Maritime Directory

Indonesian teams searching a lake for a sunken ferry in the hope of recovering nearly 200 bodies trapped inside have to contend with dangerous currents and cold, murky water far deeper than any scuba diver can ever go.The over-loaded ferry Sinar Bangun sank in bad weather in Lake Toba on Sumatra island on Monday. The lake, in the crater of an ancient supervolcano, is ringed by steeply sloping mountains, and is about 450 meters (1,500 feet) deep.Three people have been confirmed dead and 18 people were rescued after the 15-tonne wooden boat went down in Indonesia's deadliest ferry disaster for nearly a decade.

Italy appeared to relent on Thursday after at first refusing to accept 226 migrants on board a German charity rescue ship, saying later in the day it would take them in but would impound the vessel.Anti-immigrant interior minister Matteo Salvini initially said the Dutch-flagged ship Lifeline should take the people it plucked from the Mediterranean to the Netherlands and not Italy.But transport minister Danilo Toninelli, who oversees the coastguard, later said it was unsafe for the 32-metre vessel to travel such a great distance with so many people on board.

The summer season in most of Europe has been off to a sunny and warm start, which has many longingly wishing to spend time at sea. Those with access to the privileged world of Superyachts will be looking forward to getting underway and traveling the world. It’s a great time to be a yacht owner, but the follow-on is that due to the increased utilization, the number of willing sellers typically drops. This leads to a slowdown in the sale and purchase activity and can be a good time for yacht brokers to look at taking their own summer breaks. This seasonal slowdown provides the perfect time for market watchers to sit back and look at the activity over the busier winter season transactions.

Thick sea ice is impeding Arctic shipments of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Russia's newly-built export plant in Yamal, Russia's state-run nuclear-powered tanker company Rosatomflot said.Unseasonably severe ice conditions are also clogging routes to Asia through the Northern Sea Route (NSR), leading to the extension of the winter-spring navigation of Atomflot's nuclear ice-breakers, it said.The Novatek-operated LNG facility's fleet of LNG ice-breaking tankers aim to deliver gas to Northeast Asia along the NSR in summertime when ice sheets thin.In winter, LNG tankers take a westward route to Europe, where cargoes will be reloaded onto waiting tankers for onward transport to Asia.

When it was time for France Pelagique to start renewing its fleet, an electric-power alliance of Dutch and Scandinavian yard interests formed up and delivered. The result was the first installation aboard a trawler of NES’s Odin’s Eye, a DC grid solution to integrate another first for trawlers — quiet-running permanent magnate, or PM, propulsion.Where to begin a fleet modernization that ends with green credentials and richer harvests? Well, there are multiple points of contact, if you opt for a certain Scandinavian electric-power alliance.