Oil Tanker British Strength. This 1:1250 scale miniature of the „British Strength“ is a masterpiece of the CSC workshop and is on display with other models of them on deck 9 of the museum.
Between 1982 and 1983, The Swan Hunter Hight Walker shipyard in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, built the oil tanker „BP Achiever“ for the shipping branch of the oil multinational BP (British Petroleum). The ship was owned by the Sydney, Australia, seat of BP Shipping.
With a deadweight tonnage (DWT) of 127575, a length of 261,4 m, a beam of 39,65 m and a draft of 17,3 m, she was too large to cross the Panama Canal (before the opening of its expansion in 2016, where her draft would still be a problem today) but had the right size to cross the Suez Canal. That qualified her as a Suezmax tanker. This is the largest class of tankers with some flexibility regarding the ports they can deliver before the enormous classes of VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier) and ULCC (Ultra Large Crude Carrier).
The „BP Achiever“ had a long career for BP where her name was changed to „Australian Achiever“ in 1991 and „British Strength“ in 1999. The ship model on display here depicts the ship in that very year. BP sold her in 2003 to the Marshall Islands based Ocean Spirit Maritime Co., that renamed her „Afroditi“. She served under the name of the Greek goddess of love for five years, and was sold to the Jakarta, Indonesia, based Trada Offshore Services in 2008 and renamed „Lentera Bangsa“. Her new owners sent her after 2 years to the Guangdong, China, shipyard of COSCO to be transformed into a FSO (Floating Storage and Offloading). That is basically a hulk, a ship’s hull without means of propulsion that serves to store crude oil in offshore oil fields before it is transported by tanks. And that she did in the Widuri field of the Java Sea when tragedy struck in form of an accidental fire that broke out on September the 23rd 2011. Four members of her crew were injured and one died. The vessel was taken out of service due to damage and in 2016 she was finally sold for scrapping in Pakistan.
This 1:1250 scale miniature of the „British Strength“ is a masterpiece of the CSC workshop and is on display with other models of them on deck 9 of the museum.