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  • 2008 June 16

    Russian tall ship Shtandart struck off the register of ships

    Dmitry Atlashkin, head of the North-West board of GosMorRechNadzor, about striking of the Shtandart tall ship off the register of ships:

    - In the mid 90-ies a group headed by Vladimir Martus decided to reconstruct a ship of Peter the Great's times, which seemed to be a good idea at first sight. The sample was a 26-cannon frigate Shtandart. No sooner said than done. The work started.

    However the initiators failed to recon with the fact that a replica of an old-time vessel built without regard to current safety rules may not be considered as a safe ship.

    The mankind has made great strides for the three centuries which caused the problems with approval of the project as a “historical masterpiece”. None of Russian classification societies dared to approve the project of Martus and his associates.

    So the Standart was built without obligatory technical surveillance by experts of the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping (RMRS) or Russian River Register (RRR). Thus both Registers flatly refused to classify this pseudo-historic replica as a vessel. Having no classification documents the vessel may not be registered with a state register.

    The Standart owners decided to go round about. In 2004, they managed to talk the State Inspectorate for Small Vessels of the Leningrad region (SISV) into registration of the Shtandart into the vessel register of SISV.

    It is important, however, that the frigate did not meet SISV requirements to engine and passenger capacity. SISV registered multiple violations of its requirements and Shtandart was struck off the ship’s book in spring 2007. It threatened the vessel’s participation in “Scarlet Sails” – the event annually held in St. Petersburg at prom night. The Shtandart used to be a key element of the festival funded by municipal and federal budgets.

     

    Thus St. Petersburg authorities asked Russian River Register to classify the vessel so that it could be registered with the State Register of Shipping.

     

    The Shtandart was classified by the North-West board of Russian River Register in June 2007 as a sail & motor vessel of special purpose class Э - О-2 Пр. The navigation area specified for the vessel was the Baltic Sea – the Gulf of Finland to the east from Lomonosov-Kotlin-Zelenogorsk line and a 10-mile costal area from Zelenogorsk to Vyborg; navigation period – from May till October inclusive.

    On June 20, 2007, two days before the festival, the vessel was registered with the State Register of Shipping and the ship fell under the jurisdiction of the RF Ministry of Transport.

    SISV requirements are quite liberal while Russian maritime legislation is much stricter.  

    On June 4 2007, Mr. Martus provided the Federal Border Service with the cancelled vessel’s certificate of SISV and left for a long foreign voyage having violated all the rules and requirements.

    Following this the North-West board of Russian River Register cancelled the vessel’s certificate on July 27, 2007, which meant a ban for vessel operation. The board demanded thorough examination of the vessel as by that time the Shtandart was in the dock only once in her 9-year life.

    On May 10, 2008, Mr. Martus commits another forgery having sailed the vessel to the Gulf of Finland as a non-self-propelled barge. On

    On May 16, the River Register struck the vessel off the books thus changing the status of Shtandart – she ceased to be a vessel hence she was then struck off the state register of vessels.
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