The vessel was built in the early 1970s at the Astrakhan shipyard as a 388M-design fishing ship. It was intended for commercial seine, trawler and driftnet fishing, as well as for catching saury using electric light. But its destiny turned out to be different.
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From the start, the Kartesh was in luck, as the famous Russian polar explorer Ivan Papanin took a hand in its fate. In 1973, a delegation from the Leningrad Zoological Institute came to Papanin’s waiting room in an old building on Bolshaya Kaluga Street.
Various people, including seamen, scientists and young biologists, were also there. Suddenly, the office door opened and there he was standing in the doorway, short and chubby in his admiral’s trousers, with his shirt tucked in and neatly crossed by braces. Visible through the doorway, hanging over an armchair, was his admiral’s jacket with the two red stars of a Hero of the Soviet Union.
Taking in the crowd with a cheerful, sweeping glance, Papanin announced briskly: ‘Everyone come in, lads! I’ll see you all now.’
From that moment, it may be said, that the Kartesh was reborn.
Although the director of the Astrakhan shipyard was not under Papanin’s direct supervision, and tried to explain to him that the local fishing community had already been waiting for the vessel for two years, he nevertheless carried out unquestioningly the request of the famous polar explorer to turn the ship into a scientific research vessel.
Thanks to Papanin’s ability, the Kartesh spent more than 20 years in scientific research on the Barents Sea and White Sea.
But in 1995 the funding for scientific research ran out….
‘Certificate of exclusion of a vessel from the State Maritime Register of Shipping, June 30th, 1995:
The scientific research vessel Kartesh is excluded from the State Maritime Register of Shipping as it is unfit for further service or repair. The ship is to be decommission and broken up for scrap.’
However, the ship’s destiny was changed again, when the decommissioned and actually ‘dead’ vessel, was bought by the Moscow State University Diving Club.
Today, the Kartesh is the only vessel in Northern Russia which carry out underwater scientific researches at the White, Barents and Baltic Seas.
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