I have chaperoned my son’s class on a trip on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. They have a wonderful program for school groups – teaching kids history, ecology, and a bit of seamanship while also having great fun on a … Continue reading
Rick Spilman
If you haven’t seen this yet, it is definitely worth watching. It is a visualization developed by NASA/JPL of ocean surface currents around the world between 2005 and 2007. Fascinating. NASA | Perpetual Ocean … Continue reading
On one schooner, the 2012 Great Chesapeake Schooner Race ended in tragedy. Shortly after the 43-foot Cuchulain crossed the finish line at Windmill Point, at just after 4 p.m. on Friday, Paul Stephen Case, 68, of Racine Wisconsin was knocked overboard and drowned, while … Continue reading
In the 22nd Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race, thirty nine schooner raced from 127 nautical miles down the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore, Maryland to Portsmouth, Virginia. Summerwind, the 100′ 1929 John Alden designed schooner owned by the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, … Continue reading
On Friday, we posted that the windjammer Peking is in need a new home. The 101 year old four masted steel ship has spent the last 37 years as a museum ship at New York’s South Street Seaport Museum. The … Continue reading
This has not been a good few months for Aegis missile cruisers. In August, USS Porter collided with a VLCC (a large tanker) near the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday at around 3:30 PM, during routine operations, the Aegis cruiser USS … Continue reading
The Peking, a steel-hulled four-masted barque built in 1911, which has been a largely neglected fixture at New York’s South Street Seaport for almost the last 40 years, is now in desperate need of a new home. The South Street Seaport Museum thought that … Continue reading
In writing historical fiction, researching the history can be challenging. When researching my novel, Hell Around the Horn, I discovered that the three primary sources for the history behind the novel, two memoirs and the Official Ship’s Log, disagreed with each other in significant details and … Continue reading
Francesco Schettino, captain of the Costa Concordia, who steered his ship into a reef off the island of Giglio and then delayed the order to evacuate the sinking ship, resulting in or contributing to the deaths of 32 passengers and crew, was … Continue reading
The Sea Kayaker Magazine blog is reporting that Derek Hutchinson, often referred to as the father of sea kayaking, died on Wednesday at the age of 79. Hutchinson literally wrote the book on sea kayaking, even before it was universally called … Continue reading
Congratulations to Richard Bailey who has been appointed captain of the SSV Oliver Hazard Perry, which, when commissioned next summer, will be among the largest and most sophisticated school ships built in America in recent decades. The Oliver Hazard Perry Rhode Island organization … Continue reading
This will be a great couple of weeks around New York harbor for lovers of the music of the sea. “Sailing to Staten Island: The Immigrant Experience” is a free concert Saturday night at the Noble Maritime Collection at Snug … Continue reading
As we have posted about previously, the greatest threat to many species of endangered whales is from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing nets. The dead 50′ fin whale that drifted into Boston harbor recently is a reminder of this. … Continue reading
Video surveillance footage on the dock shows a group of people boarding the 130′ three masted schooner Silva in Halifax harbor at about 1:30 am, early Monday morning. They raised one sail and untied all but one mooring line. Around 5am, the remaining line parted and the … Continue reading
The brigantine Robert C. Seamans, owned and operated by Sea Education Association (SEA) is off on a 37 day Plastics at SEA: North Pacific Expedition 2012 into the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” to examine the effects of plastic debris, including debris generated by … Continue reading
Update: The death toll from the ferry collision has risen to 39 after a nine year old girl, Tsui Hoi-ying, who had been of life support in a Hong Kong hospital, is reported to have died. It only took about … Continue reading
Yesterday we posted about Nannie Dee, the erotic yet frightening witch figurehead on the composite clipper Cutty Sark. The figurehead on Galveston’s tall ship, the 1887 barque Eliisa, is quite different. When the ship was restored in the early 1980s, she was … Continue reading
The figurehead on the Cutty Sark is dramatic – a woman, all in white, wearing a flowing robe which leaves her upper body uncovered. He face is fixed in a scowl or grimace and she is reaching out with one … Continue reading
For close to two hundred years, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a center for shipbuilding. These days the sprawling site is home to a museum as well as a wide range of light industry. It is also host to quite … Continue reading
Narratively|NYC is a new web magazine with a focus, as the name implies, on narrative journalism involving New York City. For the past week, Narratively|NYC has run new features each day on New York harbor. Worth checking out. Thanks to Carolina Salguero at … Continue reading