Drunk Russian sailor crashes 7,000-ton ship into Scotland — at full speed

The cargo vessel Lysblink Seaways ran aground on the northwest coast of Scotland in February.

What shall we do with a drunken sailor?

Don’t put him in charge of a 7,000-ton, 423-foot (129-meter) cargo ship, for starters.

That’s how a Russian mariner who drank half a liter of rum before work, according to investigators, managed to crash into the coast of Scotland last winter — at full speed.

The Lysblink Seaways was on its way from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Skogn in Norway when it slammed into the rocky shoreline near Kilchoan on the Ardnamurchan peninsula at about 2:30 a.m. on February 18.

When the ship was salvaged, it was so badly damaged that it had to be scrapped.

Eight times the limit

An investigation into what happened found that the vessel’s 36-year-old chief officer — the sole watchkeeper at the time of the crash — had become “inattentive … due to the effects of alcohol consumption,” the UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch said in a report released Thursday.

While off duty in his cabin, the officer made a private phone call which “caused him anxiety, after which he consumed about 0.5 liter of rum,” the report added. Half a liter is about 17 ounces.

He then started his watch at midnight as the sole officer in charge of the vessel.

The amount of alcohol the officer consumed caused him to fail to plot crucial course adjustments, the report said — and the ship’s navigation alarm system, which could have alerted the rest of the crew to his incapacity, had not been switched on.

A breath test taken by the chief officer a few hours after the accident found his breath alcohol at 2.71 mg/ml — almost eight times the UK limit for professional seafarers. (The blood alcohol content would be 0.27 in U.S. terminology.)