Earlier this year, we posted “The Incredible Journey of Belugas Little White and Little Grey,” about the 6,000-mile transport in June 2019 of the two whales by air, land, and sea from an aquarium in Shanghai to a new home … Continue reading
Rick Spilman
Comment/Replies to Posts are now back. We have also shifted to a much more mobile-friendly format, which is to say that the blog should be easier to read from a phone or tablet. There is still some tweaking and updating … Continue reading
USS Essex, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship, recently arrived in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. Rather than carrying just helicopters, MV-22 Osprey tiltrotors, or even F-35B Lightning II fighter jets, the ship had a deck load of historic World War II warplanes. … Continue reading
How does a modern ship with radar and GPS manage to run hard aground on a well-marked reef? In the case of the Capesize bulker Wakashio that ran aground on the reef at Pointe-d’Esny off Mauritius on the evening of … Continue reading
In June of last year, we posted about the sailing cargo ship Kwai that had collected more than 40 tons of plastic waste and “ghost nets” from the Pacific Garbage Patch. Ghost nets are abandoned fishing gear that continues to … Continue reading
On July 25, the MV Wakashio ran hard aground on a coral reef in Mauritius. The large capesize bulker was bound From China to Brazil to load cargo and was empty, operating in ballast when it struck the reef. On … Continue reading
When HMS Victory went into drydock in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in 1922, she was supported by 22 steel cradles. In the almost 100 years that she has remained on the dock, the historic ship’s 3,500-tonne hull had been to … Continue reading
Having grown up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I can say without hesitation that a hurricane is the most magnificent and absolutely the most terrifying of all events in nature. Recently NOAA announced that their Atlantic forecast is for … Continue reading
A recent news item brought to Gilligan’s Island, a situation comedy broadcast on US television for three seasons in the 1960s. The premise of the program was that a small tourist boat on a “three-hour tour” was swept away in … Continue reading
USS Ling is a US Navy Balao-class submarine. The sub is currently sitting in the mud in the Hackensack River at the former location of the defunct New Jersey Naval Museum in Hackensack, New Jersey. The Ling has no access … Continue reading
Sandy Hook ship pilot, Captain Timothy M. Murray died following a fall while boarding a tanker arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey on Wednesday. His death is the second pilot fatality in less than a year. … Continue reading
The events leading up to the catastrophic explosion in Beirut, Lebanon that killed more than 135 and injured 5,000, began in November 2013, when the cargo ship MV Rhosus, loaded with 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, made an unplanned stop … Continue reading
Yesterday, a massive explosion in the port of Beirut, Lebanon killed at least 100 people and injured thousands. The blast destroyed buildings in the port district while the shockwave shattered windows and overturned vehicles across the city. An estimated 300,000 … Continue reading
Alexander Hamilton suggested in The Federalist Papers that “a few armed vessels, judiciously stationed at the entrances of our ports, might at a small expense be made useful sentinels of the laws.” When Hamilton became the first Treasury Secretary of the … Continue reading
This seems like a good story for a Monday. Forbes reports that Iran accidentally sank its fake aircraft carrier and did so in a very inconvenient place. The “fake carrier” is actually a targeting barge, a scaled-down mockup of a … Continue reading