Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on January 24, 2012 at 10:14:46 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: Sinking Ship posted by Jock on January 17, 2012 at 19:46:56:
This is altogether too close to my day job.
I mess about with ships. I've only once been responsible for a passenger cruise ship - today I just have big container ships to think about.
The ship in the picture is the old "Coral Princess", in Milford Sound in New Zealand. Calum Anderson was the Master, John McCall was the Chief Engineer, Chris Macdonald was the Mate (do you detect a certain Scottish influence?) and Mark Beaumont, who incidentally was the ship's commercial manager, took the picture from one of the starboard lifeboats.Every one of us had read Arthur Ransome and none of us can remember the year - 1989 at a guess. But if the buck had stopped, it would have been on my desk.
I have a good deal of sympathy for those involved in the "Costa Concordia" disaster. It seems to have started with a tiny thing - another ship was to port of her when she should have turned to port to start her run up the coast of the island, so she had to let that ship go clear firs,t and turned late. This changed her line of approach and because the manouevre was being done by eye, rather than using the well established electronic techniques available (primarily radar parallel indexing, invented in 1957, but widely seen as a British "fad") the error was not detected until too late.
I can bore for England on this subject... but had much better not.
There are some points in common with John wrecking "Swallow".