SHIPPING NEWS - LATEST

Sunday 27th May 2007, 21:26 UTC+2

Reports of a major marine incident were received from a vessel in the North Sea earlier today when 3,000,000 tons of rock spiralled out of control to the seabed from the luxury cruise ship “Nordnes”.
The Van Oord operated “Nordnes” was only a few hours into a scheduled spring-time cruise of the North Sea when an alert passenger spotted small stones falling through a hole in the ship’s hull. No one onboard was injured but several members of the crew were treated with After-Shock and are expect to be re-united with their families ashore soon.
Onboard the vessel, a shaken Van Oord spokesperson, Arjan “den Gouden Leeuw” Dams, said his company is assisting a team of experts from the Marine Accident Investigation Bureau to find out exactly what went wrong. When asked to explain how something like this could happen, Arjan admitted he was aware of the hole in the hull and allowed it to be used for the disposal of any loose stones found lying around the ship but stated categorically that he never knew his friends were doing it at the rate of 1800 tons per hour. Investigators are now speaking to Peter “Fill My Hopper” Raas and Ruben “Feeder On” Zaalberg to find out what part they had to play in the incident. Past and present FPROV pilots Jay, Jori, Jojo, Jerry, Jason and Aard will also be questioned.
Precisely where this serious incident happened is still unclear but fortunately, two positioning specialists from a second Dutch company, Fugro, are onboard. Although both were asleep when the incident happened, Tom “Biker” Binny and Bartosc “Scrabble King” Kowalczyk are now working round the clock in an attempt to piece together the track of the vessel in the two years leading up to the incident and are confident they can pin-point the exact location of the 3,000,000 tons of stone. Preliminary calculations carried out on the back of a cigarette packet suggest the vessel may have been navigating in Norwegian waters although the possibility that she was in the UK sector cannot be ruled out at this stage as the hotly-disputed border between the two countries is, according to the specialists, “somewhere round here”.
Frank van “The Man” Basten Batenburg is also heavily involved with the investigation, having volunteered his well known data-manipulation skills to re-process Van Oord’s entire North Sea multi-beam data-set at 5 centimetre grid cell size in the hope of locating the pile of stones.
One passenger, who bought his cruise with 17 BP Nectar Points, e-mailed to say he had never seen any stones onboard but often heard what he described as “strange rumbling noises coming from the front end”
Captain of the vessel, Tony “Expresso” Samual, will not comment on the incident until he has spoken with his banker.
Back in Van Oord headquarters, all marine procedures are being reviewed and it is understood controls were put in place immediately to guarantee the risk of similar incidents happening in the future. Meanwhile, their PR department is putting maximum effort into designs for a range of chic, gray inflatable stones (1” to 5”) to commemorate the incident after their original orange designs were rejected for being unrealistic.
GreenPeace activists, onboard the “Rainbow Worrier” somewhere in the South Pacific, denounced the incident as “another outrageous act of eco-vandalism from which endangered Norwegian rock formations will never fully recover”.

Written by Tom Binny