A rundown of gCaptain’s 50 most viewed stories from 2014. Enjoy!

The Frying Pan Tower B&B is a former U.S. Coast Guard Light Station located 32 miles south of Bald Head, North Carolina and, in July, it took a direct hit from Hurricane Arthur. The owner was aboard to capture video of the storm.

On 26 May 2014, a Chinese fishing vessel chased down and ran over Vietnamese fishing boat off the coast of Vietnam, approximately 17 nautical miles from where China’s Haiyang Shiyou 981 drilling rig was operating.

The MV CSCL Globe was delivered by Hyundai Heavy Industries to China Shipping Container Line in November. With a TEU capacity of 19,000 TEUs, the ship – one of five in the same series – beat out Maersk Lines’ 18,000+ TEU Triple-E’s for the containership with the highest cargo carrying capacity, but it is unlikely that the record will be held for long.

In January, LEGO’s 1,500 Maersk Triple-E kit hit the shelves (and sold out very quickly).

Cameras rolled as a SWATCH-hulled pilot boat in Emben, Germany made its approach just a little too hot.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta sent a message to drug smugglers by making a big spectacle out of blowing up the ship at the center of a record-breaking drug bust at the port of Mombasa. Drugs are bad.

The Brig Unicorn, an iconic two-masted, square-rigged tall ship famously featured in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, sank off Saint Lucia in May.

41. Maersk Containership in Bremerhaven Allision

In February, strong winds caused the 8,700 TEU containership Maersk Laberinto to collide with another Maersk containership, as well three cranes, causing millions of dollars in damage. In February, strong winds caused the 8,700 TEU containership Maersk Laberinto to collide with another Maersk containership, as well three cranes, causing millions of dollars in damage.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the (former) world’s biggest containerships.

A SUNY Maritime College cadet used his GoPro camera during this year’s Summer Sea Term to capture the training ship underway from a very unique perspective.

Bank effect strikes again!

You can’t make this stuff up.

That’s the Captain on the bulbous bow… not naked.

Greenpeace was back to their same old antics this year, this time off the Canary Islands.

The current world’s largest containership by TEU carrying capacity, CSCL Globe, also set the record for the largest marine engine ever – standing a whopping 17.2 meters tall.

An amazing video shows the moment Team Vestas Wind crashed their 65-foot racing yacht into a charted reef in the middle of the Indian Ocean during the Volvo Ocean Race.

MOL Comfort disaster, considered the worst containership loss in history, continued to make headlines in 2014.

Some new video posted to Youtube gave us the first good look at the massive Pieter Schelte, a unique catamaran-like vessel that will soon be used to remove decommissioned oil rigs in the North Sea.

What an amazing feat of engineering.

EPIC!

In October 2013, American ship captain, Captain Wren Thomas, was kidnapped by Nigerian pirates after they stormed his vessel, the Edison Chouest Offshore vessel ‘C-Retriever’. In this exclusive interview with gCaptain’s Rob Almeida, Captain Thomas tells the amazing story of the kidnapping and 18-days of captivity in drug-filled pirate lair.

Totally fake. Still hilarious.

In March, The Russian Navy intentionally sank the Kara-class cruiser, Ochakov, at the entrance to Lake Donuzlav in order to block Ukrainian Navy ships.

In June, the World Shipping Council released an update its figures first released in 2011, which have been widely accepted as the best estimate for how many containers are really lost at sea each year. While it’s not the 10,000 commonly quoted by the media, the real number may surprise you.

The MOL Comfort disaster continued to make headlines in 2014 with the Investigative Panel on Large Container Ship Safety, set up to investigate the incident, releasing its final report in September

Lifeboat accidents are no laughing matter, but it was hard not to on this one.

In May, a service helicopter carrying workers to Transocean’s ‘Jack Ryan’ drillship off the coast of Ghana crashed into the ocean, killing four people.

Skip to 2:30 for the action.

The Spanish-flagged MV Luno split in two after becoming pinned against a breakwater in southern France. It was all captured on a 4-minute video.

Makes you seasick just watching this.

And the number 1 most viewed story of 2014 was…

Cameras rolled as two fully laden containerships, the MV Colombo Express (right) and MV Maersk Tanjong, collided in the north end of the Suez Canal. Nobody knows what really happened, but the leading theories are bank effect, a stuck rudder, or payback over a pack of stolen smokes.









AUTHOR

Mike Schuler

Mike works as COO and Partner at gCaptain.com. He can be reached via email at mike@gcaptain.com. Follow him on Twitter @MikeSchuler







