Coast Guard Day in the United States is this Sunday, August 4th, commemorating the founding of the U. S. Coast Guard as the Revenue Marine on August 4, 1790, by the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. On the ex-USCG … Continue reading
Rick Spilman
The good news is that last month there was a debate in the UK’s House of Lords about what to do with the wreck of the Liberty ship SS Richard Montgomery, which sank loaded with munitions in the Thames estuary … Continue reading
The W.O. Decker, the last wooden tug in New York harbor, is back at work. The 52′ tug, built in 1930 in Long Island City, is now offering harbor tours from the South Street Seaport on New York’s East River. … Continue reading
In the general category of you can’t make this stuff up, in early hours of Friday morning, a mass brawl broke out on the P&O Britannia, in which passengers used furniture and plates as weapons, according to witnesses. Six people—three … Continue reading
The USCG barque Eagle has returned to its longstanding homeport at the US Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, which had been the ship’s homeport since 1946. The Eagle, a 295-foot barque used as a training cutter for future … Continue reading
Sandy Hook pilots have been guiding ships into New York harbor since 1694 when Colonial legislators first mandated that pilots be stationed at the barrier beach at the mouth of the great harbor. Here are two short videos of New … Continue reading
Here is a visually stunning twelve-minute animation, Age of Sail by Google Spotlight Stories. The story itself is a bit anemic, but the visuals largely make up for it. The producers describe the video as follows: Set on the open … Continue reading
A 15-year-old girl was allegedly plied with liquor aboard a Royal Caribbean ship by a group of men, before being taken to a cabin and gang-raped. She was on a seven-day cruise with her two sisters and grandparents beginning the … Continue reading
For a number of years, we have followed the Planetary Society‘s efforts to launch a solar sail which would be propelled by light radiating from the sun. Yesterday, the society’s LightSail 2 deployed a 32-square-meter solar sail, about the size … Continue reading
In early July, the Jubilee Sailing Trust (JST) faced a financial crisis where it needed to raise £1m in five days in order to stay in operation. Fortunately, the charity succeeded in raising the funds in time. Their financial challenges … Continue reading
In January 1968, the French submarine Minerve was underway in the Mediterranean on her way back to her home base in Toulon. Communications from the submarine advised that she would be at her berth in about an hour. Then mysteriously, the diesel-electric … Continue reading
Earlier this year, technicians operating a robotic camera surveying a route for a natural gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, were surprised to find a 500-year-old shipwreck virtually intact on the seafloor. The ship was found at a depth of … Continue reading
Sailors have navigated by the stars since the dawn of time. Now, fifty years after Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon in the Apollo 11 mission, we shouldn’t forget that even the Apollo astronauts relied on sextants to … Continue reading
A world war was raging and German U-boats were sinking merchant ships faster than they could be built, so the United States government decided to build an emergency fleet of standardized ships. The goal was to build the ships quickly … Continue reading
On April 23rd, 1945, the patrol boat USS Eagle 56 was towing targets for US Navy bomber exercises off the coast of Maine. At about noon, there was an explosion around amidships which broke the patrol boat in half. Of … Continue reading