This Week in Abandoned Cruise Ships


WITH ALL of the news about cruise ships being stranded in the middle of the ocean, I've found the topic to be somewhat interesting, but this story takes the cake. The MV Lyubov Orlovaw is a boat, built in 1976, in Yugoslavia.  It was built to conduct expeditions through the ice-laden waters of the North Atlantic.  It has an interesting history. Here's its Wikipedia page.

In 1999, it was refurbished and outfitted with amenities to become an Arctic expedition cruise ship.  In 2002, she was chartered by another company to continue her exploring cruise ship job.

The funny part starts in 2010, when docked in Newfoundland, the boat was seized, due to the owner's owing $251,000 and kind of not having paid the crew for five months.  Here's an article detailing some of the transaction.

So, an American company was hired to two the old boat down to the Dominican Republic, where it was going to be scrapped.  It must have been essentially worthless, or at least the only valuable part was the metal.

While they were towing the boat down, wouldn't you know it?  The line from the tugboat snapped.  Oh, crap.  And apparently they tried to fix it.  They tried until it got out of Canada's water and into international waters.  Then, uh, it's not our problem anymore.

And that's how it went down.  The rope snapped, it started drifting and every person involved basically said, "that never happened, there's nothing we can do."  So the boat was (and maybe still is) just drifting across the Atlantic Ocean.  Now I say "was" because there's a beacon that starting alerting inside the boat recently that is only triggered by water.  So, some presume that she's sunk, some 700 miles out to sea.

Oh, and apparently it was filled with rats.  Awesome.



Comments

Unknown said…
Sounds a lot like a cruise I once took
April 4, 2013 at 4:17 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Senator Robert La Follette

Image
Senator Robert La Follette A survey in 1987 asked Americans to name the best U.S. senators, based on their accomplishments.  Senator Robert La Follette took first place (tying with Henry Clay).  This is striking, given the vast unpopularity he faced when, in 1917, he was one of six members of the Senate to vote against President Wilson’s call for a declaration of war against Germany.  This of course, being the same Woodrow Wilson who, just the previous year, ran on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out Of War.”  So strong was the reaction to La Follette’s anti-war stance that President Roosevelt, a fellow liberal, called for his expulsion from the Senate and a Texas judge said that he was a traitor who ought to be shot.  Though, to be fair, Texas. In the run-up to the war,  organizations throughout the world were pre-emptively standing against the possibility of war.  Many of these groups were socialist organizations or labor unions, among others, desperate to prevent a wa
Read more

The Me Conspiracy

Image
Alex Jones: The King of the Selfish Idiots I HAVE AN ADMISSION.  I despise the concept of conspiracy theories. Now, I'm not saying I despise rigorous, intellectual, critical thought.  Quite on the contrary, I believe that critical thinking skills are exactly what is missing in the minds of most conspiracy theorists. An article featured on Salon goes into some detail about this very issue. I recently got into a hell-born deathmatch spicy debate with my father ( whose views can be readily consumed at his blog: "From the Outhouse," natch ), who is a fairly-moderate conspiracy theorist himself.  Meaning, he doesn't buy into the faked moon landing mumbo-jumbo or the more heart-on-sleeve rhetoric about the Boston bombings being an inside job, but he does call into question the unseen who are harnessing powers across the globe.  I think he's a 9/11 Truther, too. It's mystifying to me.  Not specifically my dad, of course.  I think he's a very smart gu
Read more

#90: "Goodfellas" (1990)

Image
Martin Scorcese's "Goodfellas" is the next film on the list of movies I'm watching this year to broaden my horizons.  Obviously, this film is iconic.  Shortlisted in gangster films with the likes of The Godfather, it is the kind of movie that people stare at you when they find out you've never seen it. At an expansive 2 1/2 hours, it's a surprisingly quick story.  Taking place over the course of thirty or so years, we follow the lead character (who is certainly not a protagonist), Henry Hill.  Portrayed marvelously by Ray Liotta, he is a witty, short-tempered and overly-confident child in a man's body. The funny thing about this movie is how it paces the first half in this throwback style, then breaks the mold in the third act, making the arguments and the violence unsettling and unpredictable. It's a terrible kids movie.
Read more