MV wisdom, a 145-metre long cargo vessel bound for Alang ship-breaking yard from Colombo, sparked

a major scare on Saturday afternoon after it broke free from its tug and drifted towards the Bandra-Worli Sea Link in Mumbai. MV Wisdom has now drifted towards the Juhu beach and is just 400 metres from the coastline. Prev

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The vessel was being tugged by MV Seabulk Plover for scrap when the tow was lost around 12 nautical
miles off the Mumbai coast on Saturday afternoon. A coast guard officer said the ship was headed for the bridge's pillar number 19, which is close to the cable support structure. Around 6 pm on Saturday , the ship was just 5 km from the bridge, when sea currents and the wind made it turn course. Around 6.30 pm, it went within 3.5 km of Taj Lands End, before continuin isdom's tug, the MV Seabulk Plover, has arrived in Mumbai. The coast guard ship Sankalp will help in the salvage. The Directorate General of Shipping has said the ship does not pose a threat to coastal waters because it does not contain fuel.g towards Juhu, where it got grounded around 8 pm.

S B Agnihotri, the director-general of shipping, was quoted by media agencies as saying, "Prima facie, it
does appear that the towing rope may have snapped causing the vessel to drift to Mumbai. We should be able to conclude our inquiry soon. The inquiry will try to ascertain if the towing material was of substandard quality or if the loadbearing capacity of the tug or the towing material was inadequate"

Sources say the DGS are in touch with the owners of the vessel who are trying to make arrangements
within the next few days to refloat it and take it to Alang. If the damage is minimal, the ship could be towed away even despite high tides. The coastguard could even look at dismantling a few parts of the ship to reduce the weight to make towing simpler. In case there was considerable damage to the ship, it might have to be completely dismantled on the spot.

Second operation

Mumbai: For the second day in a row, attempts to salvage the 9000-ton cargo ship, MV Wisdom, from the Juhu Beach have failed. The operations were called off after the vessel did not respond as expected. It only moved some 3-4 degrees after the tugs tried to pull it. The ship didnt exactly respond the way we expected it to. What happened is after the tugs were in place and the pulling action began, it just moved by 3-4 degrees. What happens is if it moves substantially then its pulling becomes smoother. That didnt happen. We are going to make a last ditch attempt tomorrow as there is a window of opportunity and if it does not work out tomorrow then we are looking for a long haul, said Satish Agnihotri, Director General, Shipping.

Salvage operations began early last morning with naval helicopters dropping rope, cables and other equipment to the MV Wisdom, which is to be towed to the Alang shipyard in Gujarat for dismantling. The rope was attached to a cable on board MV Wisdom; the messenger rope was meant to carry the cable between the two vessels. But as a result of the tide the tug went over the messenger rope and it snapped. With the salvage delayed, the bigger concerns are about what could happen if the 9000 tonne ship cannot be removed for a long time? Would it impact wave patterns and the shoreline, like the grounded River Princess did in Goa? Environmentalists and the DG shipping say that MV Wisdom does not pose an immediate environmental threat to Juhu Beach in the next month or two unless the ship breaks down. When the ship breaks up, what is actually going to happen is there is going to be some residual fuel. And since the monsoon is considered as the breeding ground of marine life and fish, it is actually the worse time of the year, said Debi Goenka, an activist from the Conservation Action Trust. Mr Agnihotri, however, said that because there is no oil or cargo on the Wisdom, it does not currently pose environmental risks. However, he did state that if the Wisdom is not towed away during tomorrows high tide, the operation may have to be suspended for a fortnight till the next high tide. Experts hope MV Wisdom leaves Mumbais shores soon before this tourist delight turns into an eyesore.

Ub

Why was the MV Wisdom allowed to get so near the Bandra-Worli Sea Link? June 14, 2011 04:30 PM |

Veeresh Malik

Did the container ship being towed to the Alang junk yard have permission to sail so close to the coast and sensitive Bombay High oil installation? Who plotted her course? And how come nobody interrupted her voyage There is now a new landmark off the coast in Bandra, in suburban Mumbai, that joins another outside the Otters Club there, and the city should consider itself lucky that it did not float onto the signature Bandra-Worli Sea Link. It is the MV Wisdom, a 26-year-old container ship, which in the course of its lifecycle has been blessed with 14 name changes, and nobody knows how many owners. As a matter of fact, the real beneficiary owner of the ship is still not known, at least not officially. Who the real owners and financiers of this ship are will, ofcourse, be known to all and sundry in the by-lanes and backstreets of Mumbai's Ballard Estate. This is the kind of published information, incidentally, which can cause the untimely demise of journalists; or others too, as we have seen recently again. So we stay out of that aspect, though it is certainly important, especially in this day and age of scams linked to stolen assets, hidden in tax havens, appearing in other industries like international sports events, offshore oil exploration, and telecom. This article tries to answer some of the simpler questions. The first simple question that arises is, what was this rust-bucket, junk, unseaworthy vessel doing so close to Mumbai in the first place. The next question is, who plotted courses so far inland from what the actual course on a voyage from Colombo to Alang should have been. And, certainly, why was she inland of the oil rigs and security establishments in and around Bombay High? Mariners cannot even begin to think of the damage she would have caused if she had gone adrift near Bombay High. MV Wisdom started life in faraway Hamburg, back in 1984-85, as the container ship Olandia. She bounced around the world with a variety of names, flags and despondent owners as well as charterers. These names often saw a repeat of the name Olandia, but also included Ocean Spirit, Contship Canada, City of Leeds, Oocl Pudong, Vietnam Star, Moringia, India Star, QC Wisdom and finally, Wisdom. Through all this, she bore a constant IMO (International Maritime

Organisation) number - 8417558. As a small container ship, logging around 700 TEU, she would eventually see service as a feeder and an uneconomical one at that. Scrapping, therefore, would be a natural outcome. Rule paramount which is drilled into our heads right in the beginning of our training is: All seaworthy merchant ships have a right of innocent passage through non-inland waters worldwide. However, a ship headed for scrapping, either under her own power or tow, does not come close to land or coast, as far as possible, for multiple reasons. If she does, then she needs to inform the authorities, who will then decide if she is to be provided with what is known as "the right to innocent passage" guaranteed to all seaworthy ships of all nations. Because a ship headed for scrapping is not seaworthy. And if a national authority wishes to, it can certainly deny her the right of innocent passage through her territorial waters, till a point where she has to enter the territorial waters for scrapping, or with precautions to prevent exactly what happened with the Wisdom. In other words, the Wisdom should simply have stayed far away from India's territorial waters, until she was right off Alang, where she was reportedly destined for, and then made an entry in as direct and straight a course as possible. That is what her entry permissions into India should have stated in the first case. The first convention that the MV Wisdom broke is that her tug and she entered India's territorial waters knowingly, and consciously, despite being very unseaworthy. We need to know and find out if she sought the required permissions to do so, or just barged right in, and then meandered close to Bandra, subsequently. A tug tow breaking in the monsoons, especially when towing an empty unmanned dead ship with high windage, is not something the authorities should have permitted right off Mumbai. One can, therefore, only presume that she was right off our coast, by some reports just four miles off, without any permissions or clearances. It would have to be total deliberate criminal negligence if permissions were given to this movement, in the way described, with just one tug that seemingly gave up after the towing arrangement snapped. If she was in any other country, the authorities would have insisted that she had backup arrangements, at least two tugs for the tow and a third one on standby, and very regular monitoring of the situation. Now, a dead ship under tow is not some sort of high-speed boat, it is more like a very slow combo chugging and struggling along at a speed not exceeding 3-4 knots (about 6-8 kmph), at best, if not even slower. In this sort of weather it would have taken more than a few days just to cross Mumbai harbour, assuming she came close to the coast past Goa, and then along the Raigad/Kolaba coast. She would have been picked up on every small and large shore radar screen, every naval and coast-guard ship, every offshore supply vessel on duty in and around the Bombay High platforms, and even the radars on the platforms and rigs. Most of all, despite the heavy seas and monsoons, she would have been visible to the naked eye from more than a dozen light-houses along the coast, including assorted naval batteries. In addition, every other ship underway in and around the area would have picked her up on their radar screens, and stayed miles away. Any ship at anchor that this combo came within miles of

would either raise anchor and flee, or raise a strong protest on the radio to the tug as well as the port authorities. As seafarers, we know how unpredictable and dangerous such derelicts under tow can be, and it is just not worth it being anywhere near them. Anywhere would mean that if I was on another ship, I would keep a very safe distance, which means steer at least five miles clear distance away, regardless, even more if I was a tanker or other kind of big ship. Every one of them would have seen a double-blip on their screens. Any one of them could have challenged the tug-ship tow on simple VHF radio, and asked them to move further from shore, as well as establish identity. Every one of them could have filed a report with the many radio and marine stations all along the coast, of a tug and tow operating too close to the coast and representing a possible hazard. It is likely that some did, but whether they did or not is unknown; and even if they did, what happened next would be unknown. Something similar happens when un-roadworthy trucks are winked past on our roads, to give you an idea of what really may have happened, since there is no other logical reason why nobody seems to be aware of what was happening till this 13,000 tonner landed up aiming for the Bandra-Worli Sea Link. The grapevine is, with hindsight, that this was a deliberate attempt to push a ship on to the Sea Link. Grapevine is seldom reliable and it does seem far-fetched, but it is an angle that will need to be investigated. If those who are investigating can find the real owners, that is. The bigger issue, however, is that the Indian coast is rapidly becoming a dump yard for the junks and overage ships. And the Wisdom is just another example of this malaise; the solution to which has been debated and written about repeatedly, but never implemented, for a variety of reasons. For all the coastline we have, our authorities have simply been unable to put up a simple Vessel Tracking System (VTS) along the coast, and appear to be nowhere near to doing so either. The bigger issue that the Wisdom brings out with shocking precision is simply that despite all the fuss after the 26/11 attacks by boat from Karachi, our coastline is as open as it was. Never mind small fishing boats, huge ships like the Wisdom can sail through, without being stopped or challenged. Think about it. And if you challenge this too much, then you are in danger of meeting the same fate as other journalists who dig too deep, into matters pertaining to anything which might upset the status quo, of what really happens in offshore India. Or, being called "anti-national", as this writer has been, lately. (Veeresh Malik is a qualified mariner and writer. He is also consulting editor with "Sailor Today".)

Finally, MV Wisdom sails out of Juhu beach

NDTV Correspondent, Updated: July 02, 2011 18:08 IST Comments Ads by Google Lodha Bellissimo Mumbai Super Spacious 3/4 BHK Homes at the Most Luxurious Township in Mumbai Lodhagroup.com/Bellissimo

Mumbai: The cargo ship MV Wisdom finally moved into the sea today, after being stuck at Mumbai's Juhu beach for the last 20 days. An international salvage company, Smit Salvage, tugged away MV Wisdom, after three earlier attempts to salvage the ship during high tide had failed, sparking environmental concerns at Juhu beach. The MV Wisdom - owned by a Singapore company- was on its way from Colombo to the Alang shipyard in Gujarat when it ran into a series of technical problems. It first drifted dangerously close to the Worli Sea Link, then ran aground near Juhu beach. Extensive efforts by the Navy and others last week to move the 9000-ton ship had failed, but everything went smoothly today as the ship moved away from Juhu beach. (Read: Merchant vessel drifts near Sea Link in Mumbai)

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/finally-mv-wisdom-sails-out-of-juhu-beach116316&cp

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HDFC Hiring for Aug 2011 TimesJobs.com/Bank-Openings 7500+ P.O. Job Openings in Aug Upload Resume.Apply to HDFC Now! New Delhi, Jul 2: MV Wisdom, which was left stranded on the Juhu Beach after the efforts to tug it away failed has finally been moved from the Juhu beach on Jul 2(today). The Merchant Vessel was tugged away by Smit Salvage, International salvage company from Juhu beach, Mumbai to Alang in Gujarat. The MV Wisdom, a massive cargo ship was on its way to Alang Shipyard, Gujarat from Colombo to be dismantled. The engine of the ship failed while it was on its way and the cable used to tow-boat broke down subsequently. The ship started moving dangerously near the Bandra Worli sea link and then stranded at Juhu Beach on Saturday, Jun 17. Earlier, equipments and steel cables were dropped through Naval helicopters on the ship so Smit Salvage Company, which has headquarters in Rotterdam could get to work. The cables would be attached so that the ship could be moved to Alang. Three people lost their lives in an attempt to get close to MV Wisdom.