I was at Kollam beach in the state of Kerala, India last friday staring at this beached ship for a long time.
The tourist taking a selfie in one of the pictures above asked me, "What is the story of this ship?" I told him what I heard:
This ship called Hansita 5, was a dredging ship. Dredgers work close to the shore where they take mud out of the bottom of the shallow sea, fill up their tanks with this mud and then empty the mud by pumping it back out to the shore. This is popular to reclaim land like in the Netherlands or to make new land like in Dubai or more controversially like in the South China Sea. My dad worked for almost 25 years until retirement on different dredgers for the Dredging Corporation of India. In India, dredging is mainly done to deepen the harbours. When I was 14 I was once on a dredger too. This dredger however didn't pump its mud out to the shore, it instead took it to deep sea and then dumped it. The waves would eventually bring the mud back into the harbour and the dredgers would take them out again. Sounds like a good deal to keep the dredging company in business except that the company was owned by Government of India :)
Dredging happens along rivers and canals too. In Kerala, men in wooden boats manually dredge the inland waterways to extract clay that is used for shoring up the banks or in construction. In Mexico, the Aztecs manually dredged lakes and rivers to make chinampas to grow food crops to sustain the population of one of the largest cities of the world in the middle ages.
But why did this dredger, Hansita 5, get beached at this beach called Mundakkal Papanasam beach near Kollam? Did it run aground while it was working close to the shore, a risk that all dredgers take? No. Hansita 5 had come to Kollam for repairs in 2013. After repairs, the port of Kollam billed the Indian owners of the vessel 40,00,000 Indian Rupees (about 62,000 USD) as the cost of repair which the owners refused to pay. The port then towed the ship about 3 miles off the harbour and anchored it there. A case was filed in court and when the crew were allowed to get off, the ship became a ghost ship.
But how it got to the beach remains unclear. Some say the monsoons dragged the anchor along. Why didn't the port tow it back? Why didn't the coast guard act? What was the Navy doing? Nobody knows.
The ship though is now on the beach. And it has become a tourist attraction. Single men and women come singly and in groups, couples, families with little kids, opportunist fishermen fish in the pool fed by the wake of the waves crashing into the ship.
To me it looked like an accidental art installation. The ghost ship itself, its rusting colors, the exploding sound of the waves traveling thru its hull into the wet sand below and then up into my naked feet made for a memorable experience. What impressed me most was that people that come to visit, after taking in the whole view, sooner or later walk along the wet sand to touch the ship. Just like Truman touches the fake sky at the end of his arduous sailing or like the apes of 2001: A space odyssey that touch the black Monolith.
I touched the ship too. And a friend told me I have hairy hands :)
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