The Chief Officer from the Wilson Garston http://timstimes.net/2007/12/30/drunken-sailor/ that ran aground on Christmas Day received a prison sentence of 3 months for “grovsjöfylleri” as they say in Swedish. For being drunk in charge of a ship in other words. The 33 year old Russian officer was alone on the bridge at the time and was asleep due to the influence alcohol and medication. He had 0.89 per mg of alcohol in his blood, the law in Sweden states that 1,0 mg is “grovsjöfylleri” but in this case because he was asleep and the ship grounded he got that sentence.
Swedish links Sydsvenskan with photographs and here also Sydsvenskan which shows how the ship became a tourist attraction.
On Christmas day the Wilson Garston ran aground outside Helsingborg in Sweden. The stretch of water between Helsingborg and Helsingör on the Danish side is thick with ferries back and forth between Sweden and Denmark, a place where the traffic heading North and South has to be on full concentration for any eventual manouvres that may be required to give way for a ferry and vice versa.
The mate on the bridge of the Wilson Garston was asleep due to the effects of alcohol, so the ship was running out of control in one of the busiest waterways in the region. Several ships tried in vain to make contact with the ship but to no avail, in the end he ran aground. Fortunately there was not much damage to the ship or the environment, the sleeping watchkeeper got a rude awakening and was arrested suspected for being drunk in charge of a ship, the court case to be held in a week, while he dries off in remand.
The consequences could have been disastrous but this case will go largely unnoticed because of the lack of damage, some Christmas present for the shipping company and the drunken sailor who is cooling his jets in a Swedish prison for the holidays.
It also casts a smear on the trade and gives the general public the image of jolly jack tar the drunkard, sad really because it is not the case.
Report in English from The Local
Snapshot of our route taken from the ECDIS zoomed up a few ranges
2000 nautical miles is the distance between our starting point and our finishing point, rounded down to the nearest 50 nautical miles. Thats a fair amount of water to put through the propellor, and it takes a few days and all. About 5½ days give or take a few hours. For those of you who don’t know what a nautical mile is, 2000 nautical miles is about 2300 land miles or 3700 kilometres for the SI measurement system believers. So you would get here a bit quicker by road but you would need 600 road tankers to lift the same amount of oil, not very practical. It would be one hell of a sight though!
We are heading through the English Channel and the weather is fine sunny, good visibility, 10 degrees C, SW’ly wind force 5 and the traffic is behaving itself which is always a bonus. The barometer is up to 1030 mbar so it looks like we might keep the good weather for a spell. March is a dodgy month for weather, you can still get a nasty storm that will kick the shit out of you, or you can get days like this, where you could sunbathe nearly,ok with all your clothes on and a blanket. But Spring is most definitely in the air, and when we are in port you can almost hear the birds behind the din of pumps and machinery.
So it has been an eventful weather week, ice and snow in St. Petersburg, fog in the gulf of Finland, rain in the North Sea (where else) and Sunshine and blue skies in the Channel, looks like the tendency is positive.
I wil give up on the weather vein now (excuse the pun) I will return with a diatribe on the weather at a later date.
Bye for now, and don’t be shy, leave a comment!
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