This week’s Belly Ache focuses on a topic quite unrelated to air cargo, but we’re confident you will agree it is an item that is so fantastical it will surely be made into Hollywood movie at some point! After all, it has all the components of a ‘great’ box office hit – ghostly mystery, intrigue and of course an essential ingredient… cannibal rats!
We also reckon that since the shipping industry is a bit of a nemesis of the air cargo industry all’s fair in love and war!
So on to the story… in happier times, the MV Lyubov Orlova was a cruise ship accustomed to taking rich Russian holidaymakers on adventure tours around the Arctic. Today, that same 100-metre ship has become a ‘ghost ship’ bobbing somewhere in the Atlantic ocean with its only passengers a horde of disease-ridden cannibal rats.
The 4,250-tonne Lyubov Orlova has been floating in the Atlantic since January 2013 with satellite images recently showing a mysterious blip matching the vessel’s size off the coast of Scotland, but oddly enough, search aircraft could not find it. Perhaps its a ‘Scottish Triangle’ at work!
Named after a Russian actress, the ghost ship’s story began when the Yugoslav-built ship was seized by port authorities in Canada after its owners ran out of money to pay the crew. As it was being towed to the Dominican Republic for scrapping, rough seas broke the towline and it drifted away. The Canadian authorities, worried that the ship might collide with its offshore oil rigs, sent another, larger vessel that towed it out into international waters where they kindly set it adrift again. Good job!
Maritime experts think it is still drifting, with cannibal rats on board that would have reproduced and eaten each other thousands of times over. You see! We weren’t kidding on the Hollywood angle! “There will be a lot of rats and they eat each other,” Pim de Rhoodes, a Belgian salvage hunter and been quoted as saying. “If I get aboard I’ll have to lace everywhere with poison.” Hmm, if he doesn’t get eaten alive first, we reckon.
De Rhoodes and other salvors are keen to find the ghost ship for its nearly US$1 million scrap value.
The ship’s lonely, ghostly, journey has now run over 12 months and as many as 2,000 nautical miles, officials reckon.
The ship, having crossed the Atlantic, is now supposedly on the doorstep of Norway, Scotland, or maybe Ireland. Unsurprisingly, the Irish Coast Guard is less than enthusiastic about the situation. “We don’t want rats from foreign ships coming on to Irish soil,” the director of the Irish maritime agency told the Irish Independent newspaper.
There is not a great deal that can be done to prevent the rats from establishing a beachhead, however, given that the ship has no location-finding devices on board and no one knows where it is exactly.
Although maritime authorities generally do not welcome such floating hazards, they are also relatively sanguine about them, saying that radar and other ship’s navigation warnings mean they are easily avoided.
Still, though, the notion of a phantom vessel, disconnected from the world and crawling with hungry, diseased cannibal rats strikes an eerie chord. There are dozens of historical antecedents stretching from distant history to the very present, the most famous example being the Mary Celeste.
The 30-metre brigantine was discovered in 1872 in seaworthy condition and still under sail heading toward the Strait of Gibraltar, crewless, but wellprovisioned. She had been at sea for a month and had more than six months’ worth of food and water on board. Her cargo was virtually untouched and the crew’s personal belongings including valuables were still in place.
None of those on board was ever seen or heard from again and their disappearance is often cited as the greatest maritime mystery of all time.
But there are numerous modern examples as well. In 2006 the twin-masted schooner, Bel Amica was discovered off the coast of Sardinia with the Italian Coast Guard crew that discovered the ship finding half eaten Egyptian meals, French maps of North African seas, and a flag of Luxembourg onboard the vessel which bore no registration identification other than the name plate.
And in 2010 Taiwanese fishing boat, Tai Ching 21, was found drifting with no crew onboard near Kiribati, prompting a search of 54,390 sq kms of the Pacific Ocean which found no trace of its captain or 28-strong crew.
In June last year, the 21 metre Nina, heading to Sydney from New Zealand, was caught in a storm. A text sent by the crew soon after indicated that they had survived unscathed. A search of nearly 500,000 square nautical miles failed to find the vessel, however. A grainy image, which some have suggested may be the ship, was taken off the coast of New Zealand. But the ship has not been seen since, even after the family of those on board financed a private rescue, but to no avail.
And there you have it, a peak into the weird an wacky world of ocean transport!
