One of the better comments posted here. Obviously you are a Pilot or a tug Master. I noticed that right away. Those Asian style tugs are typically equipped as tractors (voith and/or ASD) and are ubiquitous everywhere. That he was barely able to keep up moving sideways tells me little if any “pull” was being applied to lift ship off berth. Most of his horsepower was lost to moving sideways. why they never went “indirect” is a big question.
Do they know how? Were they ever taught this technique? Do the Pilots know how to do this?
Interesting note … no manned models (or simulators that I know of) in Asia. Anywhere. I never have seen or am aware of Pilots from Asia attending any ship handling school. NOT meant to be a racial thing at all. But addressing the “training and education” aspect of all mariners, especially Pilots and Tug Masters. Is that something South Korea, Japan, China, et al even consider???
In light of this accident, maybe they all should.
Too fast and even the best tug operators could not stay up with it. No brainer here, Pilot and Master gonna have to eat this one. Lawyers will fight over this for years.
Better image of the chartlet
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Audio is in Dutch. The tug’s captain explains that in order to slow down the container vessels speed of 6 knots he uses his ship as a drogue chute with hull dimensions of 32 x 6 meters. To accomplish this he maneuvers the tug transverse to the sailing direction. Braking with help of the tugs ship’s hull.
New generation of CAROUSEL RAVE TUGs (CRT). The CRT makes harbour towage of seagoing vessels safer, faster, easier and more environmentally friendly. In principle it is impossible that the tug will capsize. The Carrousel system consists of a base structure surrounded by a steel ring that can rotate freely through 360° in the horizontal plane.
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Some way, shape, or form, The attorneys will try to blame the poor bastard in the first crane hit for being in the way. Speed kills fellows. Luckily not this time.
I covered much the same thing in earlier posts where I mentioned transverse thrust with a standard right hand screw fixed propeller and a tug on the centre lead aft.
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Most single screw ships and tugs will back to port. Not that hard to figure out. Speed kills, it’s that simple. The tractor tugs are different and an awesome improvement, but effectiveness goes away with higher speed of the vessel they are attending. My goodness, light ship, two assist tugs and bow thruster , some on dock wind perhaps. Almost unbelievable result. Sorry to say, human error plays heavy in this one. Somebody was in a hurry for whatever reason.
Thought I’d add, the aft tractor tug doesn’t necessarily have to be tethered centerline aft in order to fall out behind the vessel for direct pull braking. This can be done while tethered to the quarter as well. After the vessel is slowed down to roughly 3 knots or less the tug can then swing out on a 90 and effectively perform direct pull off the dock as required. Performed routinely in other ports.
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I assume that chartlet is to scale. So they are at 9.3 kts and what, 2 1/2 ship lengths off? Yikes. Then at 1439 the engine is stopped, so any increase in ROT is going to come from the tugs.
On a dead slow bell ship slowed from 9.3 kts to 7.6. Don’t know the ships’s speed at dead slow or what the tugs were doing.
Wind onshore, tide flooding, ship very light, at some point, presumably before what we see here, the speed must have been misjudged.
You are correct that their effectiveness is less at high speeds if the tractor tug is stationed anywhere but directly aft of the ship. If the tug is required to lift off or push on then the tug master normally runs more line off and moves off to the quarter. Where pilot and tug master have a good relationship this happens smoothly. By high speed I mean anything over 5 knots.
Most ships will steer when going astern on the engine… as long as the ship has decent sternway. Two or more knots usually. I never had too many occasions to use it - usually when coming out of a crowded anchorage. Steer like you would a bicycle going backwards. Right rudder makes the stern go right. Since you have sternway your turning center is about 4/5ths aft so the bow will swing pretty good. If there is a fresh breeze blowing and the ship is not loaded forget about it - she’ll back into Into the wind. As for steering while the ship still has headway… sometimes, but not after the wheel wash catches up to the rudder.
I’m with Kennebec on this one. Prop largely out of the water is a bitch. I remember once with a light ship trying to back down a half mile to a berth. We had her on full astern for what seemed like half an hour. Made less than two knots. Just amazing. Captain kept looking at me nervously and reminding me we were full astern and I kept pointing out how slow we were going. After he said it for the 4th time I put her on slow astern and she stopped moving. That was an exceptional example, but I’d rather stop a loaded ship than a ship with a lot of prop showing. Any day.
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… and why didn’t they put the anchors down?
Too late for anchors. The maneuver took about 4-5 minutes from the first turn, Takes that long to get anchor release and down and have an effect…They blew it, plain and simple. Bad approach and way too fast. Those looked like good tugs,but speed rendered them not as effective as they could have been. Hate when our guys mess up. All that help and still got on the news.
Anchors should be ready to drop at a moment’s notice when in pilot waters. You never have a lot of time to fool around when things turn to poop.
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I don’t disagree with you by any means on that point regarding anchor watch, but they were out of sorts where an anchor would not have been a saving grace. They turned too late and lost sea room to get out of it. Not sure how fast your vessel can drop an anchor , but it took more than a few minutes on mine to grab purchase and stop the vessel. These guys never had a chance to deploy that and be effective. Speed kills.
Whenever I had to back my vessel down a channel, I used a trick an old pilot told me. I used the bow tug on a short line to steer me aft. I thank that guy forever for the advice. And I went slow. He raised cows by the way and a WW2 vet. I was a young pup then who appreciated that common sense worked better than throttles sometimes. (Took me a while) Those guys banged that in my head for a reason. Twin screw is great, but don’t be twin stupid and use your assets. My hat is off to them. This doesn’t apply to this incident other than they were going way too fast and out of position to use the tools they had at their disposal.
Well, what else is the crew on the foredeck going to be doing? Might as well drop the anchors because the investigators are going to want to know why you didn’t anyway. It takes a couple of seconds to say “Drop both anchors. Two shackles and put the brake on hard.” 180 feet of chain go out pretty fast and at the speed they were going, 4-5 knots, you wouldn’t have to wait at all for it to stretch out. You need all the tools in the bag at that point. It would surprise you how effective two shots of anchor can be.
Not at all surprised, been there . A couple of seconds? Not on this planet. Ideally, yes, but no. They were in a bad spot, and yes, the lawyers and investigators will stay on the payroll for years to come. And ask many questions. Same conclusion, at the end, they were hauling ass in the wrong place,at the wrong time.
I wrote that here earlier. In an emergency situation dropping of both anchors, but then already in an early stage, could have been beneficiary although the ship would have moved on quite a bit before the anchors would bite. If the anchoring crew is prepared and fully standby it should not take too long to drop the anchors. But then there was panic on the bridge…
Speaking about panic. I would love to hear the bridge conversation recorded on the VDR and also learn about these rudder and engine orders. It’s a pity that we will have to wait for about a year probably.
