Crikey! The junk that I blogged about last June seems to have been the Princess Taiping, which is a replica Ming dynasty junk that was just about to complete a 10-month, sail-powered round trip to the USA and back when it was rammed and sunk just 42 nautical miles off Su-Ao. The ‘unknown vessel’ that mowed them down was a freighter called the Champion Express, and after the collision it apparently ‘turned northward and fled’. Classy.
Happily though, the junk’s 10-person foreign crew and Taiwanese Captain all survived with minor injuries and hypothermia after being rescued by the Taiwan Coastguard. Still, that must have been a bummer coming all that way only to suddenly find yourself bobbing about in the not-very-warm ocean at 3 in the morning. Probably with The Theme From Jaws going round and round in your head…
Fuck ‘bigger boat’ — we just need a boat!
Story sources here (China Post) and here (Taiwan News).
Tags: coast guard, Coxinga, junk, ram, replica, sail-power, Taiwan, trans-pacific
April 27, 2009 at 8:37 am |
That’s sad. It’s funny that the freighter, which is being tracked at all times by several sources, “turned and fled”. Where, exactly do they think they’re going to hide?
April 27, 2009 at 1:49 pm |
I’d guess that, being a big, important, ocean-going freighter and all, they probably have urgent business to attend to — somewhere a looong way away. And that they all have their fingers in their ears and are going la la la while they wait for their blood alcohol levels to drop back to double digits. But of course this is nothing more than baseless speculation.