A week after arriving in Seattle we received an email from the owners of the psycho tanker, Siteam Leader. Quite a pleasant surprise, I never in a million years expected an answer from them, yet they contacted their ship operations company and received a report from the ship. I will post here first our original correspondence to the company which wasn’t posted in this blog, followed by their answer and then our response to the ship’s report. I am eliminating included copies of previous emails since they appear earlier. If you weren’t following the blog then, this will make more sense of you go back and read our postings from mid-July.
First, our original email to Eitzen Chemical sent the day after the event from the middle of the Pacific.
Rob
——————————-
Greetings,
I would appreciate this email being forwarded to someone in authority in your company who has responsibility for your tankers.
On July 14, 2010 we had a mid-ocean encounter with the tanker ‘Siteam Leader’. The Pacific Seafarer’s HAM net reported the incident to the US Coast Guard and we supplemented their report with our own email. The PacSea net also provided us with your company name as the owner of this tanker. The ships details are:
Tanker ‘Siteam Leader’
MMSI: 565917000
IMO: 9343194
Call Sign: 9VNR2
596 feet, 40 foot draft
Markings: Fitzen Chemical (I believe we read the first letter as an ‘F’ when it is in fact an ‘E’)
Our encounter with the vessel is documented in the below report as submitted to the US Coast Guard in Hawaii. I would like the owners of this vessel to be aware of this incident as it reflects on their company, maritime safety, and operational expenses for the aforementioned ship.
I hope your vessels are not in the practice of deviating course over 62 degrees and traveling an additional 7 miles so they can have an unnecessary encounter with a recreational sailboat as indicated below. I would appreciate you taking this seriously and perhaps investigating the decisions that were made on the bridge of this ship that led to the maneuvers around our sailing vessel. Any information you can provide that would illuminate the tanker’s side of the incident would be educational and most welcome.
We are currently underway between Osaka, Japan and Seattle, USA and do not expect landfall earlier than mid August. We can be reached at this email address but since it is received via SSB radio at very slow speeds please be advised of the following restrictions:
1. Attachments are not allowed, incoming or outgoing.
2. Do not include the previous message in replies – the connection is very slow.
3. Due to radio propagation we are able to connect to email only a couple of times a day, so be patient when waiting for a reply.
Feel free to email us with any information or questions.
Rob and Teresa Sicade
SV Yohelah
Seattle
enroute Japan to Seattle
—– Begin Coast Guard Report—–
