I feel like one of those lucky fools in 1912 who got sick and couldn’t take the trip on the Titanic that they’d been awaiting.
That’s because I managed to escape without harm from the oceangoing grain hauler Cenk Kaptanoglu. I had no notion of its nautical pratfalls and accidents when I boarded the ship, but my new knowledge gives me the chills.
The Cenk Kaptanoglu is a Turkish ship that a group and I boarded and toured recently in Churchill, Man., where it was loading prairie wheat for Mexico at the end of the shipping season.
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Everything seemed happy enough: crew members were friendly and smiley; the first officer appeared competent and professional; the grain loading proceeded quickly and without problem.
And even though some port workers later said the ship was one of the most unkempt they’d seen come into Churchill in recent years, to my landlubber’s eyes everything seemed ducky.
Little did I know that this unremarkable-looking bulk hauler has a storied history of major collisions with stationary objects, U.S. border security laws and now Canadian border security and immigration laws.
The grim truth about the peril my hapless colleagues and I were in was only revealed after I got back to Winnipeg, when I searched the internet for background on this vessel to go with a feature.
I discovered the ship had been at the centre of a briefly prominent news story in July 2004, when the captain unwisely refused to allow the U.S. coast guard to search the entire vessel and then made a joke about there being a bomb on board.
The ship was seized and swarmed by coast guard, the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Delaware state police near Philadelphia while the captain’s sense of humour was investigated.
In 1999 the ship had a less metaphorical collision on the other coast of America, when it lost power near Portland, Oregon, and crashed into a dock. The ship suffered major damage, was towed to a repair facility and required 165 tons of steel to fix.
The Cenk Kaptanoglu’s troubles have kept up with it, even in Churchill two weeks ago, when two of its Turkish sailors decided to defect to Canada.
I suppose there was little bad that could have happened to me from just walking around on a ship tied securely to a dock, but I must say I’m glad I wasn’t in that ship’s crew the day after our visit, when they pulled away from Churchill for the voyage north into the Arctic waters.
It seems like the kind of ship that just might meet an iceberg some day.
