Following on from the Arctic STS piece here last week. One of those tankers is one I’ve been watching, and she’s given me something I’d like a second opinion on. She’s the Mirabel, IMO 9511521, although the lists can’t agree what she’s called. Australia and New Zealand say Mirabel. OFAC, the UK and Switzerland say Moskovsky Prospect. The EU and Canada say Meridian.
She’d been silent since 2 August, last heard at 72N in the Barents. On 12 September at 07:57 UTC she came back on air 9 km southwest of Askold Island, making 14 knots to the southeast. Nothing odd about that.
Then at 12:53 UTC a position arrives putting her 112 km away, in Ussuri Bay. The next one has her back on her real track doing 10 knots. Then it happens again, and it keeps happening for five hours, her positions alternating between where she was and one of two spots she wasn’t. That much is ordinary enough for a jamming area, and the arithmetic on the jumps is silly by design: 82 nm in two minutes at one point, which is the 2,133 knots in the picture. I’m calling the eastbound line the real one because other ships were pushed onto those two spots that hour and none onto that line.
What I can’t place is that her own transponder reported impossible speeds too. Ten of those positions carry a speed over ground above 30 knots and one carries 57.6. That isn’t a number I calculated from two fixes. It’s the figure in the message.
She wasn’t the only one. Eight other ships reported from that same patch of the bay during those five hours, thirteen across the day, and two more tankers on the lists did the same thing: the He Bo, on air as Xing Yuan, from 08:58, and the Vostochny Prospect from 13:10. So I read this as interference in the bay rather than anything the ships are doing. They’re on the receiving end.
Her last position with us is 21:51 UTC that evening, 152 km east-southeast of Nakhodka, still declaring Murmansk for 5 October. Nothing since, which is ten days now, and VesselFinder stops on that same position. Our coverage out there is thin, so I wouldn’t call the silence deliberate. But it isn’t only us.
Windward wrote up Nakhodka and Kozmino as a jamming hotspot last year ( New GPS Jamming Hotspot Detected at Russian Oil Port ), so the area itself isn’t news. What I haven’t seen described is it reaching this far up into Ussuri Bay, or a transponder reporting the impossible speed itself. Every account I’ve read describes positions in the wrong place, and leaves the speed field out of it. Has anyone here seen that on this coast before?