From The Metro:
A sixth body has been discovered on the stricken Costa Concordia cruise liner, Italian officials have confirmed, amid reports the ship's captain may have been 'showing off' when steering the vessel too close to rocks on Friday evening...
Prosecutors said they were investigating claims Schettino abandoned the ship with passengers still being rescued. The liner started taking on water and listing badly after rocks tore a 50m gash in its hull. Schettino blamed nautical charts for the disaster – claiming the reef had not been marked.
"We were navigating approximately 300 metres from the rocks," he told Italian television. "There shouldn’t have been such a rock."
Schettino’s lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, said the captain had executed a ‘brilliant manoeuvre’ in steering the ship closer to the shore so people could be rescued. He added: "I would to like to say that several hundred people owe their lives to the skill of the commander of the Costa Concordia."
See also: The driver brought the speeding car to a halt by parking it against a tree.
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3 comments:
There may possibly be a good point in what he said: the skipper, having ripped his ship open on one set of rocks, then steered inshore to avoid her sinking in deep water - it also meant a shorter trip to shore for the lifeboats.
On the other hand, you might contemplate this blog post:
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2956830097495837473&postID=2062639643982999128
R, yes, this one is already back to where he started.
D, so how come the ship came to rest on the rocks which ripped it open in the first place? Or did he skilfully steer it from one set of rocks to another?
The latter, according to this morning's Telegraph, which seems to think that he may have hit the second set while aiming at the harbour. (Whether the harbour would have been big enough to admit a huge cruise ship I've no idea.)
Since my worst ever disaster at the helm of a boat was losing a net from a trawler, I am not the man to opine on the antics in Italy. (At least I steered my course as instructed, so the fault was my skipper's, as he readily acknowledged.)
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