History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications |
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The Rescue of SS Lakemba |
David writes: Retriever in those days spent most of her time in Suva Harbour - either tied up alongside or swinging round the hook. We very rarely had anything to do, apart from routine ship’s maintenance (and drinking a lot of beer), so the call for help was a welcome change to do something useful. It wasn’t very far for us to go.
CS Retriever’s Ship’s Movements log provides a very brief account of the rescue: 4th October 1967: Left Suva to assist passenger vessel on reef close Suva. These extracts from a newspaper account at the time give more details:
The colour photographs below are ones that I took of the rescue; the aerial ones are courtesy of the Fiji Times.
A few days after the rescue, SS Lakemba slipped off the reef and sank. It's fortunate that the Lakemba’s captain had the presence of mind to keep the engines going ahead after she struck the reef, otherwise she would have slipped off and sunk quite quickly—possibly with loss of life. The reefs off Suva harbour were at the time a magnet for small Korean fishing boats and they quite often would drive onto the fringing reef during the night. Our morning scans of the horizon might see one or two high and dry, waiting for help. Usually they would float off with the tide but some had to dragged off by a tug. It’s amazing how far onto the reef they would be from deep water! This video on CS Retriever (5), released by PK Porthcurno in 2019, also describes the rescue: David Howard also recalls that there was a story going around about SS Lakemba having a deck cargo of a couple of Volkswagen Beetles that had floated off and were bobbing around on the ocean. Certainly it had a deck cargo of timber and there were lots of that seen floating after she sank. I think the Beetles were on top of the timber. In 2014 the Fiji Times published an update on the story of SS Lakemba. Here are two brief extracts:
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Last revised: 22 June, 2022 |
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