Do Cruise Ships Have A Sexual Assault Problem?

Posted on by July 26, 2019

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 day after Christmas in 2015. She alleges that everything but the rape took place in full view of crew and security cameras, yet nobody intervened to prevent the men from buying alcohol for her or leading her away to the cabin.

She alleges that on the first night, in full view of Royal Caribbean crew, a group of men bought multiple alcoholic beverages for her at public bars until she became “highly intoxicated,” “obviously drunk, disoriented, and unstable,” and “obviously incapacitated.” That group of around a dozen men then took her to a cabin where they “brutally assaulted and gang-raped her according to the girl’s claim.

Newsweek reports that a district court in Florida had dismissed the girl’s negligence lawsuit against Royal Caribbean over the 2015 incident for failure to state a claim, ruling that she had not sufficiently alleged the operator had breached its duty of care and proximately caused her injuries.  But that decision was reversed on Wednesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which concluded her claims were, in fact, sufficient to allege that Royal Caribbean was negligent towards her.

Is this an isolated case or is sexual assault on cruise ships a chronic problem? Continue reading →

Update: Solar Sail Satellite LightSail 2 Deployed in Orbit

Posted on by July 25, 2019

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 of a boxing ring, in Earth orbit. 

LightSail 2 is the first spacecraft in Earth orbit to be propelled only by sunlight. The craft will orbit the earth powered by the momentum of solar photons striking the sail. 

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Update: Jubilee Sailing Trust (JST) Decommissioning STS Lord Nelson

Posted on by July 24, 2019

STS Lord Nelson

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 have not ended, however.

The charity has announced that it will be decommissioning one of its two ships, the STS Lord Nelson, and will continue its operations on the STSTenacious. Both ships were specially designed and fitted to allow people with physical impairments, including wheelchair users, to sail side-by-side with people who do not have disabilities. It appears that Lord Nelson will be dockside while Tenacious will continue sailing.

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French Sub Minerve That Vanished 50 Years Ago Found in Mediterranean

Posted on by July 23, 2019

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 submarine vanished. Despite an extensive search by the French navy, no trace was found of the submarine and her crew of 6 officers and 46 sailors.

Over 50 years after the Minerve’s disappearance, the French government contracted with the American ocean-mapping company Ocean Infinity to continue the search. Yesterday, Ocean Infinity announced that their Norwegian flag research vessel Seabed Constructor had located the wreckage of the Minerve in about 7,800 feet of water, roughly 28 miles south of the French port city of Toulon.  

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Intact 500 Year Old Shipwreck Found on Baltic Seafloor

Posted on by July 22, 2019

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 141 meters. The lack of oxygen in the cold and brackish waters of the Baltic Sea help to slow the decay of the ship, which is sitting on the bottom with two masts still rising vertically, the beakhead and bowsprit still projecting from the prow. The remains of a yard rests diagonally on deck while nearby an unlaunched ship’s boat sits snug against the portside gunnel. A bilge pump, capstain, and an anchor, still catted to the bow, are also visible. The shape of the ship’s anchor help date the ship to the late 15th or early 16th century.  

The ship, though fitted for swivel guns, is believed to be a merchantman. She is believed to have sunk near the time that Columbus made his transatlantic voyages. The Baltic ship at 50-60 feet long is roughly the same size as the ships of Columbus’ flotilla. 

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Navigating to the Moon — Remembering the Apollo Sextant

Posted on by July 21, 2019

Commander Lovell using the sextant, Apollo 8

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 navigate to the Moon and back. Not only did a sextant help to get to the moon, but Astronaut Jim Lovell’s use of a sextant would be instrumental in saving the crippled Apollo 13 in 1970.

The Apollo sextant was a modern update of device that sailors have used for centuries. It played a key role in the three-part navigation system in the Apollo program. Much of the navigation was performed using ground-based radar. When that was not available, an inertial guidance system was used. The inertial guidance system tended to drift however and needed to be corrected periodically. To do so, the astronauts used a scanning telescope and a sextant to take star sights. These sights were used to correct the inertial guidance system and to confirm the accuracy of the ground-based navigation system. The sextant was also considered to be a backup against the possibility that the Russians would attempt to jam radio transmissions between Mission Control and the Apollo spacecraft. 

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The Ferris Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay

Posted on by July 20, 2019

Ferris steamship

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 and cheaply to counter the submarine threat.

If the year was 1941, this might be the story of the Liberty ships. Instead, the year was 1917 during the First World War and the US Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC) set out to contract for the construction of 703 wooden cargo steamships to supplement its slowly growing fleet of steel cargo ships. Several similar designs were ultimately built but the standard design was Theodore Ferris’ type 1001 design. They were 3 islander ships, 82.2 meters long (270′) 13.7 meters wide (45′). They had triple-expansion steam engines and were capable of cruising at 10 knots.

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USS Eagle 56 — Last Navy Warship Sunk by U-Boat in WWII Found off Maine

Posted on by July 19, 2019

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 the crew of 62, only 13 survived.  The sinking was originally blamed on a boiler explosion. It would take the Navy until 2001 to conclude that Eagle 56 had been sunk by the German submarine U-853.  USS Eagle 56 was the last US warship sunk by a German submarine in World War II.

Exactly where the patrol boat sank remained a mystery, until this week when Garry Kozak, a specialist in undersea searches, announced that his team had found the Eagle 56  in 300 feet of water off Cape Elizabeth on the Maine coast. 

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Mallows Bay ‘Ghost Fleet’ Made a National Marine Sanctuary

Posted on by July 18, 2019

Photo: MARYLAND DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES/MARINE ROBOTICS & REMOTE SENSING, DUKE UNIVERSITY

Forty miles south of Washington, D.C., close to Nanjemoy, Maryland is a fleet of ghost ships — the wrecks of hundreds of ships in Mallows Bay, a shallow bay on the Potomac River. It is considered to be the largest shipwreck fleet in the Western Hemisphere. Some of the wrecks date back to the Civil War and some are of recent vintage. Most are wooden cargo ships built for World War I, which sailed directly from shipyards to layup without ever seeing service.

Over the years, the wrecks of these ships have become home to fish, osprey, bats, beavers, waterfowl and a variety of vegetation. Now, if all goes well, the fleet will become part of the Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary, the first national marine sanctuary designated since 2000.

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50th Transpacific Race — Pyewacket Rescues OEX Crew After Rudder Failure

Posted on by July 17, 2019

OEX in better days

At around 2AM on Monday, OEX, a Santa Cruz 70, owned by John Sangmeister, suffered a catastrophic rudder failure while sailing in the 50th Transpacific Yacht Race. Sangmeister reported that the lower rudder bearing had blown off and the rudder was “can-opening” the bottom of the boat. 

OEX began to sink about 200 miles off the coast. Fortunately, Pyewacket , an Andrews 70, was within two-miles of OEX and heard the distress call. Pyewacket sailed to the sinking yacht and picked up the 9 person crew from liferafts as OEX slipped beneath the Pacific. No injuries were reported. Pyewacket, owned by Roy Disney, abandoned the race and sailed back to San Diego, arriving early Tuesday. 

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MSC Gayane Freed on Bond, Sailing for the Netherlands

Posted on by July 16, 2019

MSC Gayane – Photo: HHM / Dietmar Hasenpusch

Last week, US Customs and Border Patrol seized the container ship MSC Gayane, following the seizure of 18,000 kilograms of cocaine, worth an estimated $1.3 billion, by Federal agents while at the dock in the Port of Philadelphia in late June. Now, the ship has sailed for Rotterdam, the scheduled next port of call after Philadelphia. 

American Shipper reports that William McSwain, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, announced via Twitter on Friday that his office secured $10 million in cash and a $40 million surety bond from the owner and operator of the MSC Gayane in exchange for its temporary release pending a final resolution of a lawsuit involving the ship.

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Dramatic Video of Coast Guard Boarding Drug-Running Submersible

Posted on by July 14, 2019

Here is an amazing short video of the US Coast Guard overtaking and boarding a drug-running submersible. A Coast Guardsman is seen leaping aboard the submersible while underway and forcing the hatch open to apprehend the smugglers. The capture took place in the Eastern Pacific by the USCG Cutter Munro. The smuggling craft was carrying 17,000 pounds of cocaine with an estimated street value of $232 million.

The video shows not only the incredible courage and skill required to board the moving submersible but also how difficult these specialized smuggling craft are to spot while underway in the ocean. 

Watch: U.S. Coast Guard Crew Leaps Onto Drug Smuggling Vessel

The Flying AC75s — Genius, Folly or Both?

Posted on by July 10, 2019

The new design for the AC75s is an engineering marvel. Nevertheless, I am having an argument with myself whether they are works of genius or folly. More specifically whether carbon fiber and foils will have any practical application to real-world sailing or if they are just rich men’s do-dads. While I argue with myself, here are two videos discussing how these amazing creations actually fly.

How the new AC75 will fly

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The 8,850 Kilometer Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt — From the Gulf to West Africa

Posted on by July 10, 2019

Floating mats of Sargassum seaweed in the center of the North Atlantic were first reported by Christopher Columbus in the 15th century. These mats, although abundant, have, until recently, been limited and scattered.  In recent years that has changed dramatically. A new study by Mengqiu Wang and her colleagues from the University of South Florida, published in the journal Science, documents the formation of a massive mat of Sargassum seaweed stretching from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. 

Last summer, the floating mat formed an 8850-kilometer-long belt of the brown buoyant seaweed, estimated to weight more than 20 million tons. The growth of what the authors of the study refer to as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt has been recorded by satellite imagery showing a dramatic increase in the size of the floating seaweed mats over the past 20 years. The researchers say that this Sargassum belt represents the world’s largest macroalgal bloom and that such recurrent blooms may become the new normal. 

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NYC City of Water Day 2019 — Free Fun at the Waterfront

Posted on by July 12, 2019

If you are near New York harbor on Saturday, July 13th, stop by the South Street Seaport, Piers 16 and 17, from 10AM to 4PM, to help celebrate City of Water Day 2019. In its 12th year, City of Water Day is a free harbor-wide day organized by the Waterfront Alliance in partnership with the South Street Seaport Museum, among others. 

The Con Edison Cardboard Kayak Race will return to Lower Manhattan and free PortNYC Boat Tours on all kinds of vessels, from tall ships to tugboats, will be offered from homeport docks throughout New York City.

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