How did the captain manage to do this?
Momentum?
What’s the question? He lost control of his ship, and it hit a bunch of pleasure boats.
Looks like the tug was not helping much.
He seems to have got himself across a current, slightly at first but it swings him around and instead of moving straight astern he rotates.
The tug just seems to have been pushing him, and may well have been the point of rotation - seems there was a loss of coordination between them.
If you google “cyprus cement” - the name on the back of the ship - you get a shitload of news articles like this one and this one, which refer to a propulsion problem of some sort.
Insurance policy testing.
I’ve seen smaller disasters due to acute mechanical failure.
It is really hard to tell for sure. I wish there was more video of what if anything the tug is doing. But here goes my guess. There is some question about maybe some engine trouble.
I would say the ship was moving astern with someway on. At the beginning of the video can not tell for sure if the engine is turning over or not. An ahead bell would have been rung up, so the engine would have been stopped. Then started in the ahead direction, there are many things that can go wrong at this time. So with no engine running the ship would continue into the pleasure dock and boats. Also at slow speeds a ship has little rudder response. As the crashing starts the engineers get the min engine started at a slow bell speed. As the crashing continues looks like the engine RPM is increased until the ship stops moving astern. Then the engines speed is decreased.
I think some engineer’s license rather than the captains or the pilots will be on the line.