The 100-metre-long M/V Lyubov Orlova is still 2,400 km from the beaches of Galway, but the Irish Coast Guard is poring over satellite imagery to make sure the ship can be wrangled away before it drifts into shipping lanes or breaks apart on the coast.
“Were the vessel to enter Irish waters, then procedures will be put in place to deal with the vessel at that stage,” wrote Caroline Ryan, a spokeswoman with the Irish Department of Transport, in an email to the Post.
In better times, the Yugoslavia-built vessel worked as an “expedition” cruise ship specializing in polar regions. That came to an end in September, 2010 when Canadian authorities seized the ship during a stopover in St. John’s, Newfoundland as part of a lawsuit led by Cruise North Expeditions against the vessel’s Russian owners.
On Jan. 23 — after two years of sitting derelict in St. John’s harbour — the ship was sold to a scrap merchant for $275,000, hooked up to a tugboat and hauled out to sea on course to the Dominican Republic, where it was to be sold for scrap.
Less than 24 hours out of port, however, the tow-line snapped. Husky Energy dispatched the supply ship Atlantic Hawk to capture the vessel and tow it away from offshore oil platforms, but once it was firmly within international waters, the ship was again set loose.
In a statement, Transport Canada assured Canadians at the time that it was “very unlikely” that the ship would veer back into Canadian waters.
The ship remained largely forgotten until a report from the U.S.-based National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency pinpointed the ship on a course to Europe. The Agence-France Press published news of the document this week.
Under different circumstances, a ghost ship might have difficulty making it across the Atlantic in winter. But the Lyubov Orlova is large enough to withstand heavy seas and left port with perfectly balanced ballast tanks.
As of Friday, Ireland was pulling together satellite data and getting in touch with Icelandic marine authorities but “given the size of the North Atlantic search area (approximately 16,000 square miles) locating a vessel without any transponders functioning onboard is very difficult,” said Ms. Ryan.
“If it’s going to hit shore I would expect the Irish government would take the ship, bring it into a port and maybe look for compensation from the owner for any costs associated with that,” said William Cahill, a St. John’s lawyer and Chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s Maritime Law Section.
Or Ireland could do what the U.S. Coast Guard did last spring. When a derelict fishing vessel set adrift by the Japanese tsunami approached the Alaskan coast, a Coast Guard cutter was sent to sink it with a cannonade of high-explosive fire.
A team of investigators with the Canadian Transportation Safety Board are in St. John’s investigating the Lyubov Orlova episode, including a careful inspection of the Charlene Hunt, the U.S.-flagged tug that first lost control of the ship. In notably poor condition, the tug was ordered back to port over concerns for the safety of the crew.
Whatever the Lyubov Orlova does to Ireland, it is unlikely that Canada will be held liable said Mr. Cahill, who, for two years enjoyed a clear view of the Lyubov Orlova from his St. John’s law office.
“You would be hard pressed to say the Canadian government is responsible for a non-Canadian registered ship.”
Ireland is apparently well-positioned to absorb Atlantic debris drifting in from North America. Last October, a nine-year-old in the Irish fishing village of Passage East discovered a message-in-a-bottle that two Quebec girls had tossed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence eight years earlier.
Most famously, in 1913 a man walking his dog near Cork Harbour, Ireland found a message-in-a-bottle that had been cast from the deck of the doomed RMS Titanic as the steamer approached Cape Race, Newfoundland.
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