On 1st November the HSS 1500 Stena Explorer (above) was towed away from her berth in Holyhead and from the port that had been her home since 6th February 1996. Having been withdrawn from the Holyhead- Dun Laoghaire service on 9th September 2014 (but officially in February 2015) the 19,638gt/1996 built vessel was sold to Karedeniz Holding of Turkey and renamed One World Karedeniz for use as floating office accommodation at the owner’s shipyard in Yalova, Turkey.

The vessel was towed stern first by the 2,311gt/1988 built tug Bluster and was due to reach her destination around 17th November. Stena Line’s HSS (Highspeed Sea Service) was intended to revolutionise ferry travel but only three HSS 1500s were built and one HSS 900 with the other never being completed. The other 1500s were the Stena Voyager, built for Stranraer-Belfast (1996-2011) and the Stena Discovery, built for Harwich-Hoek van Holland (1997-2007). The Stena Discovery was the first to be withdrawn after barely ten years of service, being sold eventually to Ferrymar of Venezuela as HSS Discovery in 2009 but never used and sold for scrap in 2015 in Turkey. The Stena Voyager was recycled at Landskrona, Sweden, after being towed there from layup at Belfast in 2013.

The HSS 1500s could travel at 40 knots but their twin LM2500 and twin LM1600 General Electric gas turbines made them very expensive to operate. Capacity on board was for 1500 passengers and 375 cars/900 lanemetres. The single HSS 900, the 8631gt Stena Carisma, was built for the Gothenburg- Frederikshavn service by Westamarin, who went out of business upon her completion, but has been laid up in Gothenburg since 2014. The HSS was the Concorde of the maritime world but is being consigned to history in the same way as that magnificent aircraft and the superb SRN4 hovercraft.

The Stena Explorer was the first HSS and the last and carried over 15 million passengers, 3 million cars and over half a million freight units on almost 29,000 sailings between Britain and Ireland. These highspeed craft were impressive beasts and now the UK, at the close of 2015, has just four large fast ferries serving its ports, namely the Jonathan Swift, Manannan, Condor Liberation and Normandie Express, a far cry from the Seacat heyday of the 1990s.