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Aina.
Port Lligat. Casa Museo Dalí.

📍 Cadaques. Girona.

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Passing The Los Angeles Harbor Light

(Details in the AltText) - (Detailed In Depth)

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"The solar panels delivered by a single container ship will generate as much power over their lifetimes as more than 50 ships carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) or 100 carrying coal, according to recent IEA analysis."

#solar #coal #ships

A Book Of Boats And Ships by Sergei Ivanov

A little book about ships and boats for children. Fabulously illustrated.

Illustrated by A. Beslik

Translated by Galina Glagoleva

You can get the book here and here

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Last voyage of the battlecruiser “Moltke”: the thread about how a German warship almost destroyed the Forth Bridge

On a recent (2022) trip to Orkney we visited the excellent and newly refurbished Scapa Flow museum and I bought a fascinating book on the subject of the internment, scuttling and salvage of the German Hocheseeflotte – the Imperial German Navy’s “High Seas Fleet” , after WW1. (The author, Dan Van Der Vat, is very readable, being a journalist by trade.) So naturally I’ve managed to find an exciting and little known of local history angle to this.

The SMS Moltke (Seiner Majestät Schiff, His Majesty’s Ship) was a 25,000 ton battlecruiser of the Imperial German Navy. She was 612 feet long, 96.5 feet wide, could make 25.5 knots on the 51,000 horsepower produced by her engines and was armed with ten 11 inch guns in five turrets. Battlecruisers were the pride of contemporary fleets, as well armed as the main battleships but able to reach the sort of speeds usually reserved for smaller ships. Big, well armed and fast, Moltke was every bit the equal for her Royal Navy equivalents.

At the end of the war the Hocheseeflotte was still largely materially intact, but organisation and discipline was another matter. It was forced under the terms of Armistice by the Allies into a humiliating internment under the watchful eye of the Royal Navy. It had been hoped by the Germans that the fleet would be dispersed to neutral ports but instead it ended up imprisoned in the bleak confines of Scapa Flow, the principal wartime anchorage of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet. Its remaining ships arrived at Scapa after a rendezvous with the Grand Fleet in the Firth of Forth, from where it was escorted into a miserable internment.

The German ships were disarmed and made incapable of war or even escape, but legally they remained the property of the German state. They were supplied by German provision ships sent by the German government from German ports. Although their crews were not officially prisoners, they were not allowed to leave the confines of their ships and no British personnel were allowed aboard apart from small official delegations pertaining to the administrative niceties of exile. As the signing of the Treaty of Versailles approached, the German Admiral in charge at Scapa – Ludwig Von Reuter – found himself in an impossible position.

Von Reuter was caught between the national honour of the Prussian officer class; his mutinous and non-compliant crews; British belligerence and overwhelming Allied political pressure. His fear, not without reasonable, was that the British would try and seize the German fleet on the signing of the treaty. He gathered around him a select circle of loyal officers and right under the nose of the watchful Royal Navy and his own suspicious and resentful sailors, managed to organise a mass scuttling of almost his entire fleet.

On 21st June 1919 the conspirators managed to scuttle fifteen of the sixteen battleships and battlecruisers, five of the eight fleet cruisers and thirty-two of the fifty destroyers at Scapa. The cream of the German Navy was turned into the half a million tons of scrap metal on the seabed in a matter of hours. Publicly the British were furious (the Royal Navy doubly so as it had been totally humiliated), but Von Reuter had actually done everyone involved a favour and simplified negotiations over the fate of the fleet – If the German Navy lay at the bottom of Scapa Flow then nobody could have it: not the British, the Germans, the French, the Americans or even the Italians.

Scapa Flow was now littered with over fifty German wrecks in various states of submersion, posing quite the navigation hazard – as demonstrated ably by the government whaler Ramna which got stuck fast on top of the capsized hull of the Moltke. The world soon moved on from the scuttling as shattered countries sought to begin rebuilding themselves post war.

Enterprising locals (often unofficially) stripped what they could access above waterline for scrap until an enterprising Shetland shipowner and councillor – J. W. Roberston – proved that you could salvage wrecks from underwater and brought a number of torpedo boats ashore for their scrap value. Enter now stage left the enterprising, irrepressible and energetic figure of Ernest Frank Guelph Cox. Cox was a self made engineer and metal dealer from the Midlands who had the vision to believe he could access and salvage the five hundred thousand tons of best German steel located at the bottom of Scapa Flow. Now that the price of scrap metal had started to rise after the immediate postwar slump, his backers believed that it would now be financially worthwhile.

Cox’s business partner in his firm – Cox & Danks – was his cousin, the capital behind the operation. Together they bought the rights to salvage the Hocheseeflotte from the Admiralty and set to work at Scapa in the mid 1920s. Cox had the foresight to hire Tom McKenzie, a Glaswegian naval salvage diver who would pretty much write the book on naval salvage diving.

Although all involved were practical, skilled and experienced men, they were starting from almost nothing and had to largely invent, improvise and improve all the required techniques for marine salvage on this scale. Overcoming setback after setback, they were driven along by Cox’s indefatigable determination and Danks’ deep pockets. They made rapid progress and the first torpedo boat – V70 – was raised after less than 2 months work in 1924. Moving on to the next boat and then the next one after that, they honed their techniques and were soon raising ships at a rapid rate. Within two years, all twenty six torpedo boats that Cox had the rights to take had been raised.

Cox now turned his attention to the big ships on the bottom, the battleships and battlecruisers. In May 1926 he started on the SMS Hindenburg, but even though she reached the surface the operation proved a disaster and she had to be quickly resunk. The precarious situation of the salvagers at Scapa was saved by the discovery of huge stocks of coal in the bunkers of SMS Seydlitz; it was found these could be accessed and “mined” from the surface and this free source of fuel tided the operations over. Cox now set his sights on the Moltke. The basic technique was relatively simple. Divers were sent down to plug the holes in the hull and it was pumped full of compressed air, displacing the water aboard. As it leaked and bubbled out through the holes that had been missed, these two were plugged. Eventually air could be pumped in quicker than it escaped and slowly the hull would start to float.

I say relatively, in practice it was tremendously difficult and verging on the impossible. They were working at – or beyond – the limits of contemporary diving skills and technology. Conditions were harsh and the environment of Scapa Flow was unforgiving as any British sailor ever sent there would attest, but Cox’ determination and McKenzie’s skill drove them forwards. The Germans had efficiently and effectively wrecked the watertight integrity of the ships’ inner bulkheads so before they could be raised in a controlled manner, divers had to go in and restore it by welding and plugging any gaps they could find. To make this possible, airlocks – like huge submarine chimneys – were built down into each compartment. From these, divers could access the innards and get to work under intense air pressure, working upside down on ships encased in marine slime, often in complete darkness.

Cox was a bit of a showman, always on site and always hands on. His men respected him and the press loved him. He made sure the latter were around whenever anything interesting was happening. The Scotsman filed almost weekly progress reports on the salvage of the Moltke.

• October 21, 1926. Compressed air pumping operations commence on the hull of the Moltke.
• December 10, 1926. Moltke is rising unevenly and the divers are forced to sink her in case she is caught by the winter gales.
• Feb. 15, 1927. Work restarts after winter storms, the first airlock is fitted and almost 100 men are at work on the Moltke.
• Feb. 24, 1927. The difficulties are described of working in a 15PSI atmosphere where cutting torches burn up the oxygen as fast as it can be pumped in
• May 30, 1927. Work resumes again after 2 months of gales. A disaster is narrowly avoided when the wrong valve is closed and compressed air rushes through the ship from stern to bow, blowing the 16 divers at work inside through the ship with it.
• June 13, 1927. Cox has the Pathé newsreel men on site to witness the triumph of the Moltke breaching the surface in a controlled manner and refloating after 8 years on the seabed.

But don’t just look at those grainy thumbnails, watch the whole clip on the Pathe website! Over the next four months the refloated Moltke was painstakingly winched towards Cox & Danks’ salvage base at Lyness on the island of Hoy, narrowly avoiding grounding on the island of Cava when one of her big 11 inch guns fouled the seabed and had to be cut free. They begin cutting her up in situ but it soon becomes obvious that the isolated shores of Scapa Flow were the wrong place to do this and made little economic sense. Cox therefore convinced the Admiralty to lease him the No. 3 Dry Dock at Rosyth Royal Dockyard, the largest and most modern in Scotland.

He then sold on the scrapping rights to the Alloa Shipbreaking Company, who would undertake the actual dismantling work at Rosyth, thus leaving him free to concentrate on the dark arts of salvage. But the problem still remained as to how to get the beached and upside-down hulk of Moltke 250 miles south to Rosyth. The only solution was to refloat it and tow it there – a hard enough task if it didn’t include having to transit the Pentland Firth with its infamous tidal currents, some of the fastest in the world. Undaunted, Cox set to work. The ship was lightened of thousands of tons of steel such as propellers and shafts, armour plate etc., and her hull was patched up with concrete where they had started to demolish it.

Refloated for the journey, two shelters were built on her “deck”, actually the upturned bottom; one with accommodation for the eight crew who would make the journey (including Cox himself), the other with enough pumps to keep her full of compressed air. Lifeboats were thoughtfully included too. By May 18th, Moltke was ready to go. Controversially at the time, both in Britain and in Germany, the three tugs that were chartered to take her on her final voyage were German, including the Seefalke – the most powerful in the world – the Posen and the Simson.

For good measure, on board was also one William Mowat, the coxswain of the Longhope Lifeboat, probably the only man in the world qualified to pilot the wallowing hulk out of Scapa and safely past Duncansby Head.

Despite Mowat’s presence, disaster was soon upon them when the weather got up. The three tugs could not make headway against the wind and current and Moltke started going backwards though the Pentland Firth, rolling by up to 13.5 degrees. She lost 6 feet of her precious freeboard as the compressed air bubbles within that kept her afloat leaked out due to the constant rocking and pitching motions. The pumps could not keep up and she was slowly sinking. Salvation came with the tides themselves, which inevitably turned and speedily ejected the battlecruiser and her three attendants out of the Firth.

After this literally rocky start, things calmed down and the pumps were able to refill the air bubbles and lift the hull back out of the sea again. With the tugs now making headway the close call was soon forgotten about and Cox the showman had the crew play a makeshift game of cricket on the deck for the press. I think he is the man umpiring at the back, in the pullover with his hands behind his back.

The rest of the journey to the Firth of Forth proceeded calmly and according to plan and by May 21st she was off Granton. The last manoeuvre required of the tugs was to get her safely under the Forth Bridge and into the Rosyth basin. And this is where things start to go wrong. Again.

This time it was down to petty officialdom. The Forth Pilot arrived from Granton and tried to take command. He was joined shortly afterwards by the Admiralty pilot from Rosyth. A standoff now ensued as the civil and military opposite numbers argued over who had the rights to pilot the Moltke up the Firth. Neither was willing to back down and the set to kept on going, as did the changing tide and currents of the Firth. Gradually, so to did Moltke herself, gently easing her way inevitably upstream. Before the situation could be resolved, they found themselves coming upon Inchgarvie island; the very rock on which the piers of the bridge was built. And the newsmen from Pathé were there to film it all!

One of tugs found itself grounded on Inchgarvie…

The Seefalke, attached at the back and in charge of providing steerage then drifted around the wrong side of the island and had to cut the tow. Moltke was now at the mercy of the currents, with two tugs lashed to her, one being dragged along the bottom, and with no ability to manoeuvre their charge.

Now totally out of control, Moltke spun through 90 degrees and drifted sideways down the Firth towards the bridge, dragging the helpless tugs along with her. All twenty three thousand or so tons of her was now heading broadside towards the central piers of the bridge, those which rose directly out of the water itself. All the while, trains rattled to and fro overhead with little idea what was unfolding below them.

If you watch the remarkable clip, you can see Moltke drifting beam-on towards the bridge as a train goes by overhead. Somebody must have been saying their prayers onboard though, as somehow the tugs lashed to Moltke‘s hull managed to position the 612 feet wide floating wrecking ball perfectly between the piers and Inchgarvie, narrowly avoiding disaster.

The Seefalke was now able to get a line across and bring the hulk under control, steering her gingerly towards the safety of Rosyth. The watching press were blissfully unaware how close disaster had been, the Scotsman reported “a wonderful piece of navigation and most successfully performed“. However, if you look closely at the footage, Moltke approaches the bridge stern first (with her 4 propeller supports leading the way) but passes through it bow-first (with the big notch cut out from initial breaking up leading). The big battlecruiser had done a 180 degree pirouette while passing under the bridge!

Moltke was edged finally towards the channel into No. 3 Dry Dock but Cox couldn’t yet breathe a sigh of relief; first he has to get the ship into the dock, as his contract stipulates he won’t get paid by the Alloa Shipbreaking Co. until she is in and the dock is drained.

But this last step will be no small feat – there is just a one day window on the highest spring tide to get the upside down hulk into dock. Ships usually go in the right way up of course, but the inverted Moltke is drawing 41 feet of water at her deepest, 25% more than she would otherwise, and the dock gate had a lip that reduces the depth of the water to only 38 feet! But this was Cox and he was undaunted – by an incredibly skilful act of pumping compressed air in at one end and letting it out at another, and then reversing the process, he was able to “hop” the deepest part of the ship over the dock lip and get her safely in with the gates shut.

But on the brink of final triumph, once again officialdom almost screwed everything up for Cox. With Moltke bobbing in the waters of the still flooded dock, the supervisor stepped in and disagreed about how to support the upside down ship on the dock floor. He had a point – ships didn’t normally go into dock with their pointy-bits facing down the way. There were all sorts of projections beneath the hull that might damage the critical national infrastructure that he was in charge of. Of course the Admiralty should have worked this all out with Cox before they signed over the use of the dock to him. A frantic phonecall to Whitehall couldn’t resolve things so Cox jumped straight on the first train south to thrash it out in person. Ironically to do so he first had to pass over the bridge he very nearly demolished only a few hours previously. In London an agreement was reached and he was back the next day, 28th May, to get his men to work shoring up the hull with baulks of timber.

Then dock was then slowly drained and the ship finally came to rest on the bottom. It was June 5th as the last of the water was pumped; Cox had finally won. He had raised a 23,000 ton ship from the seabed that had spent 8 years submerged – twice! -, beached it, refloated it, sailed it 250 miles through the treacherous Pentland Firth and squeezed it upside down into a dry dock into which it shouldn’t have fitted and all without demolishing one of the most important structures in the western world!

The Alloa men could now get to work and on September 13th 1928 set about cutting up the pride of the Hocheseeflotte into thousands of tons of valuable scrap metal.

Cox would go on to salvage every ship he could from the bottom of Scapa Flow giving up eight years later and £10,000 worse off than when he began. For all his drive and determination, his financial skills were somewhat lacking and his pioneering methods proved inefficient and just never paid back. Other Scottish businessmen, including those of Alloa Shipbreakers and salvage diver Tom Mckenzie, then formed Metal Industries Ltd to carry on were Cox left off. With more efficient, refined techniques and more sensible business practices, their venture would pay off in a big way.

The last Scapa ship raised by Metal Industries was SMS Derfflinger. Another war intervened in this venture and she spent WW2 beached and upside down, alongside the disarmed old battleship HMS Iron Duke, HQ ship at Scapa, which during WW1 had faced off against the Hocheseeflotte at the Battle of Jutland. The salvage men aboard Derfflinger would save the Iron Duke after she was nearly sunk in an air raid early in the war. Derfflinger was floated into a submersible dry dock and towed to Faslane after the war for scrapping.

One of Metal Industries’ many improvements on the salvage process was to rapidly sink the ship as soon as they had raised it, to crush and concertina the protruding superstructure up inside the hull, removing most of the underwater obstructions that plagued Cox. It is praiseworthy that the basic salvage techniques pioneered by Cox and McKenzie, and refined by Metal Industries, are still those that are in use today.

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The “High and Dry Club”: the thread about 30 years of the Forth car ferries running aground again, and again (and again)

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Talking about ferries running aground, you might think that kind of thing is unfortunate, so spare a thought for the brand new Firth of Forth car ferry Robert the Bruce which ran aground at South Queensferry on Saturday 24th March, after barely 3 weeks in service. The vessel was on its penultimate cross-Firth trip of the day and became stuck fast at South Queensferry at the Hawes pier. It was not until late on the Sunday that she was successfully refloated. “New Ferry Boat Stranded at South Queensferry” said the headline in the Scotsman.

Barely a week later, on April 5th, Robert the Bruce suffered the ignominy of grounding once more at South Queensferry, ending up sitting high and dry, perpendicular to the pier. “New Ferry Boat Grounded Again” said the headline in the Scotsman.

The hapless vessel was aground again 3 weeks later. It took 5 hours to get the passengers off. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to run aground once in a month may be regarded as a misfortune; to run aground twice in a month looks like carelessness. Three months later? You’ve guessed it. “Robert the Bruce” was aground again. This was getting to be rather common and the local paper hardly gave it a second mention, devoting only a single sentence to the mishap.

The ferry boat Robert the Bruce ran aground on Sunday, but was refloated at high tide without any apparent damage

In all, in her first 4 months of service, Robert the Bruce would run aground four times. Her identical sister ship Queen Margaret managed to avoid this awkward habit entirely. For now…

The Forth car ferries were the brainchild of, were built by and were operated by the William Denny & Brothers shipyard in Dumbarton. Sir Maurice Denny had crossed the Forth in the old vessel Dundee one day and had thought to himself that a purpose-built car ferry (or pair of ferries) could provide a much more efficient service. As a captain of industry he had only to pick up the phone to the London and North Eastern Railway to set the wheels in motion. The LNER paid for the ferries and leased them back to Denny, who operated them. This arrangement meant that even if the ferries poached traffic away from the railway, the railway would still profit from them.

The design was innovative and Denny had high hopes it would catch on. The vessels had a large, open car deck, with small passenger cabins fore and aft. There were ramps on each side at each end for loading and unloading vehicles. The bridge sat high above the deck on a gantry in the middle of the ship to give a commanding view in all directions. Propulsion was by paddle wheels, an antiquated system on paper, but one which had certain advantages when manoeuvring at slow speed and which was brought up to date with each paddle being independently driven by an electric motor. This, coupled with rudders fore and aft, meant for superb manoeuvrability and the ability to change power and the direction of drive very rapidly. Diesel engines under the car deck drove the generators for the motors, and exhausted through a pair of slender funnels. This arrangement allowed the ferries complete roll-on, roll-off operation for rapid loading and unloading and the ability to move forwards or backwards at the same speed and no loss of handling.

Perhaps in sympathy with and to share in Robert‘s blushes, the older companion Dundee decided to get in on the action and ran aground at South Queensferry in 1939. Again, her passengers and cars were stuck aboard for hours, the Evening News printing an atmospheric night time photo of her with the ghostly outline of one of the piers of the Forth Bridge behind her.

The Forth ferries survived WW2 without further incidence but on 18th August 1947, perhaps as a late celebration of victory, one of them ran aground again in the mud off South Queensferry. This time however it was the Queen Margaret at fault, and Robert the Bruce redeemed herself by towing her off the mud.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/23666168@N04/37190198854

In 1949, the ancient Dundee was replaced by a new vessel, the Mary Queen of Scots, identical to Robert and Margaret except that post-war economies meant that the electric drive system for the paddles was replaced with a hydraulic one. To welcome the new member to the team, Robert the Bruce decided to show off as only she knew how, and on April 3rd 1950 she ran aground. Again. At South Queenferry. Again. This incident was on account of the mooring rope that should have been thrown to the pier landing short combined with a sudden gust of wind that blew her onto the mud before the engines, idle at the time, could respond.

Queen Margaret tried to repay the towing compliment from 1947 back and rescue her stricken sister however the tow rope broke and then the tide receded, making further rescue attempts on that tide impossible. Two hours service was wasted and Robert had to wait to be rescued on the next high tide.

Friday May 23rd 1952. Guess what happened. Go on. I’ll give you one guess… Wrong! It was actually Mary Queen of Scots which grounded this time. Strictly speaking she didn’t run aground, as she found herself stuck when the tide receded while she was both loading vehicles and taking on oil, the additional weight incurred settling her on the mud beneath her keel. Attempts by Robert the Bruce to get her off the mud at South Queensferry proved fruitless and again they had to wait for a high tide to free her

Never one to be outdone by her sisters, two months later Robert the Bruce managed to run aground 50 yards short of the pier at South Queensferry. Queen Margaret came to the rescue and tower her off the mud before the tide left her high and dry after a 20 minute struggle. It was almost a year before one of the ferries ran aground again. This time it was Mary Queen of Scots: caught by the combination of a westerly wind and an autumn equinox tide “which tends to empty the river” on August 27th 1953. She was left high and dry in the middle of the Firth for an hour and a half until a change in the tide allowed her to come unstuck. This left the passengers of a bus trip sorely disappointed; they had crossed on one ferry while their vehicle followed on the next (Mary Queen of Scots) and got stuck mid-stream. By the time the bus made it over, he found his passengers had given up and headed home to Edinburgh by alternative means.

In 1955, due to booming traffic, the three Forth ferries were joined by a fourth Forth ferry (try saying that in a hurry), when the slightly larger Sir William Wallace joined the fleet.

True to the established tradition, Robert the Bruce welcomed her by running aground! On March 12th 1955, in dense fog, she hit a mudbank some 500 yards short of the pier. This time it was an exceptional spring tide at fault. It took an hour and a half to free her.

The following year, it as Queen Margaret’s turn again and on December 2nd 1956? she was stuck at South Queensferry once more. It would take a whole 3 years in service for Sir William Wallace to join the “High and Dry Club”, which she first managed in February 1958. Again it was at the South Queensferry end and she had 40 cars on board when she got stuck. The passengers were rowed ashore and either bussed to Edinburgh, or waited 5 hours in the Hawes Inn for their cars. One hopes that the refreshments provided were only teas and coffees. She repeated the act at the end of September that year, getting within 20 feet of the pier at South Queensferry and then grounding on the mud. 50 passengers were taken ashore in the lifeboats. She became stuck at 740AM and it was not until a high tide at noon that she floated free.

Queen Margaret tried something new and rammed one of the piers of the Forth Bridge in February 1961 when the wind and tide conditions conspired against her and made controlled progress impossible. There was one last grounding hurrah for the Forth ferries, when this same vessel took to the Hawes Pier mud for 1 and a ¼ hours on the appropriate date of Friday 13th October 1961. It took the combined efforts of Sir William Wallace and Mary Queen of Scots to free her.

In the final decade of the ferries on the Forth, Sir William Wallace added an additional dimension to the difficulties of running the service; she was bigger than her sisters but had the same engines and same sized loading ramps, so was slower and took longer to load and unload. This made her a logistical pain in the bum for keeping to schedule and her smaller sisters frequently had to slow down when crossing against a tide or current to let her catch up. Her car deck was also slightly differently arranged and her master found out the hard way that if he packed them on tightly the same way as the other ships, then they became wedge in, couldn’t get onto the ramp and thus couldn’t get back off again! The solution was simple but inelegant – the ship sailed around to the other side of the pier and all the cars reversed off instead.

The owner-operators of the ferries went into liquidation in August 1963 and so the liquidators continued to run the service for a further 13 months until September 3th 1964 when the last sailed before the Forth Road Bridge was opened. Guests of honour on the last scheduled voyage were HM The Queen and HRH Prince Philip. Queen Margaret had clearly no sense of occasion and humour and refused to run aground with the royal party aboard.

As a postscript, I should note that nobody was harmed in any of these groundings, beyond the feelings of the ships’ masters. In actual fact, considering the intense scheduling of the route over 30 years hard work, in tricky waters, they actually had a pretty enviable safety record. In the late 1950s, all four ships ran an all-day service at 15 minute intervals, making 40,000 crossings a year, carrying 1,250,000 passengers, 600,000 cars and 200,000 commercial vehicles.

The Forth ferries were laid up at Burntisland after the end of their working lives and the three oldest ones were unceremoniously scrapped. The press were far more interested in the new Road Bridge to be interested in three old ships. The newest and largest, Sir William Wallace, spent a few years service at Islemeer in the Netherlands before being scrapped too in 1970. After 30 years of car ferry service, the scores on the doors for running aground were:

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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