Bulk carrier COSCO Jinggangshan IMO 9418315, dwt 31898, built 2010, flag HK, owner COSCO (Photo from www.shipspotting.com)
The Gibraltar Maritime Administration has launched an investigation after a Chinese cargo ship bumped into a tanker used for floating storage by a Gibraltar bunker operator.
The incident was minor and the ships sustained only cosmetic damage. One source said the ships had “touched”.
But officials were keen to establish what went wrong in order to avoid any such incident in the future.
The vessel Jing Gang Shan, operated by the Chinese state-owned company COSCO, had called at Gibraltar for bunkers and was sailing out of the bay early in the afternoon after taking on fuel.
In doing so, the vessel appears to have made contact with the tanker Aeolos, which is used as storage by the Greek company Aegean Bunkering and was anchored in the bay.
The Chinese vessel was ordered to return to Gibraltar and detained by the maritime authority pending the outcome of its investigation.
The incident comes just months after the port’s new vessel traffic monitoring system came into operation.
The system is designed to prevent precisely this sort of incident from occurring, hence the need to investigate why the Chinese ship came so close to another anchored vessel.