On an overcast Tuesday morning, the Barque Picton Castle sailed into New York harbor and tied up at Pier 25 just before the rain set in. under the watchful eye of Captain Daniel Moreland, the crew of mostly young men and women brought … Continue reading
Category Archives: Ships
The museum ship SS American Victory will host the FBI, Transportation Security Administration and a half-dozen other law enforcement agencies in bomb detection and disposal training exercises later this month in preparation for the Republican National Convention to be held in … Continue reading
One hundred and fifty years ago today, Robert Smalls, a 23 year old mulatto slave, who served as the pilot of the Confederate armed transport, CSS Planter, led eight fellow slaves in an audacious flight to freedom. They seized the CSS Planter, steamed … Continue reading
The USCGC Stratton is the Coast Guard’s newest cutter. Built at Ingalls Shipbuilding of Pascagoula, Miss., she was acquired by the Coast Guard on September 2, 2011 and officially commissioned on March 31, 2012. Roughly a month after the 418′ foot … Continue reading
We recently posted on “Pouring the Ballast on the Boston Tea Party Ship Beaver.” A follow up video on stepping the masts: Stepping the Masts in Boston [iframe: width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/Tokg1YDEVYg” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen] Thanks to Tom Russell of the Traditional … Continue reading
The attorneys for Odyssey Marine Exploration have been keeping busy. In February we posted about the end of a multi-year legal battle between Spain and Odyssey Marine Exploration over $500m in gold and silver coins and other artifacts from the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes. … Continue reading
In 1865, the CSS Georgia, a Confederate ironclad battery was burned and sunk in the Savannah River to avoid capture and to obstruct passage on the river. (The ship was scuttled not far from where the British sank the frigate HMS … Continue reading
The 98-foot-long solar powered catamaran MS Turanor PlanetSolar returned to Monoco yesterday, completing a 37,286 mile circumnavigation of the globe in 584 days. It is the first circumnavigation under solar power. Along the way, the Turanor PlanetSolar made stops on six continents to promote solar energy. While … Continue reading
Seventy yeas ago, the Japanese and navies of the United States and Australia fought the Battle of the Coral Sea in the waters southwest of the Solomon Islands and eastward from New Guinea in a series of naval battles from May … Continue reading
Update: The final auction price for the Sea Shadow and the HMB1 was an impressive $3.2 million. The Sea Shadow is an experimental 164′ long catamaran “stealth ship” built by Lockheed in the mid 1980s for the United States Navy. For … Continue reading
One of the most beautiful and most interesting tall ship sailing today, at least to my eye, is the three-masted barquentine Pelican. The Pelican is 148ft long overall, square rigged on the main mast but fore and aft rigged on the fore mast and … Continue reading
The 2012 Savannah Tall Ships Challenge is May 3-7 and will include a three-day festival featuring more than a dozen sailing vessels berthed on both the River Street and Hutchinson Island sides of the river. Click here for more details. … Continue reading
A double-decker ferry carrying an estimated 350 people capsized, broke apart and sank in the Brahmaputra River in heavy weather. The ferry was traveling between Dhubri to Fakirganjan in Assam state and was reported to be overloaded with passengers and cargo, and carried … Continue reading
On the heels of the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic, Australian mining billionaire Clive Palmer has announced his plans to build a 21st-century replica of the Titanic and sail it from England to New York accompanied by the Chinese navy by the … Continue reading
You can’t make this stuff up. A container ship owner and ship manager are suing a California pharmacy for selling prescription drugs to a harbor pilot prior to an allision with a bridge five years ago. On a very foggy morning in … Continue reading
Updated: Sad news. Yesterday afternoon, the crew of the 91-foot tugboat, Steven Scott, called the Coast Guard to report that they hadn’t seen their captain for nearly an hour and believed that he had fallen overboard. This afternoon the US Coast … Continue reading
This has been a busy day for Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh. They braved heavy rain and driving winds to name the Gloriana, a new 94-foot ornately carved royal barge, decorated with gold leaf. The Gloriana is … Continue reading
In December, 2008, we posted about “A Junk at Risk.” The Free China, a historic century-old Fujian sailing junk, was on the verge of being scrapped. The junk made international headlines in 1955 when an inexperienced crew of five Chinese … Continue reading
Earlier today we posted about an article by Andrew Gilligan, the Telegraph‘s London Editor, in which he referred to the Cutty Sark restoration as “a clucking, Grade A, Bernard Matthews-class turkey.” For a more positive perspective on the restoration one could turn to the … Continue reading
After a long commercial career, the 1869 composite clipper ship Cutty Sark became a museum ship in a drydock in Greenwich in 1954. Then in May 21, 2007, a fire broke out that burned a significant portion of the ship. After a 5 … Continue reading