Midshipmen caught in the waves

Merchant Marine sophomores describe tsunami's far-reaching power

BY JOE HABERSTROH | STAFF WRITER

January 6, 2005

As their container ship crept into the port at Salalah, Oman, on Dec. 26, crewmen David Taliaferro and Kyle Bockelman watched as the tide plunged 15 feet in five minutes. Then weird, 50-foot wide whirlpools broke out all around the Maersk Virginia. The waves lifted their vessel and ran it aground on rocks.

Taliaferro and Bockelman are sophomores at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. They were aboard the 957-foot Maersk Virginia as the tsunami roiled the Arabian Sea, and their e-mails from the ship provide a unique perspective into its far-reaching power.

As part of the academy's training program, they have been serving since November aboard the Maersk Virginia, a ship that carries goods between the United States and India.

When the tsunami struck, their ship was 20 miles from Salalah.

" ... the tide was suddenly sucked out from under us," said Taliaferro in an e-mail Monday from the ship to the academy. "We were lucky in that the water was deep enough that we didn't run aground right there."

The ship's crew then waited seven hours before entering the port, apparently to ride in on a higher tide. But things didn't work out.

"When we coming in, the tide dropped 5 meters in five minutes," Taliaferro reported. "There was some extremely strange water action that occurred off our port bow. The water seemed to be swirling in a counter clockwise fashion, about 50 meters in all directions. I was on the stern of the ship preparing mooring lines when the waves took us for a ride."

The tsunami's impact on shipping was light because vessels at sea typically experienced the waves as non-threatening swells. But the waves did damage some ships that were working closer to shore or at ports scattered around Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Maersk Line, Limited has the largest fleet of U.S.-flagged cargo ships and none of its other vessels were affected by the tsunami, said Barbara Garrow, director of Maersk Line, Limited, in Norfolk, Va.

The Maersk Virginia "incurred minor damage with a very small crack leading into a tank," Garrow said in an e-mail message to Newsday. "The crack has been patched up and the vessel is fully seaworthy. The vessel will undergo further repairs in the Mediterranean this week."

Taliaferro said in an e-mail that the Maersk Virginia had a "ruptured fuel tank, a ruptured ballast tank and a few other odds and ends."

Neither man was injured in the incident. In subsequent e-mails and telephone calls to their families, Bockelman and Taliaferro made it clear that it was not quite a "wave" that had toyed with the Maersk Virginia.

"He said it was more like a real fast-moving tide, or tidal surge," said Taliaferro's mother, Beth Taliaferro, of San Antonio, who spoke to her son by cell phone.

"He didn't sound scared," Beth Taliaferro said. "It was more like an awesome thing -- even more than 3,000 miles away from where it started, it [the tsunami] could push a thousand-foot ship into the rocks."

Bockelman is from North Liberty, Iowa, and his parents said their son said he never felt in immediate danger. However, Bockelman's father, Tarryl Bockelman, was able to cite his son's experience when discussing the tsunami with the seventh-graders in the global studies class he teaches in the Iowa City public schools.

Maersk Virginia was inside the port's network of channels and about 200 feet from land at Salalah when the tsunami's swells lifted it landward, Taliaferro wrote.

"The wave took us and started moving us toward the rocks," he said. " ... We again were lucky in that we had enough side thrust and engine power to ride up on the rocks a little bit as opposed to hitting the rocks full force."

The tide continued to rise, which eventually allowed the crew to maneuver the ship to safety. Even so, Taliaferro said, the tide swamped the nearby pier, "causing men and trucks to get thrown around some."