We wish we were joking, but it seems as if there’s a slight possibility that this nightmare might actually come to pass.
A ghost ship full of cannibal rats landing somewhere on the Irish coast sounds like the type of nightmare one might have after two or three heavy days on the sauce, but it would appear as if both Ireland and the UK are in danger of playing host to a whole ship full of vermin that are currently stranded in an unknown location in the North Atlantic.
According to Gawker, the ship, known as the Lyubov Orlova, has been stranded at sea ever since last year, when Canadian authorities decided to let it loose in international waters after it had originally been anchored off St. John’s in Newfoundland for years before being sold for scrap in November 2012.
It was intended that it would be towed to the Dominican Republic and scrapped but the tow-line to a tug broke and the Canadian government then sent out another ship to drag it far out to sea and release it.
The ship itself is nearly 40 years old, having been built in 1976 in the Soviet Union for the purpose of pleasure cruises to Antarctica and the Arctic Circle for the wealthier classes in Russia.
There would be nothing too pleasurable about being on board now, however, as the ship is believed to be inhabited by hundreds of cannibal rats, who experts have predicted have probably began to start eating each other at this stage.
The ship, a 295-foot-long ocean vessel, was last located approximately 700 miles off the coast of Kerry in March of last year, when maritime officials detected an emergency signal from the ship and although it was spotted by radar operators shortly afterwards, search pilots sent to confirm the location couldn’t find it.
Since then, there has been no sign of it, but it is believed that it is still out there because life-raft transmitters on the ship have not been activated.
Should it be spotted by a Coast Guard crew or salvage hunters looking to make some money out of a ship that would be worth approximately £600,000, then whoever comes upon it would have the unpleasant job of dealing with it there and then, but there is also a chance that a storm could push it towards land, with the west coast of Ireland, Scotland or the southern tip of England its most likely destination.
Belgian seaman Pim de Rhoodes, one of those searching for the boat, told The Sun: “She is floating around out there somewhere.
“There will be a lot of rats and they eat each other.
“If I get aboard I’ll have to lace everywhere with poison.”
We should stress that there appears to be only a slight chance that the most frightening-sounding ship of all time will end up landing around these parts, but if it does come to pass then what can one say but…
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