Remember the Spirit of Nantucket?

That's the 207-foot cruise ship (pictured left), which, back on Nov. 8, 2007, hit a submerged object and incurred a foot-long gash in its stern while transiting the Intracoastal Waterway near Virginia Beach. The captain subsequently grounded the ship, with its 66 passengers, in the shallows to avoid having it settle on the bottom in deeper water.

It should be noted here that the Spirit of Nantucket was halfway through a 10-day cruise from Alexandria to Charleston, SC, at the time of this incident. No one was hurt, and all the passengers completed their trip by bus or were given partial refunds by the cruise-ship operator, the Seattle-based Cruise West.

Meanwhile, the cruise ship was refloated and a tug was brought in to push it to Colonna's Shipyard in Norfolk for repairs. The Coast Guard and a Virginia Beach Police boat served as escorts.

Afterward, the Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the 1,090-mile waterway from Norfolk to Miami, located a large piece of debris (see photo at right) in the area, about 4 miles north of the Pungo Ferry Bridge. They said the object had reduced the clearance for a vessel to 7.5 feet in an area where the allowed minimum is 12 feet.

When asked about what the object was, Steve Baum of the Corps offered the following explanation: "It appears to be a bulkhead" and almost certainly fell from a barge. "We're talking some trash that came from somewhere else, because there are no bulkheads in that whole area." Baum even went so far as to say he was certain it had fallen there recently, "probably in the last few days."

For what it's worth, though, I always have had an entirely different take on the object the Corps of Engineers found, which, according to them, measured 40 feet in length, stood 7 to 8 feet tall, was about 13 feet wide, and weighed approximately 30 to 40 tons. I don't, even for 5 minutes, believe that it was a bulkhead or that it fell from a passing barge. Instead, I suggest that it was a huge chunk of those old sunken barges from the oxbow you see in the accompanying lead photo of the beached cruise ship.

Why do I say that? Because it was described in the media as "fashioned mostly of solid timber and has the remnants of metal plates and spikes in it." And anyone who ever has fished around those old barges in that oxbow knows you see the same thing sticking up everywhere you turn in that area. Further, I know for a fact that chunks of those barges are always shifting around as the result of passing storms and wakes set up by all the traffic on the Intracoastal Waterway. The changes are dramatic enough from one year to the next to always make me idle through there or use my trolling motor. Only a fool runs through there on step.

Why no one, to my knowledge, ever made a connection between the object they found with those old barges in the oxbow is anyone's guess. Instead, however, most media outlets simply kept referring to it as a "big mystery," even though The Virginian-Pilot described the mass as "curving to a point, or bow, at one end." Duh? I think an appropriate saying here is, "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."

So what ever happened to Spirit of Nantucket? you may be wondering. I didn't know until today, when I did some research on the Internet.

Turns out that, following this incident, Cruise West moved the ship to their Pacific operations in early 2008. And on July 7 of that year, the renamed Spirit of Glacier Bay ran aground again (as depicted in the photo at left), this time in her namesake park (Glacier Bay National Park) at the head of Alaska's Tarr Inlet.

This time, the ill-fated cruise ship, with 24 passengers and 27 crew members, was traveling just over 1 mph when it ran aground at 7:12 a.m. on a sandbar. Spirit of Glacier Bay was stranded for about nine hours before a Coast Guard boat was able to tow it to the middle of the bay on a rising tide. Once again, there were no injuries reported.

After this second grounding, the cruise ship went back to Seattle, where she laid up at Jacobsen's Terminal. From 2008 to 2010, she was used as a floating accommodation for training, meetings and storage space for Cruise West. The operator then announced plans to rename the vessel either Spirit of America or Spirit of Adventure, give her the extensive shipyard work necessary to make her structurally sound and operational again, and to run the vessel on a series of itineraries in eastern North America. However, Cruise West ceased operations Sept. 18, 2010, before beginning the work. At last report, the cruise ship was sitting idle just northeast of the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle, along with many other vessels from the former Cruise West fleet.

I was prompted to do this post after reading "Abandoned boat stirs fracas on cities' border" by Katherine Hafner in today's issue of The Virginian-Pilot. It got me to remembering some other local marine issues that have come up over the years, and the foregoing was one of the first things that jumped into my mind.