Then there were the giant snorkels. To get water out of the vessel, Sloane and his team deposited large pumps under water at the bottom of one of the cargo holds. They also removed hatches on the deck above and welded huge rectangular tubes, or snorkels, onto them before putting them back in place. The snorkels now dangled down into the belly of the ship. Finally, a team of divers connected the pumps below to two sets of hoses that extended vertically up through the snorkels.
The pumps ran flat out, remembers Sloane, to stop water filling the engine room, which contains the most expensive and sensitive machinery.
Eventually, having removed huge volumes of water from the hold, the salvage team was able to fill some of the ship’s ballast tanks with air in order to refloat her. Had they tried to do this earlier, the tanks could have ruptured, explains Sloane: “When you get below 10m (33ft), you’ve got to be very careful about how much pressure you introduce.”
Through all of this complicated work, and in spite of not one but two typhoons, the second of which was particularly bad, the Kota Kado was saved and eventually towed to a shipyard for repairs. She is still sailing today, though under a different name.
When ships end up in places they were not really designed for, such as stuck fast in mud or pinned against rocks, the forces of nature can tear them apart. That’s why heavy storms presented such a great threat to the Kota Kado.
“Like a paperclip, the more times you bend it, eventually it snaps,” says Rosalind Blazejczyk, managing partner and naval architect at Solis Marine Consultants. She explains how problematic it is when a grounded ship is lifted or twisted by successive waves. They can crash into it for hours in a swell or high tide, pushing one end of the vessel up and throwing it down again. Suddenly, steel doesn’t seem so strong in those situations. Sloane mentions how his team sometimes weld huge girders to the deck of a ship simply to hold it together.
