World-class maritime centre prepares to set sail

The preparation for the grand opening of a new tourism and education icon for the New South Wales Hunter region is in its final stages in Australia.

The Maritime Centre, Lee Wharf, Newcastle, will open its doors on Sunday, October 12, 2008. The National Maritime Festival, to be held on the same day, will herald the opening of the new Centre, a project which has taken shape under Project Coordinator Evelyn King and the Maritime Centre’s president, the Hon. Peter Morris. The new Maritime Centre has a picturesque backdrop of the working port with some of the world’s largest ships passing by, and the site on which it is built is a highly significant, heritage listed, industrial Federation building in the heart of the newest major tourist and cultural precinct. Ms King said that the activities of the Centre would bring home to people the vital role that the port and its forbears played in the development of the community and region. The site was originally constructed in an era before the advent of rubber-tyred trucks and was then known as a “state of the art” sea to land transport interchange. “They will show how this great world port was built by our predecessors,” said Mr Morris.

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Double Launching at HDW-Gaarden

On September 5, two 2,700 TEU container ships were launched at HDW-Gaarden in Kiel, a company of ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems.

The two container ships are the second and the third of a series of three ships for the Hermann Buss shipping line in Leer. The MAIN TRADER was named by Gabriela Meyer, the wife of Jens-Uwe Meyer, financial consultant to the shipping line. The Mosel Trader was named by Dr. Ulrike Schäfer, the wife of Dr. Matthias Schäfer of the Buss family. Both ships will be chartered to the Chinese T.S. Lines Limited headquartered in Hong Kong and will operate in Asian waters. The ships will be delivered in mid-September and mid-December 2008. The container ships have been built in compliance with the rules and regulations of Germanischer Lloyd.

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Controversial Chilean ship in Kochi, India

Chilean Navy’s La Esmeralda, the second largest sail ship in the world and a relic of Augusto Pinochet’s repressive regime in the 1970s, sailed into the port of Kochi on Friday morning as part of its 45,000-km world training cruise, touching 13 ports.

Currently a sail training ship in the Chilean Navy and a marine architectural wonder, the Esmeralda arrived from Alexandria in Egypt after 21 days’ voyage. It will set sail for Cape Town in South Africa on September 9. Even as it set out on its 53rd voyage from the port of Valparaiso on May 4, there were widespread protests over its role in the Operation Condor, a plan to annihilate political rivals, carried out by Pinochet after the military coup in Chile in 1973. The infamous condor insignia still adorns its side. Amnesty International and many other human rights organizations had earlier alleged that the ship had been used during that period as a floating prison and a torture cell, but that was never officially recognized. That, however, has not helped the skeletons from tumbling out of the ship’s board.

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