Photographer Scott Haefner and a few of his friends snuck aboard ships in the Suisan Bay Reserve Fleet near San Francisco, CA and photographed and documented the rusting fleet. Fascinating images. The Mail Online ran an article today about his work. For more images, see Haefner’s site: … Continue reading
Category Archives: Current
The Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Invincible was sold to Turkish scrappers last February. Now bids are open for the sale of HMS Ark Royal. While scrapping seems a likely outcome the tender allows that “alternatively the vessel may be purchased for re-use/refurbishment for non-warlike purposes.” … Continue reading
June 8th is officially World Ocean Day, “a global celebration of ocean conservation,” sponsored by the United Nations since 2008, and coordinated internationally by The Ocean Project and the World Ocean Network. The theme for this year and next is : Youth – … Continue reading
And speaking of “music of the sea”, an intriguing story from Australia. When Matt Waller, a tour operator in Neptune Bay, Australia, attached speakers to shark cages and played the heavy metal band AC/DC, he discovered that the great white sharks became … Continue reading
The 32nd Annual Sea Music Festival at Mystic Seaport starts this Thursday night, June 9th, and runs through Sunday, June 12th. More than 5,000 people gather each year to hear Mystic Seaport’s Chantey Staff along with a solid core of performers … Continue reading
Traditionally, ships in port use auxiliary generators to power shipboard electrical systems. APL, the Singapore based container lines, is now going “cold-iron,” shutting down the auxiliary generators on their ships docking when calling on Oakland, California and using shore power instead to meet the their … Continue reading
June 25th of this year is being celebrated as the “Day of the Seafarer.” We will be joining with other bloggers and journalists from around the world to say “thank you” to the world’s 1.5 million seafarers for the invaluable and often overlooked contribution that … Continue reading
The 31-meter Turanor, a catamaran yacht fitted with 536 square meters of photovoltaic panels, has successfully sailed halfway around the world, from Monaco to Brisbane, Australia, powered solely by the sun. The Turanor‘s captain and crew are half way toward … Continue reading
Dead zones are areas where there is too little oxygen in the water to support fish and other aquatic life. They are usually caused by fertilizers and/or other organic materials causing algae blooms which deplete the oxygen in the water. Dead zones in the … Continue reading
Until I saw the video I didn’t grasp just how large this anchor is. It is believed to be from the pirate Blackbeard‘s flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which ran aground in 1718 while trying to enter Old Topsail Inlet in North Carolina, now known … Continue reading
Rear Adm. Sandra Stosz has been named as the 40th Superintendent of the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Ct. She is the first woman to lead one of the nation’s five military service academies. New leader takes the … Continue reading
Last July we posted about divers finding intact bottles of champagne, believed to date from between 1782 and 1788, in the hold of a shipwreck on the Baltic seabed. In November, a bottle of the “world’s oldest champagne” was opened and tasted by … Continue reading
A recent report by Greenpeace directly contradicts Japanese government assurances that the radiation in the water near the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is being dispersed and diluted over time. Significant levels of radioactive contamination have been recorded in local seafood. Greenpeace: Japan nuclear plant radiation accumulating … Continue reading
If a group of birds are a flock, a group of whales is a pod, and fish gather in schools, what would one call a group of Noah’s arks? A fleet would be the easy answer, but that somehow doesn’t … Continue reading
The good news is that the events were more like the Carnival Splendor than the Titanic. No one died. No ships were lost to icebergs. Nevertheless, there was high drama, bordering on the operatic, on the cruise ship MSC Opera on its … Continue reading
Victor Hugo wrote, “Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.” There are some ideas whose time always appears to be coming but somehow never quite arrive. As a young naval architect in the 1970s, I recall predictions that … Continue reading
An explosion in a fuel tank on the cruise ship docks in Gibraltar today injured several on the dock and over twelve passengers on the 3,634-passenger Royal Caribbean cruise ship, Independence of the Seas. The injuries to passengers were all reported to be minor. … Continue reading
On May 31, 1911, the RMS Titanic was launched at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland. After continued outfitting, the ship was delivered to White Star Line on March 30, 1912. She set sail for New York City … Continue reading
In April of 2007, the cruise ship Sea Diamond struck a reef off the island of Santorini and sank. Nearly 1,600 passengers where rescued and two passengers drowned. Now four years later the Greek government has says that it cannot afford to remove … Continue reading
For seventy years, battleships were the unchallenged masters of the oceans, until technology swept them aside. Now the aircraft carrier reigns supreme. The US currently has five times more aircraft carrier capacity based on flight deck acreage than the the … Continue reading