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
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