Are cannibal rats heading for Bournemouth?
Abandoned ship ridden with rodents could hit south coast
Experts fear that strong winds may have carried a ghost ship full of cannibal rats across the Atlantic, and the cruise ship and her grisly cargo may be about to crash into the south coast.
Ever since she broke free from a tow line off the Canadian coast in February last year, no one has known the whereabouts of the MV Lyubov Orlova. With no crew except the hundreds of disease-ridden rats, whose only source of food has been eating each other, there has been no way to track the drifting ship.
According to The Independent, two signals picked up from lifeboats that fell away from the Lyubov Orlova on 12 and 23 March last year showed that she had already made it two thirds of the way across the Atlantic and was heading east.
The Telegraph claims that, if the ghost ship does indeed make landfall, the most likely locations are the west coasts of Scotland or Ireland, or the Devon and Cornwall coasts. Chris Reynolds of the Irish Coastguard told The Independent that the ship was unlikely to have sunk, and more than likely was still out on the waters.
The ship was seized in St John’s, Newfoundland in September 2010 during a row over debts of $251,000. In February 2012 she was sold for scrap, and was being towed to the Dominican Republic to be broken up when she broke free from her tow line in January 2013.
Canadian authorities originally regained control of the drifting vessel, but on 1 February decided to release it again when it was far enough away from their coast not to pose a threat to their offshore oil installations.
Belgian-based searcher Pim de Rhoodes told the Plymouth Herald: “She is floating around there somewhere. There will be a lot of rats and they eat each other.”