The Hospital Church vessel De Hoop, 208 feet long, 1,106 tons gross, 390 tons net, was built by NV Schps. Gerb. Pot-Bolnes. From 1964 until 1st January 1989, the vessel served as a mother ship to the fishing fleets, supplying medical, technical and spiritual aid.
Jan Sundermann writing in Janaury 2016: Being always interested in the ships themselves, I wanted to look what had happened with former ‘De Hoop’ after the film production ‘RadioRock’ was finished. My starting point was
www.rossrevenge.co.uk, where the story of Radio Caroline involvement in the movie production is described. Final fact was that the vessel was sold on later under its new name ‘Timor Challenger’.
Under www.shipspotting.com is shown a nice large picture, and there is given its new registration.
It’s under Panamanian flag HO4822 with MMSI: number 372174000. The vessel is described as a standby safety vessel. That sounds like similar work as the vessels of Rederij Groen do: checking offshore oil and gas drillings and pipelines, new and old, for safety.
Photo: source unknown
The ship was spotted in August 2010 nearby Grangemoth. To follow a ship, the internet gives many opportunities. The first was www.vesseltracker.com There is a log without date giving a position south of Sweden, with the remark ‘scrapped’. Could that be: this vessel is also already scraped? I next went on with my favourite page www.shipfinder.com
Typing in the above given MMSI number a result very quickly responded September 17th, 2015 at position Latitude 40-51.296N Longitude 29-17.053E. On the map you can see that this is in Istanbul! Although it is written ‘at anchor’, the marked position is on land, nearby a railway station named Güzelyali, south of the D100 road. As normally the shipfinder.com gives you for free a position older than 24 hours, this could really be the last point where the ship had its navigational equipment under operation? And after that date did they started to scrap the ship there? This probably could only be verified if somebody interested walks around that area and has a look!
Radio station: Vereniging Hospitaal Kerkschip De Hoop with weather reports, general messages and Dutch language church services in the seventies and early eighties. Religious services were broadcast in the Dutch language each Sunday and Wednesday with 300 watts on 2316 kHz under the callsign PHKS.
Location: North West European Waters