The Last Voyage of the Tricolor

The night was quiet, but the English Channel was never truly calm. Captain Lars Eikland stood at the bridge of the Tricolor, his breath forming a thin mist in the cold December air. Below him, deep inside the ship’s massive hull, 2,862 brand-new luxury cars sat secured in their rows, gleaming in the artificial light like a floating showroom. They were bound for Southampton, then across the Atlantic to eager buyers in America.

Lars had sailed this route dozens of times. The Tricolor was a RoRo car carrier, a floating parking garage over 190 meters long. Tonight, however, something felt different. The weather had been unpredictable all week, the Channel unusually crowded. Still, his training had taught him to trust his instruments and his crew.

Disaster at 2:15 a.m.

At 2:15 a.m., the lookout spotted lights on the port side — fast and closing in. The radar confirmed it: a container ship, the Kariba, was on a collision course.

“Hard to starboard!” Lars barked, his voice tight but controlled. The helmsman spun the wheel, the massive carrier groaning under the strain of the sharp turn.

But it was too late.

The Kariba struck Tricolor on the port side with a grinding scream of steel against steel. The impact threw several crew members off their feet. Alarms blared. Within minutes, the Tricolor began to list heavily.

“Abandon ship!” Lars ordered. His training clicked into place — no hesitation. The 24 crew members scrambled to the lifeboats, the icy wind biting their faces as they worked quickly but methodically.

As the last boat cleared the hull, Lars looked back. His ship — his responsibility — was already on her side, slipping beneath the dark, freezing waters of the Channel. He felt the weight of failure press against his chest as the Tricolor disappeared completely, leaving only scattered debris and the distant hum of rescue vessels.

But no lives were lost. That was his only comfort as he climbed into the rescue helicopter an hour later, dripping wet and shivering.

The Crisis Grows

By dawn, the world knew about the sinking. The Tricolor lay on her port side, almost fully submerged in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Worse, oil was leaking from her tanks.

In Oslo, Ingrid Halvorsen, head of operations for Wilh. Wilhelmsen, was woken by a call that would define her career.

“We’ve contained the crew,” she was told. “But the ship is gone.”

Ingrid’s first thought wasn’t about the lost cargo or the insurance claims. It was about the environmental disaster waiting to happen.

“Mobilize the Hercules and every salvage contractor we can get,” she said. “We stop that oil before it spreads.”

Within days, the floating crane Asian Hercules II was on site. Divers battled winter waves and near-zero visibility to drill into the upside-down hull, attaching pumps that slowly removed the 2,100 tons of bunker oil from the tanks.

Each dive was a gamble. The currents could sweep a man away in seconds. Diver Thomas “Tom” Becker emerged from the freezing water after one of the first operations, his teeth chattering so hard he could barely speak.

“She’s stable for now,” he told the salvage superintendent, “but one good storm and she could split.”

The Cutting Begins

When the oil was finally removed, attention turned to the wreck itself. Leaving it on the seabed was not an option — it was a hazard to shipping. But raising a 32-meter-wide ship intact was impossible.

The plan was bold: cut the Tricolor into nine enormous sections using a specially designed cutting wire, then lift each piece individually.

For months, crews worked from two massive jack-up platforms on either side of the wreck. Divers drilled under the hull, threading the abrasive wire through guide tubes. The first time the wire began to sing — slicing through steel with a shrill metallic wail — everyone on deck fell silent.

“It’s like we’re sawing a ghost in half,” one engineer muttered.

The first cut took nearly three weeks. When the stern finally broke free, the lifting operation began.

Captain Lars was present that day. Though no longer responsible for the ship, he couldn’t stay away. As the first section broke the surface, water streaming from its decks, he felt a strange mix of pride and grief.

“There she is,” he whispered.

Triumph and Tragedy at Sea

Each lift was dangerous. The shearleg cranes strained under thousands of tons of shifting steel. Every creak of cable made the supervisors hold their breath.

On one particularly rough day, a rogue wave slammed into the work platform just as a section was being raised. One of the lifting frames shifted, threatening to drop the load back into the water.

“Hold tension!” the rigging boss shouted. Divers scrambled to re-secure the chains underwater, risking entanglement in the process.

Tom Becker was among them. For twenty minutes, he worked in near-blackness, fighting the current and his own rising panic as he tightened the final shackle. When he surfaced, gasping, the team erupted into relieved applause.

“You just saved us six months,” the salvage superintendent told him.

A Ship Taken Apart

By summer, five of the nine sections had been removed. The remains of Tricolor were now twisted and weakened by months of exposure. The final pieces had to be broken up with a huge wreck grab, ripping them apart like a giant hand tearing through paper.

It was brutal, inelegant work — but necessary. Every last piece, down to the smallest car axle, was recovered. French and Belgian authorities watched closely, insisting that the sea floor be left as clean as possible.

Back in Oslo, Ingrid reviewed the weekly reports with growing satisfaction.

“This will be one of the cleanest wreck removals ever attempted,” she told the board. “No long-term environmental damage. That’s our legacy.”

Resolution

By the end of summer 2004, the operation was complete. Tens of thousands of tons of steel had been lifted, cut, scrapped, and recycled. The cars were dismantled in Belgium under strict environmental controls.

For Captain Lars, the conclusion was bittersweet. Standing on the shore at Zeebrugge, he watched as the last section of Tricolor was unloaded onto the scrapping site.

“She was a good ship,” he said quietly to Ingrid, who had flown in for the occasion.

“She was,” Ingrid agreed. “And because of you, everyone made it home alive.”

Lars nodded. He would never command another ship — the incident had ended his seafaring career. But he had faced disaster, made the right call, and saved his crew.

For Tom Becker, the diver, the operation had been the pinnacle of his career. The near-accident during the lift had changed him — he became a safety officer, training the next generation of divers to respect the sea and its dangers.

And for Ingrid, the success of the operation became a case study in corporate responsibility. Years later, she would lecture about it at maritime universities, reminding cadets that a company’s true character is revealed in crisis.

Epilogue

The English Channel is busy again, ferries and freighters passing over the spot where Tricolor once lay. There is no trace of the ship now — only a clean seabed, carefully scanned and certified.

But for those who lived it, the memory of that cold December night and the long months of salvage remains sharp.

In the end, the Tricolor was more than a ship. She was a test — of courage, of skill, of perseverance. And those who answered that test left the sea a little cleaner, a little safer, and themselves forever changed.