While all the rest of SA is going on about defaced paintings and whether the North West Province is about to descend into a mini race war, I’ve been marvelling at this timelapse of Eihatsu Maru – the “Clifton trawler”.
Yes. I know that this is now (literally) last week’s news, but, when comparing last week’s news with this week’s news, I think I’d rather still be there.
In the words of the videographer:
What was supposed to be a single time lapse of the ship getting pulled out, ended up turning into a four day documentation of the entire event.
There were three attempts to pull the ship out, two of them failing with the rope snapping and the third being a success. The diesel on the Japanese trawler, which was also carrying fish, had to be pumped into a bladder on the beach to decrease its weight, making it easier to pull out. It ended up being quite a lengthy operation involving teams of specialised staff to operate and to offload machinery, and to coordinate the event.
The diesel was offloaded, a stronger towing point was welded to the rear of the ship and she was pulled out at high tide on Friday the 18th May 2012.
A DAFF investigation has shown that the vessel was not engaged in any illegal fishing.
Thanks for the distraction, some really stunning work by the photographer.
very cool!
I still can’t understand how the ship got so close to the beach, with modern instrumentation and all.
Maybe the skipper was impatient for an ice-cream, and just ignored it all.
[...] civilisation blog (it’s in the blogroll for folks who want to wander over there), I noticed a timelapse of the attempts to refloat the Eihatsu Maru, which ran aground at Clifton not too long ago. It’s awesome [...]
[...] fishing vessels have been all over the news lately. If you count the one that ran aground on Clifton Beach last month and the one that was found drifting off the coast of Canada in April, that is. The [...]