Mikhail Lermontov (ship)
 The Mikhail Lermontov in September 1983 in Tilbury
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The Mikhail Lermontov was a Soviet cruise ship built in 1972 that ran aground and sank in New Zealand in 1986.
history
construction
The passenger ship expired on 31 December 1970 with then- Mathias-Thesen-Werft in Wismar with the hull number 129, stack and formed at its commissioning April 21, 1972 completion of a series of five sister ships of the Ivan Franko class . The series was commissioned by the Baltic Shipping Company in Leningrad . The sister ships were the Aleksandr Pushkin , which is still in service today as Marco Polo , and the three ships Ivan Franko , Shota Rustaveli and Taras Shevchenko , which have since been scrapped. All five ships were almost identical in construction and were named after great Georgian, Ukrainian and Russian writers , in this case after Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov .
The Mikhail Lermontov was 176.28 meters long and 23.55 meters wide. It had eight decks and a draft of 8.20 meters.
commitment
Initially, the ship was used between Bremerhaven and the Canaries and from autumn 1972 to May of the following year in the Bremerhaven-Montreal service. 1973 followed trips between Leningrad, Bremerhaven, London, Le Havre and New York. Various cruises took place up to 1980 and from June to August there were trips from Leningrad to New York, the latter being ended at the height of the Cold War at the instigation of the USA.
From January to May 1982 the Bremerhaven-based Lloyd Werft overhauled the ship extensively, after which the Mikhail Lermontov was employed on other worldwide cruises.
Stranded on February 16, 1986
In the spring of 1986 the ship under the command of the 48-year-old replacement captain V. Vorobjow (Russian В. Воробьёв) carried out a series of eleven-day New Zealand cruises in charter of the tour operator CTC. On February 16, 1986, the Mikhail Lermontov ran at 3:10 p.m. with the advice of the pilot and port master of Picton in the Marlborough district , Donald Jamison, with 330 crew members and 480 passengers on board from Picton. The planned course initially took the ship out to the open sea area of Queen Charlotte Sound as planned. After the master had left the bridge and the ship was already well outside the area requiring the pilot, the cruise ship changed its previously discussed course at the pilot's instigation and instead steered closer to Cape Jackson. When asked by the first officer on duty, Jamison replied that he wanted to offer the passengers something to see. About one nautical mile from Cape Jackson, the pilot decided to change course again, which should lead the ship through the 460 meter wide passage between Cape Jackson and the upstream lighthouse at Walker Rock. When passing this bottleneck, the passenger ship ran aground on an underwater rock at 17:38 and suffered severe soil damage. The master then came back on the bridge and initiated the following measures. After it became clear that the ship's pumps could not cope with the water ingress, Mayday was given and an attempt was made to strand the sinking ship in Port Gore Bay. The stranding succeeded briefly; In the meantime, however, the power supply to the ship, which had meanwhile had no propulsion, had collapsed due to penetrating water, and the Mikhail Lermontov was moved back into deeper water by the incoming tide . The Ro-Ro ferry Arahura and the LPG tanker Tarahiko then took over the passengers and crew of the Mikhail Lermontov . Eleven people were injured. At 10.45 p.m. the Mikhail Lermontov finally sank to a water depth of 35 meters off Gannet Point, killing one of the crew members.
consequences
Although the then Minister of Transport, Richard Prebble, declined a formal investigation into the case, a preliminary investigation into the incident revealed, among other things, that the pilot Donald Jamison continued to advise the ship outside the piloting area of the Marlborough Harbor Board, but that he was well versed in this area . The passage between Cape Jackson and its upstream lighthouse was unsuitable for a ship the size of the Mikhail Lermontov , Jamison explained his wrong decision by mental and physical exhaustion, caused by several previous months with about 80 hours of work per week. Donald Jamison later made no further statements about the sinking of the cruise ship, but voluntarily gave up his pilot license.
After an investigation by the Soviet authorities, Mikhail Lermontov's first officer Sergei Stepanishchev was sentenced to four years suspended prison sentence and a fine of 20,000 rubles in favor of the Baltic shipping company in Leningrad.
An out-of-court settlement of damages was reached between the Baltic shipping company and the Marlborough Harbor Board. The wreck of the Mikhail Lermontov could not be salvaged, only part of the oil was pumped out in the following two months after the accident. Today the ship is a popular destination for scuba divers.
literature
- Arnold Kludas: The world's great passenger ships. A documentation. Volume V: 1950–1974 , Stalling Verlag; Oldenburg, Hamburg 1974, ISBN 3-7979-1844-5 , p. 150.
- The passenger ship “Mikhail Lermontov” sank because the pilot remained on the bridge. In: International shipping. Issue 4/1987, Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford, pp. 147–149.
- The pilot left the sinking ship - the sinking of the "Mikhail Lermontov". In: International shipping. Issue 11/1989, Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford, p. 450.
Web links
- Data and photos about the ship (Swedish)
- Derek Grzelewski: The Last Cruise of Mikhail Lermontov. In: New Zealand Geographic. No. 42, April – June 1999. (English)