The twenty eight year old bulk carrier Oriental Nicety was recently sold for scrap for $16 million. The ship was originally a tanker and has four owners and as many names. She is best known as the Exxon Valdez, the single hull … Continue reading
Category Archives: Lore of the Sea
Earlier this month, 90 year old Winnie Breegle spoke at the 2012 Women’s History Month celebration at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, FL. She had quite a story to tell. Not only was she a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency … Continue reading
We posted previously about “Pirates and Privateers,” a documentary on CBC’s Land and Sea. The 20 minute documentary is now available on-line. It presents a distinctive view of piracy and privateering from the perspective of the Canadian Maritimes, not often seen by those of us … Continue reading
The luxury cruise ship Silver Shadow may have lived up to its name on Friday morning when it collided with a container ship in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. There were no reported injuries on the cruise ship, though passengers reported being knocked off their … Continue reading
James Cameron wants to dive to deepest part of the ocean – the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, 35,800 feet (5.8 nautical miles) below the surface. To do so, he plans on using a single person submersible designed to dive … Continue reading
Alan Villiers was the great chronicler of the last days of sail. In 1918, at the age of 15, he left home in Melborne, Australia to go to sea. His first love would always be the full rigged sailing ships … Continue reading
In 1904 and 1905, archaeologists Haakon Shetelig and Gabriel Gustafson excavated a burial mound at the Oseberg farm near Tønsberg in Vestfold county, Norway that contained a well-preserved Viking ship. The Osberg ship was reconstructed and has became Norway’s largest tourist … Continue reading
Coelacanths apparently evolved in their current form around 400 million years ago. They were thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago, during the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction – that is, until 1938 when a fisherman in South Africa pulled one up … Continue reading
Way back in 1984, I worked for Malcom McLean’s United States Lines, when the 4,400 TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) containership, the American New York, was delivered. She was this first of McLean’s fleet of “Jumbo Econships.” In those days, he … Continue reading
In November, we posted about how a drought on the Rhine River was exposing unexploded World War II munitions, and then in December about the evacuation of half of the German city of Koblenz, when several large bombs were found buried in … Continue reading
The US Navy wants to install a $100 million offshore training range, which would include an undersea array of cables and sensors for training warships, submarines and aircraft about 50 miles off the Atlantic coast of southern Georgia and northern Florida. Environmentalists … Continue reading
Two years and one month ago today, the SV Concordia, a school ship operated by West Island College International, was knocked down and sank off the coast of Brazil. Fortunately, all 64 passengers and crew aboard were rescued. The final … Continue reading
Norwegian Jarle Andhøy, 34, who calls himself a “Wild Viking,” is in trouble again. Andhøy and two others are sailing the 54-foot yacht, Nilaya, off Antarctica. They have reported that the yacht has a broken boom and that they are heading for an unspecified Argentine … Continue reading
At first this sounded like a joke. Pirates like to tweet, have blogs and are on Facebook. Really? According to security expert, Jessica Lincoln, director of intelligence at Rubicon Resolution, “Somalia is a very sophisticated economy, it has one of the best mobile phone communication systems … Continue reading
This week we posted that the Pacific nation of Kiribati is considering purchasing land on Fiji as a possible site to relocate as rising waters threaten to submerge their home islands. As distant and exotic as Kiribati’s problem may sound an article in the … Continue reading