The most recent issue of Vanity Fair has an article on Nick Sloane, the salvage master who refloated the Costa Concordia and oversaw the towing of the ship to Genoa. Wonderfully, the article is written by William Langewiesche, author of The Outlaw Sea and this article on piracy off the coast of Somalia.
Sloane is a local boytjie who lives in Somerset West when not abroad doing salvage work. He agreed to talk to Langewiesche for this article on condition that they did not discuss the Costa Concordia (I imagine he was utterly exhausted and sick of that subject). Many of the salvage jobs that Sloane has worked on are off the Cape coast – notable examples dealt with in this article are the wreck of the MV Treasure (now a dive site) in Table Bay, and the Ikan Tanda which ran aground off Scarborough in 2001.
… one of the greatest seafarers at work today is neither a naval commander nor an old-salt merchant mariner but a certain marine salvage master with a taste for chaos and a genius for improvisation. He is a burly South African, aged 53, by the name of Captain Nick Sloane. His job is to intervene where other captains have failed, and to make the best of ships that are sinking, burning, breaking apart, or severely aground. Usually those same ships are threatening to leak bunker fuel—the sludge that powers them—along with crude oil or other toxins in quantities that could poison the environment for years to come. Sloane boards the ships with small teams—by helicopter from overhead, or by Zodiac from oceangoing tugs—and once he arrives he stays aboard and fights, sometimes for weeks at a stretch.
Do not be put off by the fact that the article doesn’t deal with the Costa Concordia salvage at all – I imagine we’ll see a book about that in a couple of years’ time.
Read the full article here. It’s a fascinating read.
