The PNB deputy in Congress and spokesperson for the Basque group, Aitor Esteban brought a seafaring story to the San Jerónimo race this week. He brought it during the debate on the motion of no confidence presented by Vox against Pedro Sánchez and in which the speech of the candidate for the presidency of the Government, Ramón Tamames, was answered by the different representatives of the different formations represented in the chamber.
Esteban, the third speaker to take the stage, brought the Tamames, a boat launched in 1965, the year in which a Ramón Tamames, then 33 years old and a member of the Communist Party of Spain, published Formation and development of the European Common Market, a book of almost 500 pages about the union of states that Spain would join two decades later. The politician from Bilbao made a series of similes between the candidate and a ship that started its life with the red boat and ended it with the boat painted black. When he finished the intervention and wanting to draw a new parallel between the two Tamames, the Basque indicated that, instead of ending his days in the naval museum, the ship ended up scrapped in Mexico.
It is not unusual for a merchantman to end up scrapped after several decades of service and the number of ships that end up being preserved is counted. These usually have a weighty history that makes them candidates for conservation, as is the case with some liners turned into floating hotels or certain warships now turned into museums. Except for three or four specific moments, the history of the Tamames was not transcendent and practically only those who sailed on it remember the ship. It was built at the Unió Naval de Levant, in the port of Valencia. The shipyards, now gone, occupied the land where the Baleària shipping company will build its new maritime station to operate from there its regular passenger and cargo lines to Palma, Ibiza and Algeria.
The Tamames, 73 meters long and almost 12 meters long, was owned by the oil company Cepsa and sailed at a maximum speed of 12 knots, around 22 kilometers per hour. Registered in Tenerife, it was dedicated to the transport of gas between different Spanish ports and sometimes also traveled to European destinations. All this, without notable incidents during its first decade of service. His name appeared in the media three times during the 1970s. In 1974 he was in the news for having saved the lives of the crew of a catamaran adrift in the Cantabrian. These intended a titanic adventure: traveling from the UK to Costa Rica. However, the most serious incident he experienced was in the summer of 1977, sailing without cargo on a course towards Immingham, in the United Kingdom, when he collided in the middle of dense fog with a German merchantman on which he opened a way of water and ended up sinking it.
Finally, in 1979, traveling between Mallorca and Cartagena, José Luis González Rodríguez, captain of the Tamames, said he had seen about fifty UFOs when his ship was sailing 15 miles east of the Mola lighthouse in Formentera . The incident was recorded in the log book that would later be used for the report of the Undersecretariat of the Merchant Marine. Aitor Esteban took advantage of the number of flying objects to finish comparing it with the 52 deputies that Vox has in Congress.
Shortly after the failed coup of 1981, Campsa sold the Tamames to a Panamanian company, which changed its name to Caribgas VII and painted the vessel black. With that color and name it continued sailing through the Caribbean until 1996, when it was finally scrapped in the port of Túxpam de Rodríguez Cano, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, 9,000 kilometers from where it was scrapped as Tamames.
