The Wallowing Panamanian

There is a ship wandering around the Bay of Biscay without a driver.  Apparently the ship developed a list (I believe the technical term is "manifest") and the crew were evacuated.  Despite a pronounced manifest and the absence of a crew the ship seems quite happy to keep wandering through the seas.  The media have released photos that do indeed show quite a remarkable manifest.  The fact that the ship is ploughing through stormy waters in this condition leads one to wonder whether it should have been designed that way in the first place.  It seems to be operating better at forty five degrees to vertical than it did when it was upright.

The problem with this is not so much the presence of the vessel in the water, its rather that the ship is in danger of running out of water. The French coast beckons and, as is obligatory in such scenarios, the likely target area for running aground is between a seaside resort and a national park.  Nothing ever seems to run aground in a junkyard.  The French Navy has sprung into action and has apparently averted disaster for the time being.

The ship was sailing from Gabon to France with a cargo of timber and construction equipment.  I know Gabon has been looting its forests for hard currency but I didn't realise they were a net exporter of construction equipment.  Still it could have been worse, timber and construction equipment are possibly two of the least environmentally harmful things you could dump on a French beach.  The real concern is the vessel's fuel tanks, and what might happen if they don't survive the ship's inadvertent sideswipe of the shoreline (hey, that was a neat piece of alliteration).

French officials have fallen over themselves to assure the public (or at least the public close to the Bay of Biscay, those in the Rhone Valley probably don't give a crap) that environmental action plans are in place and will be implemented the moment the ship makes landfall.  What will be done if the ship doesn't make landfall wasn't elaborated on.  Possibly everybody would be happy to just let the thing wander the seas indefinitely like some timber hauling version of the Flying Dutchman.  The Wallowing Panamanian perhaps.

In years to come it will be a legend of the sealanes.  Sailors in dockside bars (and drug rehabs) will swap tales of the time they were far out at sea (or as far as you can get in the Bay of Biscay) when, through the rain, the saw a glimpse of the Wallowing Panamanian and it chilled them to the bone.  Perhaps an opera could written.  They've been written about sillier things.

Of course if that sort of thing happened in Australia we'd deal with it much more efficiently.  We'd just let the damn thing run ashore and then kill a couple of dozen sharks to make sure that it could never happen again.