Titanic II embarks on maiden voyage, lives up to its name
Titanic II: Briton Mark Wilkinson set out from Dorset's West Bay harbor in his inauspiciously named 16-foot cabin cruiser. You can guess what happened next.
If you can imagine the ship in this image as being only 16 feet long instead of 900 feet long, and with only one person on board instead of more than 2,000, and sinking in a balmy English harbor instead of the icy waters off of Newfoundland, then you can pretty much envision what happened to the Titanic II.
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Mark Wilkinson's second-hand boat, which he rechristened as the Titanic II, behaved on its maiden voyage exactly as one might expect from a vessel with that name.
Mr. Wilkinson towed the 16-foot cabin cruiser, which he had just purchased for about $1,600, from his home in Birmingham, England, and set out on a fishing trip from West Bay harbor in Dorset on Saturday morning. On his way back, as the Titanic II made its way into the harbor and ... well, you can pretty much see this one coming.
According to the Dorset Echo, the coast guard officers and the harbormaster spotted Wilkinson un-ironically clinging to the bow of his rapidly sinking metaphor for hubris. They helped moor the ship, and Wilkinson climbed out of the water unhurt.
The harbormaster speculated that the breach in the Titanic II's fiberglass hull was caused when an old repair job came apart.
"It's all a bit embarrassing," Wilkinson told the Sun newspaper, "I'm fed up with people asking me if I hit an iceberg."