After opening her hull on ‘O.G.Rock’, Oceanic Grandeur was taken about six miles east of the accident site and anchored, where her forward welldeck dipped underwater as her ruptured tanks filled and she listed to port. As luck would have it, the tanker Leslie J. Thompson was passing outbound in ballast a few hours later and was able to warp alongside and relieve the stricken ship of her oil. Nevertheless, 250,000 gallons of crude managed to escape into the sea.
  My Sygna article (Afloat, May 2007) made passing reference to the tanker Oceanic Grandeur, whose holing in the Torres Strait produced Queensland’s biggest oil spill.
  The following looks at the circumstances of her accident, my main references being the Queensland Harbours and Marine compilation of facts and figures edited by Winifred Davenport, M.I.E, Aust., M.R.I.N.A. and Captain John C.H. Foley’s book, Reef Pilots. Arriving in the area soon after, I also collected a lot of anecdotal material from friends involved in everything from lighthouse servicing to pearl farm operating.
  At 0155 hours on 3rd March 1970, the fully laden 55,000-ton tanker Oceanic Grandeur picked up her pilot, Captain Arthur Wish, off Goods Island then continued eastwards into the Prince of Wales Channel, close north of Thursday Island.
  Restricted by reefs and islands, she was obliged to remain within the confines of a safe navigation area indicated by lines on the chart (page 21) and aided by lateral buoys and leading lights before steering southeast to bring up the east coast of Queensland. She would then traverse the full length of the Great Barrier Reef’s Inner Route to Brisbane.
  Manned by a Chinese crew under the command of Captain F. T. Gar, a Taiwanese citizen holding a Liberian Masters Certificate, this was the vessel’s 58th visit to Queensland waters carrying Indonesian crude oil. Drawing 38ft 8ins (11.8m), the tanker was a well-managed ship and the pilot was a 34-year man, over 16 of which were in the pilot service.
  Added to this, a flat sea and clear sky made any thoughts of imminent disaster – had they occurred to anyone – seem quite absurd under the circumstances.
  With her engines set on 70rpm, producing a speed of 10.36 knots, and bridge controls on manual, the autopilot was disengaged and the wheel handed to a quartermaster as Oceanic Grandeur steamed up-channel. Towards Wednesday Island the pilot reset the course to bring up the East Strait Island Leading Lights to pass between Herald and Alert Patches, opening them to the south slightly to avoid a 35ft (10.7m) shoal amongst Alert Patches. This was standard practice with deeply laden ships as they navigated one of the shallowest sections of the entire Great Barrier Reef route.
  When midway between Herald and Alert Patches, with the leading lights still open and only one hour twenty minutes into her pilotage, Oceanic Grandeur ripped her hull open on a submerged object, merely shuddering slightly to the impact, after which inertia carried her well beyond the impact point with no noticeable loss of speed. Slow ahead was called for then the pilot ordered her to be taken six miles into relatively reef-free water to be anchored.
  At anchor, the sea lapped over the forward welldeck as the bow dipped and a port list developed with oil spillage becoming apparent. Damage-assessment was urgently needed. The Pilot Station on Thursday Island was advised and by 1000 hours a relief pilot with customs and health officials were aboard, followed by local shipwright Col Jones and several divers. A day later representatives of Ampol – the cargo’s owners, and the ship’s owners were put aboard along with state government marine officials.
  With extraordinary co-incidental luck, the Ampol-owned tanker Leslie J. Thompson, sailing north in ballast to Indonesia, arrived within a few hours of the accident and dropped anchor close by, then warped alongside the stricken Oceanic Grandeur to trans-ship her oil and deliver it to Brisbane. Two trips were needed to complete this task after which Ampol submitted a salvage claim that was rejected after protracted hearings.
  The lighthouse service vessel Wallach, skippered by my good friend Len Foxcroft, was fitted with oil dispersant spraying equipment and dispatched from Thursday Island for environmental reasons and also to provide on-site living quarters for well-known salvage diver Joe Engwirda and his team.
  Both Len and I are a little hazy on the next point, but Joe either tried to dive through the oil inside the ship’s tanks or through oozing sludge to one side of the vessel, but either way he found the oil softened the air hoses to a dangerous degree and was obliged to dive down the ‘clean’ side of the ship to enter the tank through her damaged bottom plating.
  Joe and his team did a remarkable job of patching the torn hull with thru-bolted inner and outer plates after which she went under her own steam to Singapore for dry-docking.
  But not before Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen visited the scene hoping – it was loudly proclaimed by conservationists – to find no environmental damage and thus vindicate his dogged determination to issue oil-drilling licences within the Great Barrier Reef.
  To the contrary, Oceanic Grandeur would prove pivotal in the subsequent formation of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Ironically, this was a turning point for hardpressed conservationists who had battled governments for many years to respect and protect the reef.
  250,000 gallons of black sludge escaped from the tanker’s belly, but apparently dissipated within days as the fast Torres Strait tides carried it away with minimal impact on nearby reefs. However, as we will see, claims that it had no ecological impact whatsoever were somewhat under-stated.
  A few months later I sailed into the Torres Strait for the fifth time in nine years, by then as keen to see old friends again as to explore its islands and reefs. Most fishermen, crayfish divers and cultured pearl farmers of my acquaintance had firm opinions about the environmental impact, declaring it to have been a disaster.
  But absolute fact was hard to garner because pearl farms, in particular, were already doing it tough before Oceanic Grandeur came along, with at least one closing down soon after (I had the interesting experience of rescuing a castaway from a Torres Strait island after he had been taken out to inspect a defunct pearl farm’s machinery with a view to buying it all.
  His transport failed to return, obliging him to forage for six weeks before I spotted him waving frantically from a beach. He had ‘toughed it out’ on mangos, paw-paw and fish). 

  The only pollution I personally found was at an anchorage a few miles from the castaway’s island where I was surprised to find a beach still filthy with sludge many months later, as if some of the 250,000 gallons had migrated south rather than east and west out of the Torres Strait as everyone seemed to think.
  The true extent of environmental damage after Queensland’s biggest oil spill may never be known, but the cause of the problem has long since gone. Having been missed by a wire sweep in 1946 by HMAS Challenger, divers located and destroyed the rock with explosives in 1978. In hindsight, a number of Torres Strait pilots recalled a degree of vibration when passing over the area but, miraculously, deeply laded ships had been missing it for decades. It is possible, geologists say, that the pinnacle of rock could have been squeezed up through the earth’s crust during that period.
  Perhaps the most encouraging outcome of the whole sticky business was the way in which it proved conclusively that stricken vessels can be anchored for rapid-response within the Great Barrier Reef, but not if they used the outer route where they would either sink in deep water (from where their cargos would drift onto the reefs) or, if the ships themselves drifted onto the reefs, their chance of salvage would be negligible.
  As long as humankind depends on imports and exports, it cannot be denied that ships offer the most economical means of transport and, as outrageous as it is seems to many detractors, the Great Barrier Reef’s inner route is superior to the outer route, both for the savings in fuel and the reduced impact in the event of another disaster.