I cant believe how these pricks with all the latest navigation gear can be 25 km off course and hit the Great Barrier Reef !! With a $200 hand held gps you can know your exact position to within a few metres. What kind of f@#k knuckles are driving these floating environmental nightmares !!!
It will be interesting to see how this all pans out, will the chongs get flogged or will Kevin slap their wrists for getting lost.
Definitely a short-cut...didn't quite shorten the trip though, I hope the skipper ends up in some hot water over this.
What piss weak penalties !!! one million dollar fine for the shipping company !!! Less for the skipper. The captain should be locked up in gaol and the company should be fined a billion dollars and banned from australian waters..I'd also like to see them all strung up by the balls and covered in fire ants!!!
we haven't really learnt a lot have we since the exxon valdez, what I don't understand is why we havent pumped all the oil out of the piece of crap that is in danger of breaking up and dumping its load all over OUR REEF
When we were on our way back to North West Island from Douglas Shoals last August we saw a bulk coal carrier coming through . It too was probably taking a short cut. Just hope the Keppel Island group or Yeppoon don't cop the worst of the slick (although with easterly wind we have been getting might put us right in the cross-hairs) Does anyone know what the latest advice is?
I think the standard advice is to run inside and stand in a doorway arch or under a sturdy table.
No, hang on,.. That's for an earth quake.
It's to run inside and crouch down on the bathroom floor.
No,.. Hang on. That's for a hurricane.
Hmm,. Shipping disaster,.. let me see.
Go to the upper deck and rearrange the deck chairs,.
Nope,. That's only if you're on board the ship.
Geez. We seem to be lacking a bit on advice for offshore shipping disasters.
Can't help there.
Richiefish seems to have a few ideas. You could ask him to be a bit more explicit. 
Better check on the availability of ball hangers and fire ants.
Haven't seen any in K Mart.
With all the technology around today (particularly satellites), isn't there some way to monitor where these things are and what route their taking and to bust 'em if they are seen to take the wrong route?
Like the Patagonian tooth fishers that cost the WA gov a fortune a few years back. From memory there was a lot of difficulty proving that they had caught the toothy little buggers in our waters. Isn't there satellite data that can show the path taken by a boat, and couldn't that have been used to prove that they were fishing where and when they were?
Maybe I expect too much from satellites and technology, but it seems to me that all of this should be very do-able and there shouldn't be any reason why tens of thousands of tons of metal floating around in the ocean shouldn't be able to be tracked.
I'm not talking about devices fitted to the vessels. In my limited understanding of satellites it should be possible to monitor the movements of something as big as a ship given their size and vastly different signal they reflect relative to the vast expanse of ocean around them. I'm sure there's satellites with a <10m resolution - this should be plenty to see a ship on a background of ocean. The fact that this isn't being done suggests perhaps that it's my limited understanding of satellites that is the problem 
Select to expand quote
And the manpower to monitor the hundreds of ships in Aus waters?
I wasn't really thinking there's be a control room with people watching ships slowly move across the screen, more that if I was a ship operator and knew that someone could go back and prove where I'd been and when if they wanted/needed to then I'd be pretty careful about where I went.
Anyway, it seems pretty clear that it wouldn't work. Which I guess is why I'm not a satellite dude or ship captain!
Make them all carry a GT-31s and download their tracks to KA-72. Then we'll all know if they've been misbehaving. 
Ban the whole coal thing its stuffing the whole world up .....fast
Wake up australia for selling the stuff in the first place
An letting those bulk carriers anywhere near our pristine reefs is just plain dumb as you can get.....hello.
It does seem to take time to work out what to do with the stricken vessel, but what do you suggest to do to pump the oil out?? You just cannot bring in another ship to the area and pump it out. The marine experts are doing all they can at present, and although it seems slow, they work to formulate the best plan they can. All too often however again the environment suffers.
Hope ya caught the news.....................................
Well it only took them a week or so to figure it out DUH. Fk me do theses people really give a rats arse about anything but themselves.
dirtyharry,
Commercial ships entering the Great Barrier Reef area are required to report their position on a regular basis under the REEFVTS system. So AMSA should have known their position. AMSA is also responsible for managing the response to a spill under the national plan. They have a variety of scenarios and contingency plans, depending on what is spilled where.
You can bet AMSA started work on the planning as soon as the spill was notified. But as has been said, it takes time. I doubt anyone would have a spare ship just laying around in the area and big enough to take off the cargo of a bulk carrier. Not only that, before doing anything they often need to wait for the right conditions or risk making things worse.
just kidding
Just wonder.......... if there is any truth that some of this crew were on
the bulk carrier that collided with Jessica Watson a few months ago!!!
[}:)]
Apparently it was all going well until they had to cut a hard left to avoid hitting a whale.
They're an endangered species you know.
Now that the ship has been refloated off, it would be a good time for both Queensland and Australian governments to let us know what the hell that ship was doing there:
