‘Vessel seemed to be searching for a safe spot’

Cape Town. 120514. Peter Womsley, Wendy Prevost and Rene De Wet tease the seamen aboard the r beached fishing long liner Eihatsu Maru at Clilfton First Beach. Photo by Michael Walker

Cape Town. 120514. Peter Womsley, Wendy Prevost and Rene De Wet tease the seamen aboard the r beached fishing long liner Eihatsu Maru at Clilfton First Beach. Photo by Michael Walker

Published May 15, 2012

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An eyewitness who watched the Eihatsu Maru longliner run aground at Clifton says the vessel nosed about in First Beach and then in Fourth Beach for almost an hour before returning to First Beach where it ran aground.

In that time, Mea Brüning and her husband tried to raise the alarm with port control, but were told to phone the police.

Brüning, who lives on the fourth floor of a block of flats on Clifton’s First Beach, said she and her husband were woken at 4.30am on Saturday by a “powerful spotlight shining into the bedroom”.

They went on to their balcony and saw the fishing vessel about 40m away in thick fog, “slowly approaching the coast, engine running, spotlight being cast from side to side”. Her husband phoned port control.

“He said he was phoning from Clifton and there was a ship approaching the shore. He said: ‘It’s going to run aground, it’s going to run aground, send a tug.’ The woman who answered the phone said to my husband: ‘Where’s Clifton?’ He told her it was near Camps Bay and she knew where that was. She said there was nothing on her radar screen and told him to phone the police,” Brüning said.

He did so, and also phoned the Table Bay National Sea Rescue Institute who came to the scene. “I put all the lights on so that the ship could see it was a building, not the harbour. At 5am my husband and I were still on our balcony, and we saw it make a three-point turn and we were relieved to see it going out to sea again. But then we were astonished to see it heading towards Fourth Beach. When it got there it turned around and made its way back to First Beach, still casting the spotlight around and carefully approaching the shore. To us non-sailors, it seemed as though the vessel was deliberately being run aground in a safe spot.”

She said the later salvage attempts had left them feeling “flummoxed”. When the tow rope had snapped on Saturday evening, when salvors tried to refloat the vessel on the high tide, there was no back-up rope so the two tugs had left. Less than an hour later, the vessel was floating free. “At this point she could easily have been towed, had a back-up rope been available. The weather was calm.”

Port manager Sanjay Govan said on Monday Brüning had contacted him. “We’ve got the conversation on record so we will investigate and make sure it doesn’t happen again, and make sure our people know how to deal with it,” Govan said.

The SA Maritime Safety Authority (Samsa) has elevated the salvage operation of the fishing vessel to a national level, and is now leading the operation.

Yesterday a SAAF helicopter dropped salvage experts on the vessel.

Samsa has asked Smit Amandla Marine to provide any extra support to help salvors Atlatech refloat the vessel.

Dave Colly, regional manager for Samsa, said the chief problem was finding a connection point on the vessel strong enough to withstand the 80 ton pull force of the steel cable.

The plan is to take the cable around the accommodation unit and try to pull it off this morning between 10am and 1.20pm. - Cape Times

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