MV Fri Sea, recently grounded while docking at Corpach at Fort William, did not make a timely report to the Coastguard and the MCA when, trying to enter the berth stern-first, a strong gust of wind led to her stern hitting the eastern end of the pier there – and then blew her aground.
Her master is very familiar with Corpach, having been there many times.
Confirmed approximate times of the incident and subsequent actions are:
- 07.30 ship goes aground
- 09.00 member of public calls police
- 11.30 police call coastguard
- 11.30 vessel calls local coastguard
- 11.30 local coastguard tells Fri Sea’s master to call Stornoway Coastguard on Channel 16 and report the incident
- 11.45 MCA [via Stornoway Coastguard] officially informed.
This shows the Master taking 4 hours to report damage and a grounding and only then moving to make the official notification to the MCA.
Had the local coastguard not instructed him to call Stornoway, when would the MCA have been informed?
The ship’s owners account for this delay in saying: ‘We had just to make sure that everything was OK before we called the coastguard’.
Four hours with a crew of 7 claimed to be unharmed is a lot of ‘just checking to make sure everything was OK’.
The Master is not likely to have doing much checking. Common sense would suggest that he could have called the coastguard to report while his crew were ding any necesssary checking,
It also has to be remarked that after the member of the public informed the police of the grounded vessel, it took the police two and a half hours to inform the coastguard.
She had seven men aboard and although there apparently there were no injuries, this could not been assumed by anyone concerned.
The smack of the stern against the pier – which has made a clear and sharp indentation in the hull, as Martin Briscoe’s photograph showed – will have caused a sudden unexpected jolt which could well have caused falls, with potential injury dependent on where a falling crewmember happened to be at the time.
The stern damage is currently being patched up and the ship is due to leave today, 11th March, returning to her original itinerary.
The curious thing about this time lapse is the procedural similarity in the aftermath fFri Sea’s sister ship, Fri Ocean, driving straight aground at Calve Island, east of Tobermory in the Sound of Mull on 14th June 2013.
In this incident, the vessel grounded at 03.22 and the Master also did not report this to the Coastguard.
Again, the report came from a member of the public who saw the ship aground and at 07.10, coincidentally also four hours later, reported it directly to Stornoway coastguard who, in turn, tasked Tobermory lifeboat to the scene.
The MAIB report on the incident is clear that the Fri Ocean’s Master did not report the grounding to the Coastguard.
At that tie there was talk about company policy on such maritime incidents often interfering with the proper execution of the due reporting requirements.
In some cases, Ships’ Masters had been known to have been instructed by head office to report to them, after which other actions would be decided.
The MAIB’s recommendations undelined the imperative of having a look out and the equal imperative of fatigue management. The report said that the ship’s master ‘should have felt empowered to stop the ship to allow his crew to receive the rest they needed.’
The issue here is that a Master without, as the report diplomatically said ‘the benefit of unequivocal support from the company’ will ‘always find this a difficult decision to make’.
There is no suggestion that fatigue was a factor in the Corpach grounding but what remains a matter of curiosity is that two ships from the same company each failed to report a grounding to the MCA in anything like timely fashion.
IHS Maritime 360 reports that the shipowners, Kopervik’s spokesperson told them: ‘There is some damage on the stern part of the vessel, some small indents when it touched the berth. It has been inspected.’
You have to grin at the constraint of ‘touched the berth’. The punch in the hull’s stern looks more like a Glasgow kiss than a touch.
