chart, the high point of the ridge is the charted 5 1/4 fathom spot a bit further SE along the ridge of the new 3.5 fathom high spot found by the Fairweather’s survey boat after the Fennica struck bottom.
The new information that the highest spot of the ridge is 1.75 fathoms higher and a few yards NW of the charted 5 1/4 fm spot does not make this an “uncharted reef”.
This new information is not of any use to a prudent navigatior on a vessel drawing 28 feet (4.7 fathoms) as the entire ridge should have been avoided. If for some reason it was necessary to transit that side of Hog island the safest track would have skirted around the 8 fathom spot at the end of the “finger” However far safer to simply stay west of Hog island staying outside the buoys.
From the posts above it was normal practice for larger vessels to pass west of Hog island.
We know that the error of this pre-1940 survey was about 5.25fm-3.5fm = 1.75 fm or 10 feet, again, a 10 foot error on a known shoal is not an uncharted shoal.
The Fennica caculated UKC over that 5.25 fm spot calculates out to about 6 feet. 3.3 feet plus a 3 foot tide minus whatever swell and assuming no error in the charted depths which were obtained pre-1940 with a lead-line.
Here is the ship they are running with those margins.
That is a very cogent explaination of a major screw up all around.
From the three tracks, FENNICA apparently ran through there three times. It’s almost as if the master had to have assumed that the pilot knew that there was more water in there than the chart showed.
The photo does not do her justice. Up close and personal FENNICA looks much bigger than that.
[QUOTE=tugsailor;165398]That is a very cogent explaination of a major screw up all around.
From the three tracks, FENNICA apparently ran through there three times. It’s almost as if the master had to have assumed that the pilot knew that there was more water in there than the chart showed.
The photo does not do her justice. Up close and personal FENNICA looks much bigger than that.[/QUOTE]
I can’t imagine what the pilot or captain was thinking. Transiting over that shoal was poor seamanship in anybody’s book. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the pilot and crew don’t know how to navigate.
The Fennica is a valuable assset operating in a remote region far from support under intense scrutiny. Maybe they have enough pull with regulators they don’t have to worry about that but you’d think they’d be worried about possible delays to their opereration.
[QUOTE=Kennebec Captain;165400]I can’t imagine what the pilot or captain was thinking. Transiting over that shoal was poor seamanship in anybody’s book. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the pilot and crew don’t know how to navigate.
The Fennica is a valuable assset operating in a remote region far from support under intense scrutiny. Maybe they have enough pull with regulators they don’t have to worry about that but you’d think they’d be worried about possible delays to their opereration.[/QUOTE]
After seeing this I am inclined to say get Shell out of Alaska, now. They haven’t even got started yet but are an embarrassment once again to the hope that at some point in time oil can be safely extracted from Alaska. If the USA is determined to allow drilling there it is time to get the amateurs out until professionals willing to do the job right and under go well deserved scrutiny are willing to do so.What professional with local knowledge did Shell employ as a master to oversee this route? We all know that in the oil business mariners are an afterthought and are considered a necessary evil by the drilling community but in Alaska professional mariners with local knowledge and years of experience are needed whether it fits these oil outfits with a jack-up way of doing things or not.
Does the pilot not have years of experience or local knowledge?? That boat has also been there on and off for several years. Not defending them at all, but those arguments aren’t valid for this f*** up.
My first thought was that maybe the pilot came aboard and caught the captain by surprise not giving the crew enough time to evaluate the plan to transit over the shoal. But looks like they went over three times! Is that AIS track correct? Was anyone watching the depths as they passed over? Evidently not or they thought 3- 6 feet clearance is fine. That’s one or two meters for most of us.
It’s mind boggling that they’d sail that big icebreaker all the way to Dutch for the job and then sail around with such small safety margins for no apparent good reason.
Perhaps they hired one of the unemployed Aviq towing masters. They technically have experience and recency in Alaska.
That on top of the Fish and Wildlife rule they have to keep the rigs at least 12 miles apart. Another snag on their season. What kind of lawyers do they have working on this? Amateur hour indeed.
[QUOTE=coldduck;165404]Does the pilot not have years of experience or local knowledge?? That boat has also been there on and off for several years. Not defending them at all, but those arguments aren’t valid for this f*** up.[/QUOTE]
Shell’s Arctic operaton is evidently so fragile that an entire drilling season can be put at risk by a single (apparently) inept pilot.
Errors occur all the time. Each vessel crew needs to be able successfully trap errors. That takes a deep bench of skilled, experenced mariners and a useable and robust SMS.
Unless they are really lucky I see this adventure doomed.
The word of the day is “Isostatic Rebound”.
Due to earthquakes, glaciers and sea level “adjustments” due to that dreaded “Climate Change”, the unofficial rule I went by in Alaska was to stay over 1/2 mile off headlands, due to old and inaccurate surveys.
I still hit a rock in PWS in the day. Luckily it was only a bent shaft.
As before, relying on charts in Alaska has its risks. Having a look under the surface is the only way to go, without sonar, there will probably be more surprises around the corner.
Isostatic Rebound? Much of Alaska has only received cursory bathometric survey to begin with. Since the Kodiak quake of '64, NOAA vessels like “Fairweather” and “Rainier” have made a concerted effort to update more heavily trafficked areas. Crewmen working small vessels have been lost in this effort.
Bathymetry near Sitkinak Is. (near Kodiak) discovered an escarpment rise from 62 meters to 50 meters along a 200 meter length. Was it there “before”? The Aleutian Trench is a fault-active zone, and the bottom is constantly changing.
Research (Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, Vol. 5, P.284) can be interpreted as showing bottom changes as much as 12-30 ft. on charts near Kodiak / Middleton / Montague Islands. Anecdotal conversations revealed that in some survey areas, chart discrepancies greater than 10 meters were found. Incomplete original survey or changes since…? It doesn’t really matter. This information should be better respected.
Local knowledge? Most Accredited Marine Pilot Associations take very few of their members from the fishing community.
When Chouest and Shell sent Aiviq across the North Pacific with Kulluk, you can bet that the tow plan was on the contracted advice of Gulf of Mexico consultants, the vendors with the track record and billable experience that the clients already knew about. Using the “time-honored” shallow-water GOM technique of “soft hawser” to absorb shock, rather than a suitable length of heavy chain for a proper deep-water North Pacific shock-absorbing catenary may not have been the best tow rig for the application. They were able, however to reconnect to their broken tow— twice? If you already know how to do something, why learn it different? There is an astonishing amount of unintentional(?) arrogance in the push to achieve drilling results inside calendar and budget.
Why this many years into this operation are there not US vessels performing these duties for shell rather than a foreign vessel? Not Aiviq, but a capable vessel with a capable crew?
I can see the first year but no reason a vessel couldn’t have been built by now.
Looking at that chart it’s an easy call I think. How many minutes would it have added to just go around that shoal stay in the deeper water. That’s just being lazy and wanting to stay in a straight line.
[QUOTE=seacomber;165425]As before, relying on charts in Alaska has its risks. Having a look under the surface is the only way to go, without sonar, there will probably be more surprises around the corner.[/QUOTE]
The problem is not to get the ship safely through those shoals. The problem is how to get the ship safely out to sea. It only takes a glance at the chart to see how to do it. The safe route is around the shoals SE and S of Hog Island, around the buoy then north up the west side of Hog Island. Any mate with a trip or two under his belt could lay down a safe track-line.
There’s no reason to go into those shoals. Even with better soundings avoiding touching the bottom in those shoals just becomes a ship handling and navigation problem. No point, a ship can transit from that anchorage to the destination in the Arctic in deep water.