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Thursday 22 September 2016

The Mystery of the MV Lyubov Orlova

In my last blog post concerning a ship I stated that she reminded me of a film star, well the vessel in the card below was named after a movie star, the Soviet Union's Lyubov Orlova.



You may not have heard of the actress, but you have probably heard of the vessel as she is the so called cannibal rat ghost ship that certain tabloids wanted us to believe was headed our way back in 2014.  This turned out to be false but it's not known what actually did happen to her.
MV Lyubov Orlova was built in 1976, a year after her namesake had died. She was built in Kraljevica, the oldest shipyard in the Adriatic which was then in Yugoslavia now Croatia. She was owned by the Far Eastern Shipping Company based in Vladivostok and was used for Antarctic cruises which she carried out without incident until 2006 when she ran aground at Deception Island, which itself is  home to abandoned scientific bases and might be of interest to some of you. 
The ship was taken out of service in 2010 and effectively placed under arrest. She was seized following a suit by a haulage contractor over a $251,000 debt. The 51 strong crew had not been paid for 5 months.
She was impounded at St John's in Newfoundland becoming gradually more derelict until she was sold for scrap in 2013. It was  when she was being towed away that her status as a ghost ship started. The tow line broke and the ship started to drift. As she was in international waters, there was some dispute as to whose jurisdiction she fell under and with no-one claiming responsibility the vessel continued to drift. She was sighted a couple of times in early 2013 the last time being on 12th March that year. It's not known what happened to her after that but she is believed to have sunk.
You may wonder how we can lose a 300 ft. ocean liner but she is not the only ship to have disappeared, though she is the only one, as far as I know, to have created such headline grabbing stories.
I've been searching for a card of the Lyubov Orlova since I first read those stories two years ago and I finally found one on ebay a couple of years ago. It's not the best quality but for me it's the "holy grail" of cards.
I'm not sure when it dates from but it's from the Soviet Era and published by Morflot.
    

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