
Technical Specifications
Overview
BBC California, before 2011 known as Beluga Fraternity and briefly Fraternity, is a German general cargo ship owned by Beluga Shipping. In 2009 she and her sister ship, Beluga Foresight, transited the Northern Sea Route while carrying power plant components from Ulsan, South Korea, to the Russian port of Vladivostok. The voyage was widely covered and sometimes incorrectly said to be the first time when non-Russian ships make the transit. In 1997, a Finnish oil tanker, Uikku, sailed the length of the Northern Sea Route from Murmansk to the Bering Strait, becoming the first Western ship to complete the voyage.
Live Tracking
Intelligence
Verified reported figure. Band is peer-relative, not official IMO CII.
Compliance
Voyage data recorder (VDR) / Simplified Voyage data recorder (S-VDR); ISM
Port-State-Control detentions.
Operational Status
The latest broadcast is too stale or lacks the speed / status to classify.
Read from the single most-recent AIS broadcast we hold for this hull — we keep no position history, so this is a point-in-time posture, not a dwell inference. Derived in-house from our own AIS feed; weight it by the broadcast age above.
Composite Risk
Multiple adverse factors, or a hard ship-specific signal, lift this hull above the fleet norm.
A coverage-weighted blend of the 4 components we could read for this hull — the weights renormalise over only the components present, so a thin read is never inflated and a hull is never credited a “safe 0” for a signal it has no row for. Higher means riskier. Derived in-house from government-open port-State-control, flag, sanctions and our own vessel data; weight it by the coverage above.
Estimated
Other · summer draught 8.3 m · 23.5 t per cm immersion
Estimate only — modelled from deadweight (hull geometry) using a first-principles hydrostatic model, not measured hydrostatic tables. The design draught it is anchored to is unreliable across the fleet.
Transparency
Behavioural flags raised against this vessel — each shown with the raw evidence behind it. Derived in-house from data we are entitled to publish; informational, not a determination of wrongdoing.
Stopped transmitting relative to the live feed front
Method: gap measured vs the live feed's own max timestamp, not wall-clock. Source: TheMaritime aisstream.io ingest (ais_positions).
Signals are a current-state view: a flag clears once the vessel stops tripping its detector. These are screening indicators, not a substitute for your own due diligence.
Commercial

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