GIANT WAVE - The Lighthouse - page 83

March 1861. The tops of the cliffs by the west landing on Eilean Mor are considerably
lower than this, varying at points approximately between 110ft to 170ft.
In addition to the battering taken by lighthouses from giant waves, there is a long list
of ships which have also suffered, and the size of the ships was no guarantee against
their being sunk by monster waves. There are several well-known examples of size-
able ships being damaged or sunk. One of the most prominent cases occurred in 1978
to a German vessel, the MS München . The München was a LASH 16 vessel (the only
one of her kind under the then West German flag) owned by the West German line
Hapag Lloyd. She was a reasonably large vessel by any standard, 44,600 tons, and was
launched on 12 May 1972 at the shipyards of Cockerill at Hoboken in Flanders, Bel-
gium and delivered on 22 September 1972. On 7 December 1978 the München depar-
ted the port of Bremerhaven, with a crew of twenty-eight, to sail for Savannah, Ge-
orgia, carrying a cargo of steel products stored in eighty-three lighters on the vessel.
She also carried a replacement nuclear reactor-vessel head for the American company
Combustion Engineering, Inc. The trip to Savannah was a regular run for the München
and the trip was to have been her sixty-second voyage. The weather ahead of the ship
was not good, there was a severe storm which had started in November and had shown
no signs of abating. However, the München had sailed through similar weather and sea
conditions previously, plus the design of LASH vessels was such that they were con-
sideredtohaveexceptionalfloatingcapabilities.Despitetheseverestorm,the München
made steady progress until just after midnight on the night of 12-13 December. The
München 's radio officer, Jörg Ernst, made a short radio communication to a colleague
named Heinz Löhmann on the German cruise ship Caribe which was a considerable
distance away, 2,400 nautical miles. In the communication which he sent on a 'chat'
frequency, Ernst stated that they were encountering bad weather and, more pertinently,
he said that there had been damage to the München. Ernst also stated the last known
position of the ship, which was some considerable distance into the Atlantic from the
Europeanmainland.Thequalityofthetransmissionwasnotgoodbutasitwassentasa
standard communication on a 'chat' frequency, the information was not passed back to
Hapag Lloyd, the München 's owners, until four days later (17 December). Three hours
after the communication from Ernst to Löhmann, partial SOS signals in Morse code
were received by a Greek freighter Marion, which in turn relayed the SOS signals to
a Soviet freighter Marya Yermolova and a West German tugboat Titan. The position
of the München given by the signals was later believed to be approximately 100 miles
(160km) away from her actual position. What added to the difficulty of getting a clear
picture of what was happening was that only parts of the signals were actually being
received. One part of the signal stated '50 degrees Starboard' which was taken to mean
a 50-degree list to Starboard.