Move over, poop cruise, as there’s another, more nightmare-y ship currently adrift on the open seas: the Lyubov Orlova, an abandoned Russian cruise ship overrun with starving, diseased cannibal rats that’s drifting toward the UK coast.
Writes Gawker’s Ken Layne…
Named for a popular film actress in Stalin’s USSR, the Lyubov Orlova was built by the Soviets in 1976 to treat Russian elites with pleasure cruises to Antarctica and the Arctic Circle.
But it was seized in 2010, by Canadian police acting as debt collectors against the ship’s now-private owners, and for years it remained anchored off St. John’s, the provincial capital of Newfoundland. Finally sold for scrap in 2012, the massive ship was lost at sea just a day after being towed out. When Canadian authorities finally captured the cruise ship last year, they decided to let it loose in international waters.
In our era of Google satellite maps, GPS and constant government surveillance of the most mundane activities on land, it seems peculiar that a 295-foot-long ocean vessel could disappear in the North Atlantic while still afloat. But maritime officials in Ireland and Scotland say they haven’t heard from the Lyubov Orlova since March of last year, when an emergency signal from the ship placed it about 700 miles off the coast of County Kerry, Ireland. The ship itself was spotted by radar operators not long after, but search pilots sent to confirm the location couldn’t find it.
Ever since, the rat ship has been missing at sea.
This sounds like a great time for some sort of “military exercise” to be carried out by the Royal Navy. Seriously, let the boys in uniform have some fun. Send a bunch of ships out and the one that successfully finds the rat ship and torpedoes it to the bottom of the ocean gets a weekend with Russian hookers or something. FOR GOD AND COUNTRY!
In the meantime, keep calm and carry on, Brits!
