South Africa’s Salvage Superhero

No ship’s captain worthy of the name wants to sink his ship, or run it aground, but he should keep Nick Sloane’s number in his cell phone just in case.

Nick Sloane grew up in Durban, South Africa, and early on in his career, he was working for Cape Town-based shipping company Safmarine, where he rose to the position of Third Officer.
South Africa’s Cape is one of the busiest sea routes in the world, and the weather is often treacherous.
As a result, ships of various sizes and carrying a wide range of cargoes, often hazardous, regularly find themselves in trouble.
Sloan was in the Safmarine offices one day in August 1983, when they received notice that a Spanish supertanker, the Castillo de Bellver was in serious trouble 40km off the coast.
Following an explosion which killed a number of the crew, the survivors had abandoned the vessel which was now on fire and drifting in heavy seas.
Safmarine called for volunteers to try and rescue the situation, and Nick Sloan volunteered.
The ship, carrying a huge shipment of crude oil, had broken in two, and by the time the salvage team reached the wreck, the entire stern section had sunk, with 100,000tons of crude oil in its tanks. The sea around the forward portion of the ship was a mass of flames, which took the salvage team 2 days to extinguish.
They had no way to remove the crude oil that remained and eventually they received instructions from the South African government to tow the remains of the wreck out into deeper water and sink it.
Sloane volunteered to board the wreck and attach the tow cables. Once this was accomplished and they had reached the site where the wreck was to be sunk, Sloane again volunteered to go aboard and place the explosive charges, which eventually sent the Castillo de Bellver to the bottom.
As he watched the bow of the ship slide beneath the waves, Nick Sloan knew that he had found his calling in life.
Reaching Cape Town, he immediately requested a transfer to Safmarine’s salvage division., and over the years he was constantly on the move, and much in demand, growing his expertise, both locally and in other parts of the world.
For Nick Sloan, salvage operations, whilst both lucrative and exciting, have always been more of a calling, with the potential environmental damage from sinking ships a major factor in his motivation.
Over the years, his expertise grew and along with it his reputation as the go-to guy for the most difficult salvage operations. He was the one they called, after other salvors had written an operation off as too difficult or too dangerous.
So, when the Italian cruise liner Costa Cordia struck a submerged rock and ran aground after striking a submerged rock off Isola del Giglio, Tuscany, on January 12th 2012, Nick Sloan was the obvious choice to make the attempt to first right, and then refloat the liner, so that it could to towed to a scrapyard.
The initial preparations began 4 months after the grounding, and following 16 months of preparation, the ship was refloated in September 2013, following an operation lasting 19 hours.
Nick Sloane was subsequently awarded the German Sea Prize in 2015, for this epic feat.

For a more detailed account of Nick and his achievements, it’s worth reading the following article which appeared in Vanity Fair magazine.https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/12/nick-sloane-costa-concordia-salvage