New Attempt to Refloat Ever Forward

gCaptain.com ^ | 3/30/2022 | New Attempt to Refloat Ever Forward

[Kartographer]

A second attempt to refloat the Ever Forward will take place this evening using seven tugboats, a U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson has confirmed to gCaptain.

The refloating effort is expected to take place during the next high tide at around 6 p.m eastern time.

[Kartographer]

Evergreens run od bad luck continues

[Apparatchik]

What an ironic name. They should rechristen it “Ever Mired”

[rlmorel]

Whenever I see things like this, I am reminded of the famous grounding of the USS Missouri on January 17, 1950.

The grounding of the Missouri is juicy with...hubris, ineptitude, bad luck, and bad timing.

On the morning of January 17, 1950, the USS Missouri left Norfolk for only the second time under her new captain, CAPT William Brown, and on her way out, was to conduct an exercise where she would steam past some experimental acoustic devices that would record her screws which they were trying to use to identify ships.

Captain Brown ordered the speed increased to 15 knots, which for this area of water was considered quite fast for a ship of that size, and when one of the officers made his opinion known, the Captain ignored him and overrode him.

Down in the chart room, the officers in charge of navigation were puzzled both by the speed and the trajectory of the ship which was (to them) taking them into shoal water. One of the navigation officers looked out the port hole and saw a navigation buoy and knew they were going on the wrong side of the buoy, basically cutting the corner ACROSS the shoals.

Multiple people with more experience in the area realized what was going on and tried to tell Captain Brown, who repeatedly ignored them or that they had no idea where they were.

When the ship hit the mud in the shoals, the angle of the bottom was so shallow, and the mud so slick that nobody even felt the ship going aground. Something amiss was noted when men on the stern saw muddy water being churned up by the screws, and almost simultaneously, the salt water intakes for cooling water for the engines clogged and temperatures began to rise. It all happened so softly and gradually that the ship had gone aground 2500 feet before finally stopping that most of the crew did not even realize they had run aground!

It was that slick mud that served as a "lubricant", and raised the entire ship several feet out of the water, after which it began to settle back, and the sticky mud encased the entire hull, grasping it tightly.

Worse (if possible) she had run aground at an unusually high tide, which as anyone knows, is very bad. To make things even worse, she was fully loaded with both fuel and ammunition which brought her displacement up to 57,000 tons.

She wasn't aground, she was...ashore, by more than two ship lengths worth! Just as bad from a publicity perspective, she was aground in full view of a major heavily travelled roadway. There she would stay for two weeks.

They brought Admiral Homer Wallin in who had been instrumental in the salvage efforts at Pearl Harbor, and his straightforward plan involved the obvious steps:

• Remove as much weight as possible from the battleship

• Lift the ship

• Remove as much sand as possible from around the battleship

• Use the combined power of the area's tugboats to pull the battleship

• Dredge the channel to provide deep water for Missouri to reenter the shipping lane

But after offloading all her fuel, ammunition, food, water, anchors, and even her anchor chains, they were unsuccessful.

They added even more pontoons, and had divers all along both sides of the hull with pressure water hoses trying to dislodge mud adhering to the hull like cement, as tugboats above on port and starboard sides alternately applied pressure to rock the hull from side to side, as tugs fore and aft pushed and pulled at the same time.

I cannot imagine how dangerous that must have been for those divers.

Politically, it became intolerable for the Navy.

An Army helicopter darted in (under full view of the Press and civilians on the side of the highway, watching) and lowered a line with a sign saying something like "Need a hook?" and even the Soviet Union piled on from afar.

Heads rolled. As they should have.

[rlmorel]

"...the ship was travelling at about 13 knots when it exited the dredged channel and came to a screeching halt in around 25 feet of water. It’s draft was reported to be 13 meters (42.6 feet)..."

Wow! Very much like the Missouri, and she is a LOT bigger than the Missouri! But...she has a lot more that can be removed from her than the Missouri could. Once they offloaded fuel and ordinance from the Mighty Mo, the pickings became far slimmer...

[Mount Athos]

[bigbob]

Never Forward

[Apparatchik]

Yes!!!

[Ken H]

Curses!! Was just getting ready to post that!

[BradyLS]

In one of the Hornblower novels, a ship-of-the-line he was aboard became similarly stuck and the tide was running out. He had every gun turned as far forward as possible and put all hands possible on the capstan. He then fired both broadsides simultaneously while the hands at the capstan heaved for their lives. A second time freed the ship.

[BradyLS]

Thanks for the story about the Missouri! It was something I had never heard of!

[TChad]

Great story, thanks.

[Chode]

LOL, i wa gonna ping you, i shoulda known... 8^)

[Jimmy Valentine]

They will have to unload enough cargo to get it out of the mud

[maddog55]

Unloading would have solved it but the sensible thing to do is always the last thing you do.

[jmcenanly]

Between this incident and the incident with the Ever Given in the Suez canal, I am beginning to think that they’ve hired Captain Joseph Hazelwood as the head of their academy.

[Chickensoup]

So did the ship get freed?

[rlmorel]

I have no doubt-can you imagine, being in some locale in a ship-of-the-line, stuck hard with the tide going out, especially if you were in either a hostile area, or an area where you might be seen by higher command!

I don’t doubt for a second that every single gambit was employed-you could imagine having the entire crew running from side to side trying to rock the vessel, guns firing, heaving at the capstan in unison!

[rlmorel]

I knew of it, but...not the details. Then, one day in a local library as I browsed through the military section, I stumbled across a book that described that incident in great detail with lots of pictures, and it was completely fascinating...especially the part about the Army helicopter derisively lowering a sign for a photo-op while the Navy brass fumed!

[Sirius Lee]

The Missouri took part in Desert Storm, so yes.

[rlmorel]

It is hard to read that story, and not think of Humphrey Bogart in “The Caine Mutiny”, one of my all-time favorite movies!