The roll-on/roll-off passenger ferry MV Tunu Pratama Jaya capsized and sank in rough seas late Wednesday on its way to the resort island of Bali, Indonesia. At least four people died, at least 30 are missing, and 31 survivors were rescued, according to local authorities.
“The vessel departed from Ketapang Port in Banyuwangi District, East Java, to Bali’s Gilimanuk Port at 10.56 p.m. and reportedly sank at 11.35 p.m.,” Wahyu Setia Budi, coordinator of the Banyuwangi SAR agency, said.
According to the ship manifest, the MV Tunu Pratama Jaya carried 53 passengers, 12 crew members, and 22 cars. Rescuers were still assessing if there were more people on board than the manifest showed. The passengers were all Indonesian, the transport ministry said.
The ferry crossing – one of the busiest in Indonesia – is around 5km as the crow flies and takes around one hour.
A helicopter and nine boats, including two tug boats and two inflatable boats searched for survivors with assistance from fishermen and people onshore.
Strong waves up to 2 meters (6.5 feet) high and darkness hampered emergency responders overnight, but an official said improved weather and sea conditions Thursday morning were assisting the search effort.
“For today’s search we are focusing on searching on the water, as the initial victims were found in the water between the location of the accident toward Gilimanuk port,” Surabaya Search and Rescue head Nanang Sigit said in a statement.
MV Tunu Pratama Jaya is a 734 GRT Indonesian-flagged ro-ro/Passenger Ship built in 2010.
This is not a comment on this particular post but concerning Old Salt Blog’s use of «follow.it» for distribution of its news items. This is no criticism of Rick Spilman and other contributors to the blog contents but a reaction about follow.it. For while now those quasi-daily mails have become aggravated spam and click bait. Faced with information overload and increasingly fussy and multiple-step logging-in procedures (especially when one is adverse to yielding personal info and being scraped and squeezed by advertisers and Big Brothers), I like emails arriving in my inbox to have an explicit subject line allowing preliminary weeding. It never was so with Old Salt Blog’s use of follow.it where the inbox display listing has always been:
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but clicking to display the mail used to display the WHOLE article, title and text. I do not have the time to read every blog mail and am only particularly interested in those dealing with traditional sailing vessels, “tall ships”, historical vessels and the like.
At the foot of the mail there was a small ad for follow.it and its services.
Then follow.it started truncating the blog text, ending it with a link “Continue Reading” and an advertising plug for follow.it.
IF the article was of interest, clicking “Continue Reading” DID NOT SEND THE READER TO THE OLD SALTBLOG.COM PAGE but to a sponsored ad page on the follow.it site, at the foot of which appeared a link “Go to article—Don’t want to see ads and get taken directly to the publisher’s page? Upgrade to the “Hello”-plan for only 3 USD/month”. That is spam.
For a while now, there is not even the blog article title and first few lines, just “follow.it New updates! — Click to read” and the self-advertising ads for follow it.
Clicking sends to a page on follow.it with the Blog’s release title and truncated text and advertising ending with, finally a link to the blog’s whole post.
Now follow.it is purely riding on the back of Rick’s and other voluntary contributors to the Old Salt Blog. I am not “upgrading” to the “HELLO”-plan but saying GOOD-BYE.
I am cancelling my subscription to follow.it
I shall of course still being visiting directly the Oldsaltblog.com home page from time to time, but this is prone to lapses and is not as convenient as being notified of interesting posts on the day they are published, especially “hot news” with lively comments. Actually, even before unsubscribing from the parasitic follow.it mailing list, the click-baiting strategy was already leading to lengthy delays in opening those click-baiting mails, skipping them for infrequent quiet days.