Shipwrecks & sea disasters

There are heaps of shipwrecks below the surface, but the ones above the waterline provide a fascinating spectacle. From http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/05/shipwrecks-sea-disasters.html
here are just some of the images, check out the site for more.


HMQS Gayundah was a 360 ton steel gunboat operated by the Queensland Maritime Defence Force and the Royal Australian Navy. She entered service in 1884 and in 1921 she was sold to Brisbane Gravel, who employed her as a sand and gravel barge on the Brisbane River. Gayundah was eventually scrapped sometime in the 1950s, before being filled with concrete run aground in 1958 at Woody Point at Redcliffe, Moreton Bay to serve as a breakwater.


The USS Oriskany aircraft carrier, the world’s largest artificial reef 911' long, 150' tall and 146' wide, was unk in 212' of water 22 miles from shore, near Pensacola in the USA in 2006. You can dive it which would make it an alternative to the USS Saratoga at Bikini Atoll ( they closed diving in 2009).

If you don’t mind the cold you can also dive the Russian built Murmansk, a Sverdlov-class battleship (built 1955) one of the last all gun cruisers. Lost in 1994 while in tow to India, and is now aground on Sørøya, Norway. It still remains intact, complete with all guns, 5 decks above the water-line and 5 below.

SS America had a long and lustrous career as a luxury liner, having had several owners, In 1994 it was re-named the American Star was undertow from Greece to Phuket when the tow lines broke in a storm and it was left adrift till it grounded at Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands.

In 48 hours it snapped in two, the stern section broke off and sank, it became a total loss. The port side & funnel collapsed in 2005. The hull started to break up it was finally claimed by the sea in 2007 when the starboard side fell.

Photographs of shipwrecks-in-progress, the Victor Karyakin a fishing vessel meets some unforgiving rocks at the Rybachi island, Northern Norway. The 12-strong crew was in deadly peril, as no other ship could come close to the same rocky shore. The crew was saved by Norwegian Coast Guard Sea King helicopter.

This unreal combination is not photoshopped.

The 820-foot-long coal freighter the Pasha Bulker had been preparing to collect coal from Newcastle, NSW and was lying at anchor about 200 metres off Stockton Beach, when a storm surge with 18m swell and winds of up to 100kph ripped the ship from its moorings. It hit a rock shelf called Big Ben Reef and the sand-bank at Nobbys Beach on the outside of the southern entrance to the port. The collision broke the back of the ship, it bent the ship into an inverted U-shape that could be seen by onlookers from the beach as ripples in the hull. The engine room frames were severely damaged and every ballast and fuel tank at the bottom of the ship was breached. After its salvage and removal it left under tow for Vietnam, where it will have to be cut in half for repair.
There is a great selection of Pasha Bunker photos on Flickr looks good as a full screen slideshow!

T-boned in 2003, the MT Gas Roman (230 meters long and 37m wide, built in 1990) fully laden with 44,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas collided with the MV Springbok (general cargo ship of 15,000 tonnes. 144 m long & 20m wide, built in 1979, and laden with 3,165 tonnes of timber) off Singapore.

Shipwrecks claimed by the desert from the Namibian Skeleton Coast. The area is subject to dense ocean fogs, a constant, heavy surf onto the beach or rocks, then hundreds of miles of marshes and finally a hot and arid desert. So much the stuff of Geoffrey Jenkins “A twist of sand” and Clive Cussler’s “Skeleton Coast” novels.

And finally a couple of 'how did they do that'

and why do that