Abandoned cruise ship

when I told people that I planned on swimming out to a capsized cruise ship, I had the usual response that I get whenever I plan on doing something bonkers. People either didn't think I was actually going to do it, or they tried to persuade me not to. But they're competing against the voice in my head that tells me that someday I'll be 90-ish, and reminiscing about the days when I could make it to the toilet on time. They have no power here. Let's have some crazy adventures now, while I can.

There was just one problem, and that's that I'm actually terrified of water. My earliest memory is nearly dying in a swimming pool as a child, and it's left a bit of an impression. But the shipwreck is only a mere hundred metres from the shore. I can do that, right? Well just to make sure, in the weeks leading up to my flight I visited my local swimming pool regularly to do a few laps and learn how to swim. Sure enough, I soon found out that I sucked. But I think the hardest part of any new activity is powering through being shit, and once I got over my initial anxiety, swimming was kinda fun. I kept at it and I got better. People told me that my new hobby of swimming wasn't as interesting as my old hobby of exploring abandoned things and trying not to die. They're the same hobby, fools! Let's get on with the show!

A shipping company called Ellerman wanted to have a fleet of luxury liners going from London to South Africa, and so created a quartet of fancy ships. They had promenade decks, lounges, cafes, a sports deck and a dance venue overlooking the swimming pool. The first of the Quartet was the "City of Port Elizabeth," who had its maiden voyage from London to Beira in January 1953. The second ship, The City of Exeter, followed on its own maiden voyage in May, and then this ship, The City of York, set sail in November. The fourth ship, City of Durban, wouldn't set off until May the following year.

The four ships could make the journey from the UK to South Africa in fifteen days, which was actually quite an impressive speed in the 1950s. As well as going between London and South Africa, they'd also call at Hull, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. So it's safe to say that for a while they were a pretty big hit. Unfortunately for them, a whole new crazy method of transport was taking off, both figuratively and literally, and that was commercial aircraft! By the end of the 1960s, Ellerman was starting to feel the pinch, and soon The City of York and its siblings were rotting away in a port in the Netherlands, awaiting a buyer.

the four ships weren't just left rotting in the Netherlands forever. Greece was going through a post-war pre-oil-crisis shipping boom, with companies snapping up second-hand ships from all over the world, and in 1971 a chap called Michael A Karageorgis nabbed these four, intent on converting them all into modern luxury cruise ships. Keeping with the theme of them all having similar names, each ship had "Mediterranean" as a prefix.

Of the four Mediterranean ships, only two of them would ever actually be used. City of Durban, renamed Mediterranean Dolphin, sat in limbo for a while, as the good folk of Karageorgis pondered what to do with it, before concluding that they didn't really need it at all. It was destroyed in 1974. City of Port Elizabeth took a similar route. Initially named Mediterranean Island, the corporate bigwigs couldn't decide what to do with it, and as such it sat idle for years. In 1975, things seemed to be looking up when they renamed it "Mediterranean Sun," as if they finally had a plan for it, but then they changed their mind and scrapped it in 1980. 

That left the City of York and the City of Exeter, who each underwent extensive transformations into the Mediterranean Sky and the Mediterranean Sea. They were still identical, but now virtually unrecognisable from their former identities.

But the pain in my poor too-ugly-for-onlyfans feet aside, isn't this amazing? Words couldn't express how giddy I was to be stood on this thing. I've been doing this whole "forbidden tourism" thing for over a decade now, but I've never done anything quite like this. The UK does have a few shipwrecks but nothing of this magnitude, and nothing in water I'd be comfortable swimming in. And also in the UK the urbex scene is a tiny bit stale. It all tends to move in a herd. That's not a dig at anyone. I'm guilty of following the crowd too. But it feels good to get out, leave it all behind, and have an authentic adventure. And if I'm being completely honest, it feels great to challenge myself, and do something that takes a little bit of effort and preparation followed by throwing myself out of my comfort zone with reckless abandon. Let's do more of that.

As the Soviet Union sputtered towards its final days, a lot of Soviet Jews fancied getting out of there. The Soviet Union wasn't exactly big on letting people leave, and even had the Jewish emigration movements leader, Antoly Sharansky, thrown into a labour camp for "treason." Times were messy, but as the Soviet era came to a close, the Zionist Gustav Scheller and his wife Elsa worked to facilitate the emigration of numerous Jews from Soviet territory to Israel. And to do that, they ended up getting their hands on the Mediterranean Sky. There was a veil of secrecy on the whole thing. A lot of Jewish attempts at emigration from Soviet territory had gone pretty badly. On the same week that the Mediterranean Sky made its first journey to Israel, a bomb in Budapest had just missed a bus full of Jews, and killed their escorting police officer. So the media in Israel was kept totally in the dark out of fear of any coverage leading to a terror attack on the cruise ship.

Of the four "City of" Mediterranean-Something ships, only the Mediterranean Sky remained. The ship made a few trips to Italy, its last journey being from Brindisi to Patras. But with the company having financial issues, the ship was arrested in Patras in 1997 for having unpaid port fees. This meant that it couldn't leave by order of a court. It sat in Patras until 1999, when the port authorities got sick of looking at it and had it towed home.

But alas, with nobody maintaining it, it eventually started to leak. It took on sufficient water that it was noticeably lopsided, so rather than wait for it to sink in the harbour, in 2002 a decision was made to tow it to shallow water and abandon it there. 

In a way it's sad to see it like this, but at the same time, it is still being enjoyed. It's a bit of an obscure tourist attraction for those who know about it and fancy something a little unusual that doesn't require an admission fee. Swimmers come here to dive off the ship. Free-runners come here to practice parkour. I've even seen videos of people using its sloped hull to do water-skiing stunts.

It's just far enough from the city that getting here makes for a nice day out, but not too far that it's a faff to get to.