The RCGS Resolute
The fact that all fun and the entirety of summer has been canceled due to the impending apocalypse has really sucked balls for most people on the planet, but the cruise industry in particular has really been getting its gonads smashed in a car door over and over again repeatedly throughout this entire miserable experience. It started with all those poor bastards that were doomed to sail around the earth for eternity on pandemic death cruise quarantine ships that make the Event Horizon look like a lighthearted romantic comedy, and now basically any time you mention the idea of going on a cruise any time in the next decade everyone around you is going to either laugh in your fucking face or look at you like you're about to hurl yourself off a very tall building. Shit, I was supposed to cruise the Mediterranean in early May, but now instead of chilling on sandy beaches with colorful beverages and hot bikini babes I'm going to consider that week a victory if my body isn't devoured by wild animals. So that should give you some idea as to the state of things right now.
Well, with the world ending, all hope lost, cruise lines hemorrhaging cash, and the entire global economy about to collapse, on Monday one fucking boat had enough of this shit and decided it was time to hit back. To vent her frustration by social distancing herself straight through a motherfucker's face with sheer force of will and a steel-tipped prow. That ship is the Royal Canadian Geographical Society ship Resolute – a no-nonsense 8,000-ton cruise ship with a badass reinforced hull strong enough to smash its way through ship-killing Antarctic icebergs – and, in the early morning hours of Monday, March 30, 2020, she went toe-to-toe with a full-armed modern military warship… and completely fucking annihilated it.
Now, most times civilian ships get close enough to slapfight a military destroyer things go about the way they did when that Los Angeles-class submarine ballknocked a Japanese fishing vessel, but the RCSG Resolute is a bit more intense than your typical deep-sea trawler. Built in Finland in 1993, Resolute is about 123 meters long (400 feet) and displaces over 8,300 tons, and is designed to carry 146 passengers on tours through the treacherous ice floes of Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean. She also had her fair share of problems, especially with the law – in August of 2019, I shit you not, the ship was arrested while in port in Nova Scotia. Like, not the crew, or the owners or whatever, but a fucking Canadian sheriff had to go out there and formally place the ship under arrest because its owners owed a bunch of money to some company in Nunavut or one of those other funny-sounding Canadian places. The arresting officer is quoted in that article I linked as saying, "What stood out was it was an actual cruise ship that needed to be arrested. That does not happen very often." Sure, great. She was actually even arrested again in Argentina two months later, for the same reason, and now she's got a bunch of penguin researchers mad at her because I guess the company owes them a fuckton of money they promised in charitable donations that never actually arrived. I'm not going to go on the record by saying it's cool to rip off charitable organizations, but I'll also argue that there aren't a lot of cruise ships that are so goddamn gangster that they've been arrested in multiple countries and run con jobs worthy of an old-school mafioso.
Ok, well shit got real for the Resolute around 1am on Monday morning. She had no passengers and was traveling with a skeleton crew of 32 maintenance workers on a routine tour from Buenos Aires to Dutch Curaçao for resupply and refitting, when, about thirteen miles off the coast of the Isle of Tortuga, she received a strange and menacing signal from an approaching vessel. The oncoming ship identified itself as the Venezuelan Navy patrol boat Naiguata, informed Resolute that she was in Venezuelan waters, and demanded that she follow the Naiguata to a nearby port so the ship could be seized and the crew detained for questioning.
For most ships, especially chill-ass cruise ships, having the fuzz on your tail demanding you pull over to the side of the road wouldn't really invoke some sort of wild ferret-like fight-or-flight response.
But, as you have read, the Resolute is not an ordinary ship.
She said Fuck Tha Police.
GC-23 Naiguata. Please note she has multiple big guns mounted on her.
Ok, let me provide a bit of background here. I don't know if you saw Season Two of Jack Ryan yet, but Venezuela is having some serious fucking problems at the moment. They're more or less controlled by Presidente-por-Vida Nicholas Maduro, an old Hugo Chavez guy who won re-election in 2018 when he moved the voting date forward by six months without warning and then banned all other political parties from voting. Basically everyone except Iran and Syria hates him, sixty countries recognize some totally other guy to be the legitimate President of Venezuela, and this dipshit has somehow managed to completely fuck the economy sideways even though the entire country is built on top of an oil field big enough to drown the entire population of South America, but, hey, he still sleeps in the Presidential palace and the Army kills the people he wants them to kill, so he’s in charge because that's how the world works. Apparently the US State Department declared this guy a narco-terrorist like a week ago and put out a $15 million bounty on his capture, which honestly comes as a bit of a surprise to me since I’m pretty sure that back in January I saw Doug Stamper and Jim from The Office shoot him in the balls with an RPG, murder everyone in the Venezuelan presidential palace, and then burn the entire country to the ground from the minigun sponson of a Blackhawk, but maybe Amazon Prime is fake news now, who knows. The point is that shit in Venezuela is nuts, they are not doing awesome, and it's really not the kind of place you want to be imprisoned under suspicion of espionage.
So, you can probably understand why the crew of RCSG Resolute didn't really feel like complying with the Naiguata's request to pull over their vehicle and submit themselves for torture, incarceration, and possible execution as mercenaries or spies at the hands of an insane paranoid dictator who thinks that everyone in the world is out to assassinate or depose him (although, in his defense, he’s also probably not wrong). And, according to maritime law, Resolute didn't fucking have to pull over, either – she was 13 nautical miles from Tortuga, international waters begin at 12 nautical miles, and this is one of those situations where it helps to know your rights. Her ship master held her course, and radioed in to the home office to ask for orders from someone a bit higher up the corporate food chain.
It was at this point that the sound of a cannon shot ripped through the Caribbean night. Naiguata had fired a 76mm artillery shell across Resolute's bow.
That’s not good.
The Guaicamacuto-class warship GC-23 Naiguata is 80 meters long, with 1500 tons of displacement, making it about two-thirds the length of Resolute and about one-fifth her weight, but civilian vessels are not really designed to take hits from fucking naval artillery, and the Naiguata is pretty heavily armed. She's equipped with a bigass 76mm anti-ship cannon, a couple 12.7mm anti-aircraft guns, and something called the Millennium Gun, which sounds like the super-weapon in an anime but is really just a naval shotgun designed to shoot down incoming missiles. She was built in Spain in 2003 under circumstances so fucking shady that the company that built her is STILL under investigation by the Spanish government for allegedly taking about 42 million Euro in bribes as part of the bidding process, and now the Navy that paid that hefty bribe is using that ship to take potshots at cruise ships at one o'clock in the morning like a bunch of assholes.
But, still the Resolute stayed… um… resolute, I guess. She maintained course. This fucking boat wasn't going to deviate until she got orders from her bosses to stand down.
In the meantime, Naiguata cranked off two more rounds across the bow.
Then she swung in at full speed and tried to PIT the fucking cruise ship by ramming into it.
If this sounds fucking insane, that's because it is. Try and picture this for a minute – you've got RCSG Resolute, an unarmed cruise ship designed to take nice families on chill-ass tours of Antarctic glaciers, and she's getting side-humped by a badass ultra-modern naval destroyer that is blasting off artillery and slamming into it like something you'd see in a James Bond car chase. The Naiguata careened hard into Resolute's side, smashed it again, and then tried to hit it a third time, this time up in the bow area of the ship.
That’s when it met the business end of a fucking reinforced bow designed to break icebergs.
Resolute's bow is cool for two reasons. Firstly, it's official icebreaker rating from the Finnish-Swedish Maritime Administration is "1A Super", and every time I read that classification I read it as though it is being yelled in a Swedish accent with five exclamation points. And, second, literally every story about this that I could find refers to the front of Resolute as a "bulbous prow," which, maybe that's an official nautical term or something, but all I can think is that is sounds like a slang phrase a Brit would use to refer to his dong.
Anyway, Guaicamacuto-class warship vs. Antarctic icebreaker did not go well for the Venezuelan Navy. The Resolute smashed its 1A Super Bulbous Prow deep into the hull of Naiguata, penetrating its frontal armor, and fucking it up so hard that the warship started taking on water and began to sink. The moral of the story here is that when you're packing large-bore artillery on the front of your warship you should probably practice social distancing and use the big guns first, before you decide to ram a fucking ship that has two bars and a jacuzzi on board.
The captain of Resolute tried to contact the crew of Naiguata on the radio as they bailed out into their life rafts, but he didn't get a response. He radioed in the wreck to Maritime Rescue Coordination Center – Curaçao, circled the sinking warship for an hour, then went home after MRCC Curaçao released him from the scene.
As of the time of this writing, Resolute is currently docked in Dutch Curaçao. President Maduro and the Venezuelan government are trying to sue or hold the ship there, but it doesn't seem likely. The Venezuelan Minister of State has officially accused the Resolute of "piracy and terrorism," claiming that the cruise ship was trying to hijack a fully-armed warship packing something called a Millennium Gun and containing a Marine contingent that ounumbered the crew members aboard Resolute — a claim that is unlikely, for sure, but if it’s true only makes Resolute even more badass as far as I’m concerned. They also argued that they only attacked the cruise ship because they thought there was a chance it was carrying "mercenaries to attack Venezuelan bases", which, ok, I guess anything's possible, really.
Oh, and they're also crying about how the Resolute sailed off and didn't try to rescue any of the Naval sailors who shot artillery at it and tried to ram it. I find this to be amazing.
Resolute, for her part, sustained very minimal damage from the hardcore collision that killed the warship of an unhinged dictator, and should be able to go on with her normal operations shortly.
