A dredger vessel is aground in Ramsgate’s outer harbour.
The vessel appears to have become stuck on a sandbank.
The crew has not called for assistance from the RNLI and will likely wait for high tide to shift the craft.
Ramsgate mayor Trevor Shonk spotted the mishap and caught it on camera. He said: “The crew seemed ok. Hopefully they can dig themselves out.”
It’s not ‘run aground’. It’s moored and as it’s flat-bottomed it can quite happily settle at low tide, and will simply float again as the tide rises.
That sandbank has been there for years i am surprised this has not happened before .When will those responsible for the harbour do something positive about it?
I think you’ll find that’s exactly what the dredger was doing. I watched it for a couple of hours from the Royal Harbour Brasserie dredging exactly that sand bank. I would imagine they moored on it through low tide so they could continue dredging in the same place on high tide. Why do people think it had run aground?
I think technically it has run aground,but as has been said it is designed not to come to harm if it does run aground.If its cooling system relies on seawater then that might be a problem with blocked filters and silting up of any heat exchangers. I cannot see how it can load safely at that angle, but in any case it can kedge itself off using an anchor or wait till the tide turns.Anyway when I last looked it was OK.It is somewhat minute for the job in hand as it is akin to using a pen knife to cut down a forest.
If a boat is moored to a jetty in a drying basin (as the dredger was), technically it is not “running aground” but “taking the ground”. The former is an accident, the latter is deliberate. I think the dredger crew knew exactly what they were doing.
It would be nice to hear from someone In authority as to why it has not been dredged be for now