Sand-trapped ship now a tourist attraction in Kollam

KOLLAM: A dredger trapped off the Kollam coast for more than three years now has turned one of the tourist attractions. Hundreds of visitors, which might outnumber beachgoers of Kollam, throng the place near Eravipuram every day to have a close look at the dredger washed ashore in a recent sea surge. The ship Hansita is now on a long wait for salvation from the sand floor to the deep waters.

Highly placed sources from the harbour engineering department said, it was the responsibility of the shipowners to tug her off which is indefinitely delaying. Its anchor has got trapped deep inside the sand bed, and the ship authorities have started repairing the anchor machinery to lift it off. Raising the anchor will be easier if tried from inside the ship, experts say, rather than using a tug or crane from outside.

The owners have informed the port authorities that a tug had been hired from Mumbai to pull it back to deep seas, which sources, dismiss as a pretext to indefinitely delay till the anchoring mechanism is repaired. The salvage groups that are capable of lifting the ship from sand bed have demanded huge sums, which is impossible for the port authorities to bear.

Technical issues have made the ship to anchor near Kollam port since 2013, caused by the owners not paying port wharfage charges that had then exceeded Rs 40 lakh. The local people raising protests demanding its immediate removal from the shore have also turned headache for the authorities. Hansita is a Chinese ship brought to Kollam by the Indian company Megha shipping on March 26, 2013. It had made a contract of 25 days with the port, but the time exceeded made a huge burden of wharfage charges for its owners.