Photo: Irish Coast Guard

Storm Dennis was the second-strongest nontropical storm on record in the North Atlantic Ocean. It brought hurricane-force winds, towering waves, and significant flooding to Britain, Wales, and Ireland. It also brought something wholly unexpected — the abandoned general cargo ship, MV Alta, which washed up on the rocky shore near Ballycotton, Cork, on Ireland’s southern coast.

No one was aboard the 77m (253′) cargo ship, built in 1976, when she came ashore. The MV Alta had been a “ghost ship,” a derelict, adrift in the Atlantic Ocean for more than 17 months, ever since her crew of 10 was rescued by the US Coast Guard in October 2018.  The crew had been stranded for almost 20 days following a machinery failure. They were running out of food and water and a hurricane was approaching. In the nick of time, USCGC Confidence rescued the crew approximately 1,380 miles southeast of Bermuda and brought them to Puerto Rico. 

The owner reportedly arranged a commercial tug to recover the ship, then sailing under the Tanzanian flag, and tow it to Guyana. What actually happened is unclear.

It has been reported that the ship was hijacked, perhaps for at least the second time. The Independent.ie reports that in 2007 it was claimed the MV Alta had been hijacked off Guyana by pirates. Amazingly, it was then claimed that, once recovered, the freighter was the subject of a second attempted hijacking.

Whatever transpired, the ship ended up adrift in the Atlantic.

Last September, it was reported that the UK Royal Navy’s Devonport-based HMS Protector had come across the MV Alta adrift in the Mid-Atlantic.

And so the MV Alta drifted, an abandoned “ghost ship,” carried by currents across the ocean toward Africa, then drifting north past the Iberian Peninsula and into the Celtic Sea until finally carried ashore by the raging Storm Dennis.

The Washington Post quotes John Tattan, an official with the local branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. “This is one in a million. I have never, ever seen anything abandoned like that before.”

Tattan added that it was particularly bewildering that the Alta managed to make it past the many fishing boats off Ireland’s southern coast without being detected.

Thanks to Roger Eastman for contributing to this post