The Pasha Bulker got stuck on Nobby’s beach in Newcastle some 25 days ago during the massive storms that we had. It was one of the many ships waiting to pick up a load of coal in Newcastle. It had ignored advice to move further from shore during the storm while it waited, and so it was pushed onto a beach. Last Wednesday night was the first planned attempt to refloat the ship, and using three tug boats pull it into deep water. The timing was due to a full moon on Saturday night, which means that the tides will be high for about a week.
The attempt on Wednesday night didn’t happen, Thursday night the ship was moved about 9 degrees before a couple of cables attached to the tug boats broke. Friday and Saturday night’s attempts were postponed, and so on Sunday we decided to go and have a look at the ship.
We picked Iris up at Redfern station just after 10 am and then headed north. In Newcastle we found ourselves a parking spot and started walking towards the ship, but I think that none of us realised how far we’d have to walk to see it. Because of the salvage operation there was an exclusion zone about 500 metres around the beach, and so we walked a long way before we found somewhere that we could see the entire boat from. It may not have been clear from our sightings how close it was to the shore, but we could tell it was very close. From photographs in the news papers, it looked less than 100 metres from the water’s edge!
Walking back to the car we stopped for a late lunch of fish and chips. The shop we got them from had a board saying “seen the ship, now have a chip”. hehe. We detoured through The Entrance on the way home. Unfortunately we missed the pelican feeding, but the sunset was stunning. Andrew took some photos (he also took the one of Pasha Bulker above), and this is one of them.
Sunday night the Pasha Bulker was successfully rotated so that she was ready to be pulled out to sea, and last night it seems that it all went well and she’s no longer beached. She has sustained some damage, so I guess she’ll have to get repaired before she can go anywhere. It’s amazing that three little boats could pull such a huge ship stuck that was stuck in sand around and then out to sea. Well, I’m amazed, anyway. 🙂
