On Tuesday around 3:35 PM the Coast Guard in Galveston, TX was notified that a fishing boat, the 82′ long Pappy’s Pride, had collided with the 600-foot chemical tanker Bow Fortune. The fishing boat had capsized and four crew were in the water. One crew member was subsequently rescued, one died and two remain missing. The tanker was reported to be under pilotage at the time of the collision. Heavy fog was also reported to have limited visibility and to have hampered the search for the missing crew.
How the fishing vessel came to collide with the tanker is unclear. Photographs of Pappy’s Pride show radar and multiple radio antennas. Presumably, both vessels also had AIS.
With AIS this shouldn’t happen.
With AIS, with a Security Call on a VHS Radio, with someone observing the radar, even with the prudent use of foghorns, it never should have happened.
Is there any link between the Bow Fortune and the Bow Belle, another vessel that ran down a party ship on the River Thames killing many people?
The Bow Belle was a dredger while the Bow Fortune is a tanker. Bow Belle was owned by East Coast Aggregates Limited whereas Bow Fortune is owned by Odfjell. I doubt the tow vessels have anything in common.
Perhaps this is a GPS assisted collision, something like the radar assisted collision we studied during radar plotting training. The crew of a vessel puts it on auto pilot tied to a GPS plotter to take them down the channel and begins cleaning nets and sorting fish.