At some point in the early hours of February 16, a ship washed up on the rocks off the village of Ballycotton in County Cork. First spotted by a jogger out for their Sunday lunchtime run, the ship was soon making global headlines.
In its final resting place, the MV Alta was perched sideways on top of a series of jagged rocks, its starboard side facing inland. The ship looks like it could fall at any moment. The Alta, which was built in 1976, bares all the marks of years of hard work at sea. But as it made land, the ship was empty.
The Alta, it turned out, was a ghost ship. It had been floating around the mid-Atlantic without a soul onboard since the Autumn of 2018. Ghost ships are not unheard of but they are rare. The Alta is even more unusual for how long it drifted - almost 18 months in total - during which time it was battered by huge storms and shifted by strong currents. And, during that whole time, it was only spotted once. By chance it managed to avoid major shipping routes and other obstacles, leaving its small cargo of oil barrels intact.
The ship's true owners remain unknown, although it was last sailing under the flag of Tanzania, and the vessel has changed its name four times during the last half decade. Now ocean current analysis and analysis of data sent out by the ship's onboard Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders - a technology underpinned by GPS - have shed some light on its most likely path to Ireland.
The animation above, produced by analysts at Spire Maritime, shows what happened to the Alta. It left the Strait of Gibraltar in September 2018, before moving into the Atlantic. “They have the speed going through the Atlantic,” says Max Abouchar, an engineer at Spire Maritime. When the red line of travel turns white, this is the moment the ship slowed down.
“Somewhere, almost mid-Atlantic they suddenly just stop,” Abouchar says. The period shown in the animation covers September to October 2018. When the ship slowed down it is predicted to have been travelling at speeds of around 0.1 or 0.2 knots, which equates to around 0.2 to 0.3 kilometres per hour. Put bluntly: it was barely moving at all. “They drifted around a bit, probably just by the currents. Then they move a little bit quicker, especially East, towards in the direction of Africa.” Abouchar, who uses Spire Maritime's data gathered by satellites to monitor currents, says these looped movements are unlikely to just be the sea moving the ship around.
Instead, he speculates, the vessel was either trying to move under its own power or that it was being towed by another vessel. “Whatever was towing it or driving it gave up after a while,” Abouchar says.
It was around this time that US authorities became involved with the Alta. In October 2018, the USCGC Confidence, a coastguard ship, is reported to have rescued ten crew from the vessel. At the time GCaptain reported that the seafarers were stranded on the boat that was around 1,300 miles southeast of Bermuda. They had been stuck on the ship for 20 days and had received a food supply, dropped by a coast guard plane, on October 2.
“We were conducting a law enforcement patrol near Puerto Rico when we were assigned to assist the crew of the motor vessel Alta,” Confidence commander Travis Emge told GCaptain. “We traveled over 1,300 nautical miles to get to the disabled ship.” The coast guard said the crew were being taken to Puerto Rico and the ship's owners were being contacted so Alta could be towed back to shore. But this never happened