16 thoughts on “The Ship Captain And The Italian Coastguard”

  2. Can this possibly be true? I hope to goodness it’s fiction … and if it’s not … Well, what fate does the captain deserve?

  3. It looks like it is true – gCaptain is a good resource for all your marine disaster needs:

    http://gcaptain.com/

    This sort of thing happens every couple of decades…I think it was the Greek crew of the Oceanos back in the late 80’s that did much the same.

  4. Inept cruise ship captains and #Ocupy DC vermin? This week is a godsend for amateur comedians!

    I’ll be the “pros” will still be making fun of *yawn* Tebow come Saturday night…

  5. I have to admit, I am looking at the pictures of the damage and just left awe struck. This ship is nearly the size of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. And the massive rock it picked up and cradled in the hull shows the forces involved in the collision were absolutely staggering. With that said the captain is certainly a stuttering clusterfuck of a miserable failure. Perhaps Obama will find a parable in all this.

    1. The ship represents the US economy and Obama is the captain who did stupid things to impress his friends.

      1. No, Larry, it’s the 1% that ran us aground. Obama would really like to help prevent that, but there’s all these lifeboats in the way.

        1. If Obama weren’t trying to ruin the economy, what would be do different than what he’s doing now?

          Pile expensive regulatons on businesses? Check.
          Create massive uncertainity in business decisions? Check.
          Propagate class warfare? Check.
          Hinder domestic energy production? Check.

          BTW: Obama IS part of the 1%.

  8. I was on a sister ship, the Carnival Conquest, last August. I can’t imagine using a ship of that size for literal showboating. By chance, we parked next to the Allure of the Seas; it’s even bigger than a Nimitz carrier.

    Hours after the event, I heard the Captain was arrested. I thought then that the Italian police were stupid in worrying about culpability rather than rescue. My initial thoughts were wrong. I think trying him for homicide is a fair charge.

    I feel sorry for the good people at Carnival Cruises. They should have never kept a Captain like this, if they knew at all about his showboating (there is YouTube video showing he’s done similar stuff last year). Still, they have deep pockets, and Italy needs money. And they are responsible in part.

  9. I could definitely see some of the larger cruise operators installing a ‘black box’ that logs GPS/inertial nav coordinates every 30 seconds, and also uploads those logs every hour. (Big ships already have internet connections.) If the ship goes outside of well defined safe zones, then the captain gets asked to explain themself, and quietly dismissed if they can’t do their job.

    1. Why “quietly dismissed”? This is a ship, after all, and there is a rich tradition of all kinds of interesting punishments at sea. They probably keep the ship bottoms too clean for keelhauling to be very interesting any more, though.

    2. I worked for a project that designed one of those. It was meant for private yachts. We tested it with police department and a cities municipal pool cars. As a citizen, I was happy to see such departments fire employees for using their sirens to get through intersections and bureaucrats getting canned for using their city cars to visit clubs. Still, it was not a great way to advertise. I suspect any captain worth his salt would know how to disable or fool it.

      Then again, Schettino isn’t worth much salt, and his boat did have a black box (minus the 30 second reporting system).

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