Video of Costa Concordia Saluting the Island of Giglio in August 2011

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It seems that performing a close approach to the island of Giglio was fairly routine for the Concordia. This video was taken in August 2011.




I went to marinetraffic.com and looked up the AIS records, which show a close approach on 13 Jan 2012, followed by disaster.  The three inflection points in the track shown in the photo and map below are at 20:37 UTC (15.3 knots), 20:53 UTC (2.9 knots), and 21:02 UTC (1.1 kts).  But note that the straight lines between these points do not necessarily show the ships behavior, since marinetraffic.com has no data for those times.

A Turkish web site SeaNews Turkey provides a chart that apparently uses additional AIS data showing a very close approach to a sub-island called Isole del Scole.  Rocks are nearly coincident with the ship track.  In this very likely scenario, the Concordia hit the rocks then traveled across the mouth of the port before stopping.  According to the captain, they then headed closer to shore, purposefully grounding off a small headland (to the left of the end of the red line) to avoid sinking in deep water.

"No emergency call, play down the situation, abandon ship."
"Are you talking about this ship or about Europe?"

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