06/09/2026
A 90,000 Ton Ship Drifted Along the Coast for Days With Nobody Aboard
The Kowloon Bridge was a 965-foot ore-bulk-oil carrier, twice the length of a football stadium, running from Quebec to the Clyde in November 1986 with 160,000 tonnes of iron ore in her holds. She developed cracking in her main deck during the Atlantic crossing and put into Bantry Bay for shelter. Then her anchor gave way and her steering gear failed, and with a full gale running and waves reaching sixty feet, RAF helicopters lifted all 28 of her crew off. They left her engine running astern. For days after that a ship the size of a small town drifted along the West Cork coast with nobody aboard, and people onshore watched her pass like something out of a story. On the morning of 24 November she struck the reef at the Stags near Toe Head and stopped there, impaled.
Local fishermen were the first to reach her. Colin Barnes and his crew climbed aboard the following morning and found every light in the ship still burning and not a soul anywhere. They went down into the engine room and could hear the water coming in and the steel hull tearing itself apart around them. She broke up and sank in early December, spilling well over a thousand tonnes of fuel oil onto the Cork coastline, killing hundreds of seabirds and wrecking the local fishing season. She was fully insured and nobody was ever held to account, and Cork County Council and its ratepayers ended up carrying the cost of the clean-up. She lies now in 20 to 118 feet of water and is one of the largest wreck dives in the world. There is a harder question underneath all of it. Her sister ship was the MV Derbyshire, lost with all hands in 1980, and people have asked ever since whether these ships were sound in the first place.
CTTO
