A passenger ferry carrying around 60 people that had been stranded off Germany’s North Sea island of Heligoland due to a technical defect has reached the mainland port of Cuxhaven after several hours adrift, authorities said.<\/p>\n
The vessel, the Funny Girl, arrived in Cuxhaven on Saturday evening, a spokesman for the German Maritime Search and Rescue Service (DGzRS) told dpa.<\/p>\n
The ferry had been unable to manoeuvre about five kilometres off Heligoland after suffering a technical defect, according to police.<\/p>\n
The DGzRS deployed a rescue cruiser to assist the vessel. However, authorities said conditions made it impossible to tow the ferry directly to Heligoland.<\/p>\n
Instead, a decision was taken to tow the disabled vessel, with all passengers on board, to Cuxhaven. Two tugboats were involved in the operation, with strong westerly winds complicating the rescue effort.<\/p>\n
The ferry had departed B\u00fcsum on Saturday morning on its regular route to Heligoland, Germany’s only offshore island. The journey typically takes around two and a half hours, depending on weather and currents.<\/p>\n
According to the operator Adler & Eils, the vessel will now undergo technical inspection in Cuxhaven to determine the cause of the failure. Alternative travel arrangements were made for passengers both on board and waiting on Heligoland.<\/p>\n
Ferry services between B\u00fcsum and Heligoland were suspended for Sunday and Monday. It remained unclear when operations would resume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A passenger ferry carrying around 60 people that had been stranded off Germany’s North Sea island of Heligoland…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[30850,32762,5,32761],"class_list":["post-36058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-cuxhaven","tag-german-mainland","tag-germany","tag-heligoland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}