"Captain, we have already mentioned full speed. The current speed is 26 knots, heading 255, 15 nautical miles away from Lanfang Island."
Half an hour after the ship left the port, Gu Kun and his sister walked into the wheelhouse to inspect the situation, and Chen Li reported to him truthfully.
A survey ship is a survey ship, and it is much faster than a fishing boat. Gu Kun's fishing boats can only reach 20 knots no matter how fast they go.
Fishing boats all use diesel engines, but this survey boat uses gas turbines. The difference in power type is there, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Gu Kun looked around the environment and said expressionlessly: "Speed up a little bit and try to see the true top speed of this ship."
Chen Li was a little worried: "No matter how hard we try, we can only reach 28 knots or 29 knots at most. This ship will never be able to reach 30 knots. What if we continue to drive at the highest speed and the ship is damaged?"
Gu Kun was very confident: "Don't worry, if you can't see it after trying it for two hours, the damage will be mine."
Chen Li said no more and followed the order.
The ship began to increase speed again and was expected to reach 28 knots in 10 minutes.
Gu Pan followed him to study. When he was far away, he asked his brother alone: "Is this necessary?"
Gu Kun subconsciously looked around before replying: "If necessary, if we encounter an Indonesian fishery administration boat, it is best for us to run away and negotiate less. If we can drive two or three knots faster, we will have more leverage and be prepared."
After just a few words, Gu Pan felt that the atmosphere was getting tense.
After all, fishing for boats in other countries' exclusive economic zones is a difficult matter to discuss in detail. If you can avoid it, avoid it.
After sailing for another three hours, Gu Kun reconfirmed his position. The ship had arrived on the ocean 90 nautical miles away from the Lanfang Islands, 60 nautical miles away from the Temeran Islands in Indonesia, and 70 nautical miles away from Singkawang Port in Indonesia.
Legally speaking, the territorial waters of all countries are 12 nautical miles wide, so this is not the territorial sea of any country. However, if an exclusive economic zone is designated, this place is 20 nautical miles closer to Indonesia, so there should be no objection.
"Slow down the ship's speed, release the towed active sonar, and conduct precise positioning." Gu Kun gave the order through the intercom in the captain's cabin.
Even if the coordinates were accurately memorized in the previous life, for things like fishing a boat, the sea is vast and you still have to reposition yourself when you arrive at the specific location.
According to international practice, many of the work of fishing in foreign exclusive economic zones must be registered with the host country. The registration accuracy requirement is generally a square area with a side length of 3 nautical miles. In other words, the first discoverer
, you can request the exclusive protection of the salvage rights of this nine square nautical miles of sea area after obtaining a license, and the time period is generally not more than half a year.
The information that Gu Kun remembered from his previous life also came from Indonesian records. The boat on the bottom of the sea at this moment was originally supposed to be fished out in 1999 by the Breton thief Michel Hatcher.
According to the information, this was a medium-sized merchant ship sailed by the Spanish from Jiading Port to Jakarta in the 18th century. At that time, the Dutch East India Company had controlled most of the routes in the southern part of the Spice Islands, and had relatively strong penetration in the South China Sea. Therefore, the Spanish were forced to operate it themselves.
When ships return to Europe from the Philippines, they have to take a detour and go south along the coast of Vietnam, because the Dutch are relatively weak in the offshore waters of Vietnam.
Note: "Jiading Port" is the name of the port in southern Vietnam in ancient times. It is roughly equivalent to the later Saigon and has nothing to do with Jiading in China. Anyone who has played in the Age of Discovery should know that there is this port in Southeast Asia.
Because the accuracy recorded in the data source has an error of three nautical miles. So when Gu Kun arrived at the scene, he had to use high-precision sonar again to accurately define where the ship was located within 100 meters of these three nautical miles.
After dozens of minutes of repeated snooping and investigation, Gu Kun finally confirmed the specific location.
In the captain's cabin, he calmly ordered through the intercom: "Go south-southwest for another three and a half chains, and anchor two chains ahead of time."
"Roger, right rudder 215, idle forward." Chen Li replied in the wheelhouse.
"Received, prepare to drop anchor." Long Wu also confirmed the anchor operation instructions.
"One chain" is originally a unit of distance in navigation, which is equal to one-tenth of a nautical mile, which is 185 meters, or 01 minutes of equatorial latitude.
Note: One nautical mile is 1852 meters. Many people think that this number has zeros and wholes, so they think it is an imperial unit and reject its use, but in fact it is not. The nautical mile is an international unit, and its original meaning is "1 minute of latitude at the equator."
"Distance", that is, divide the earth's circumference of 40,000 kilometers by 360 degrees, and then divide it by 60 minutes per degree. If you are interested, you can click on the calculator and the calculation will be 1852 meters.
However, with the evolution of navigation technology, many ships designed the length of their anchor chains into whole chain units, which helped to control the final precise stopping position after anchoring in advance.
The principle of the anchor is that if you hinge it from directly above the anchor, you can easily lift the anchor. However, if you drag it far away laterally and tighten it, the anchor will hook the seabed and drag the ship tightly. If you want to retrieve it,
To anchor, the boat must be sailed back to directly above the original anchor point.
To put it figuratively, it's like when a farmer's plow is inserted into the soil, it's very laborious for you to pull it sideways, and it won't be able to move until it hits a big rock. But if you lift the plow up, you can easily lift it up.
At this time, Gu Kun used the method of calculating the length of the anchor chain in advance and setting the anchor accurately, so as to accurately control the final stop position of his ship, just above the sunken ship, which was very clean and neat.
After arriving at the point, Gu Kun put on his diving equipment and said, "Long Wu, can you do it? It's probably more than 100 meters here. You can dive down with me to investigate. We may need to install a breaker, and I can't operate it alone."
"No problem, boss, it's up to me." Long Wu agreed quickly, and then got into the water.
This time, Gu Kun came prepared to salvage the merchant ship, so he would never be satisfied with salvaging boxes of things. He had made a plan to salvage the ship's hull in sections.
If the ship is salvaged together, the usual method is to insert large self-inflating pontoons into the sunken ship.
This kind of pontoon has a hollow cable tube at one end, which is connected to the salvage ship. There is an air bag inside the tube that is initially suppressed, so it can sink into the sea at first.
After the installation is in place, you can either rely on the compressor of the ship on the sea to inflate the pontoon through the connecting pipe.
Or you can activate the original gas in the buoy to produce chemical agents. The chemical reaction produces a large amount of gas and fills the air bag with the buoy.
Such buoys can theoretically provide 1 ton of buoyancy per cubic meter of volume. Installing a few more can greatly reduce the output power pressure of the salvage ship's own winch.
This time, Gu Kun bought dozens of large pontoons in advance, with a diameter of nearly one meter and a length of three to four meters. Two people were required to install them.
Each tube can provide 3 tons of rated buoyancy.
In addition, ancient sunken ships are all made of wood, and the wood itself is lighter than water, so as long as there is an additional buoyancy of 30% of the rated displacement, it is enough to fish the ship out.
With a reserve buoyancy of 150 tons, it is no problem to salvage a 500-ton wooden boat. If the weight exceeds 500 tons, you can also rely on the power of the winch on the salvage ship to provide part of the force.
The winch power of Gu Kun's ship, when the main engine is not running and as much power as possible is supplied to the winch, can be equal to that of a heavy-duty crane on land. It is so simple and crude.
The principle sounds simple, but in actual operation, it is a lot of trouble.
Gu Kun and Long Wu carefully explored the water for several hours, and first encountered a thorny problem: the hull of the ship was relatively complete. When the ship sank, except for a section in the middle that was cracked, the rest was intact.
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This makes it difficult to choose the installation location of the pontoon.
There are no useful underwater wired intercoms these days, so Long Wu can only use the light of his headlamp to communicate technical movements with his boss in sign language.
"Shall we put half of the empty cylinder through this hole?"
Gu Kun waved his hand, and then responded with a tipping gesture: "No, the counterweight is unstable and will tip over when it is lifted up."
One of the keys to salvaging the pontoon is to ensure that the stress on all corners of the sunken ship is stable. Otherwise, once it overturns after being lifted for tens of meters, the pontoon will jump directly back to the water, and the sunken ship will crash back to the seabed, and maybe the porcelain inside will be broken again.
Crush half of it.
Long Wu was helpless when Gu Kun made a gesture and asked him to tie heavy-duty hooks to certain positions on the other side of the hull.
Long Wu was puzzled and couldn't explain it in detail underwater, so he could only just follow it.
It turned out that Gu Kun planned to make several large holes on the other side of the symmetrical slope. He ensured that when the float was installed, it would be able to bear symmetrical forces on both sides and lift it up steadily.
The two gave up the plan of installing the pontoons first, threw the uninflated tubes aside and left them on the seabed, and then focused on setting hooks at selected locations on the sunken ship.
After everything was done, it took them 4 hours to slowly surface and return to the ship.
Gu Pan then came up with the two of them, gave them hot towels and ginger tea, and arranged for them to take a shower, eat, rest and massage.
While serving his brother's meal, Gu Pan asked: "You have been busy for a long time and you haven't loaded a single tube?"
Gu Kun was speechless for a while: "It can't be that easy. I just brought two tubes down just to try my luck. In reality, nine out of ten ships encountered will not be so symmetrical.
Let’s get here first today, we have already tied a lot of hooks on the boat. According to the tightness of the hook ropes, we broke part of the ship’s planks, and then we went down to confirm.”
The hooks he laid were all connected to cables that were as strong as anchor chains, and the other end was connected to the big ship. Therefore, by pulling hard with the big ship, he could break several holes in the selected location of the sunken ship.
If the sunken ship is too big, you can also use this technique to tear the sunken ship apart first and then fish it out in sections.
There is nothing easy about making money as long as you don't cheat. Three hundred and sixty lines, there are difficulties in doing so.
Gu Kun just sat for a while and regained some strength. Chen Li in the control room brought another piece of bad news: "Captain, we seem to have been discovered by the patrol. There is a speedboat approaching us. It is less than 20 nautical miles away."
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Do you want to avoid it first?
Gu Kun's thoughts were racing and he felt that it was not the right time yet.
"Don't be afraid, we haven't started the official salvage operation yet, it's easy to hide it. You step up, tear up all the places where the hooks are hooked, and take all the suspicious equipment that will reveal the flaws back to the ship. If anyone comes to ask, I will come forward.
It’s manageable.”
Things like escaping should only be considered after you have stolen goods and cannot be used lightly.
There is nothing dirty now, so what are you afraid of?
When I met someone who came to inquire, I said that I was surveying the new international waterway in accordance with the law. You bite me!