A Roomba For Lionfish — Underwater Robot Vacuum to Suck Up an Invasive Species

Posted on by June 14, 2017

A year ago we posted, Invasive Lionfish for Sale at Whole Foods – If You Can’t Beat ’em, Eat ’em, about a new approach to combating lionfish which have been spreading rapidly along the southeast coast of the U.S., the Caribbean, and in parts of the Gulf of Mexico. Native to the Indo-Pacific, the lionfish lack natural predators and have been laying waste to local fish and shrimp populations. Whole Foods, a high end supermarket, is started to sell lionfish in their stores to consumers as one way to help slow their spread.

Unfortunately, there are more lionfish than there are divers to spear them. Now a foundation, Robots in Service of the Environment (RSE ) has developed an underwater robot to suck up the lionfish, a sort of underwater invasive species Roomba.  If you are not familiar with the Roomba, it is a consumer robot vacuum cleaner. RSE was founded last year by Colin Angle, the CEO for iRobot, the maker of the Roomba. He was visiting friends and marine biologists on Bermuda and they explained how lionfish quickly became king of the Atlantic’s coral reefs. Angle, John Rizzi, and friends decided to take action and the Guardian LF1 robot was born.

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Wreck of USRC/USCGC McCulloch Found — Sank 100 Years Ago Today

Posted on by June 13, 2017

Researchers are holding a news conference today to announce the discovery of the wreck of the USRC/USCGC McCulloch, a cutter of the United States Revenue Cutter Service and later the US Coast Guard.  Delivered in 1897,  just before the start of the Spanish-American War, she was initially transferred to the US Navy and served under Commander Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron in the Battle of Manila Bay.    

The McCulloch later patrolled the West Coast and later helped to enforce fur seal regulations in the Pribilof Islands off the coast of Alaska, where it also served as a floating courtroom in remote areas. In 1915, she was transfered to the US Coast Guard, the Revenue Cutter Service and the United States Life-Saving Service were merged to form the Coast Guard.  In 1917 with the US’s entry into World War I, the McCulloch  was transferred back to the US Navy. 

The McCulloch sank on June 13, 1917, 3 miles northwest of Point Conception, California, after colliding with a civilian steamship.

Update: Flying Clipper, World’s Largest Square Rigged Sailing Ship, Launched

Posted on by June 12, 2017

We have been following the progress of Star Clipper‘s new ship, the Flying Clipper, since her announcement in May 2015, through her keel laying at the Brodosplit Shipyard in Split, Croatia, in December of that year. On Saturday the Flying Clipper was launched at the Brodosplit shipyard.  

When the Flying Clipper makes her first voyage, expected in early 2018, she will be the largest square-rigged sailing ship in the world. A five masted barque, she is 532 feet (162 meters) long, with a 60 foot (18.5 meter) beam and will have a sail area of 68,300 square feet (6,347 square meters). By comparison, the tea clipper Cutty Sark set less than half as much sail at around 3,000 square meters. 

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OSTAR & TwoSTAR Races Battered by Storm — Dismasting, Sinking and Mid-Atlantic Rescues

Posted on by June 11, 2017

Graphic: RWYC & YachtingWorld

Sailors competing in the Royal Western Yacht Club’s Original Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) and the Twohanded Transatlantic Race (TwoSTAR) were battered by a North Atlantic storm with 60 knot winds and 45′ seas, 900 miles miles east of Newfoundland. One boat sank, two were abandoned and several competitors retired from the races. Fifteen single-handed sailors set off from Plymouth in the UK bound for New port, RI on May 29th. Twelve sailors also set off in six boats in the doublehanded race.

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The Mariner’s Guide to the Port of New York and New Jersey

Posted on by June 10, 2017

New York Harbor is the busiest port on the east coast of the United States. Here is a fascinating video about the challenges and dangers of the being on the water where cargo ships, tugs and barges, ferries, sailboats, power boats and kayaks all try to share the same space. 

The Mariner’s Guide to the Port of NY and NJ from John Rako on Vimeo.

Navy Retrieves Cannon from Perry’s USS Revenge off Watch Hill, RI

Posted on by June 9, 2017

US Navy archaeologists have retrieved a cannon which they believe came from USS Revenge, a schooner commanded by Oliver Hazard Perry in 1811. The schooner struck a reef and sank off Watch Hill in Westerly, RI in 1811.  Navy divers raised the cannon on May 24.  The cannon has been taken to the Washington Navy Yard to be desalinated and stabilized. As reported by the Westerly Sun: 

There are not many examples of early naval guns of this type, said George Schwarz, an underwater archaeologist with the Naval History and Heritage Command. The command oversees the identification and management of sunken naval vessels. “It’s a tangible reach back through naval history,” he said. Schwarz said he has a high level of confidence that the cannon is from the Revenge.

Perry’s career languished after the wreck until he was sent to the Great Lakes during the War of 1812. He’s remembered as the Hero of Lake Erie for defeating the British navy. He was famous for reporting simply, “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” after the decisive battle in 1813. Continue reading →

China Opens Floating Solar Power Farm

Posted on by June 8, 2017

This is only slightly nautical, but I find it interesting, nevertheless. China has opened a floating solar power farm.  Unlike offshore wind power, the facility is not at sea.  The 40-megawatt solar power plant is floating over what was once an open-pit coal mine, which has now flooded forming a lake. The plant is more efficient because the lake’s water provides to the panels, inverters and other mechanical components.

Several news sources have billed it as the “world’s largest floating solar plant.” This looks like harmless hyperbole, or a backhanded way of commenting on how unusual a floating solar power plant really is, as the 40 MW plant is not overly large in absolute terms.   

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Onrust Returns to the Connecticut River

Posted on by June 7, 2017

In 1614, the Onrust, captained by Dutch merchant explorer Adriaen Block, was the first European vessel to explore the Connecticut River. This summer, a replica of Block’s ship is returning to the river in a collaboration between the Connecticut River Museum in Essex, CT and the Onrust Project, offering cruises on the river and educational programming at dockside.   

The original Onrust was built by Block and his crew in the winter of 1614 somewhere in New York harbor. The ship, Tyger , on which Block had sailed from Holland to New York, had been destroyed by fire the previous winter.  Onrust , which means “restless” in Dutch, was the first ship to be built in what is now New York State. Sailing the Onrust into Long Island Sound, along the coast of Rhode Island and on to Cape Cod, Block drew the first accurate charts of the southern New England coast. In October of 1614, Block rendezvoused with another Dutch ship on Cape Cod and sailed back to the Netherlands.  The Onrust, however, would go on to be used to 1616 to explore the Delaware River under the command of Cornelius Hendrickson. 

The replica Onrust was built by the non-profit Onrust Project between 2006 and 2009 at the Mabee Farm Historic Site in Rotterdam Junction, NY, using traditional Dutch shipbuilding techniques. Since 2009, the Onrust has served as a floating museum providing the public with a living history experience of 17th century life and maritime exploration. 

The Connecticut River Museum is located at 67 Main Street, Essex, CT 06426.  To learn more, click here.

World Oceans Day on the Lilac — Answering the Ocean’s Call: Stewardship of Our Ocean, Our Future

Posted on by June 6, 2017

If you are around New York harbor on Thursday, June 8th, from 6 — 7:45 PM, stop by the historic USCG Cutter Lilac at Pier 25 on the Hudson River to celebrate World Oceans Day. The Lilac Preservation Project is hosting “Answering the Ocean’s Call: Stewardship of Our Ocean, Our Future” a program featuring ocean advocates, conservationists, performers and educators who are striving to connect citizens with the waters that sustain us. Speakers will include Mary Crowley, Betsy Damon, Tanja Andrejasic-Wechsler, David Thoreson, and Nina Hitchings. The program is presented in partnership with the Geoversiv Foundation and Our Humanity Matters.  Please register if you plan to attend.  Admission is free, but space is limited.

Lilac is a retired 1933 Coast Guard cutter that once carried supplies to lighthouses and maintained buoys. Decommissioned in 1972, USCGC Lilac is America’s only surviving steam-powered lighthouse tender and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is eligible to become a National Historic Landmark.

The Log of the Record Run — Frederick William Wallace’s Ballad of the Effie M. Morrissey (Mary L. McKay)

Posted on by June 5, 2017

One last post (at least for the immediate future) on the historic schooner Ernestina-Morrissey, which is now being restored in Boothbay, Maine.  Launched in February, 1894, she had a very successful almost thirty year fishing career, before becoming an Arctic exploration ship and then a Cape Verdian packet schooner.  

On December 10, 1912, the journalist, photographer, historian and novelist, Frederick William Wallace, boarded the Effie M. Morrissey for a record breaking voyage from Portland, ME and Yarmouth, NS, covering a distance of 200 miles in 20 hours.  Wallace would later pen a ballad “The Log of the Record Run.”  The song is now best known as “The Mary L. McKay.” Wallace explains why he changed the name of the schooner in the song:

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Bob Bartlett and His “Little Morrisey” — Voyage to Greenland

Posted on by June 4, 2017

Yesterday, we posted about the restoration of the historic schooner Ernestina, ex-Effie M. Morrissey.  Here is a documentary, narrated by the polar explorer, Captain Bob Bartlett, describing a voyage to Greenland in the schooner he refers to as his “Little Morrisey.”

Captain Bartlett sailed with Robert Peary in his expeditions to the North Pole. Bartlett sailed the schooner Morrissey in twenty voyages to the Arctic.  In total, Bartlett spent more than 50 years mapping and exploring the waters of the Arctic and led over 40 expeditions, more than anyone before or since.  While this film is dated 1947, it was shot on an earlier voyage north, as Captain Bartlett died in 1946.

Effie M Morrisey (Ernestina) Coastal Schooner 1947 Classic Film

Restoration of the Ernestina-Morrissey Continues

Posted on by June 4, 2017

Effie M. Morrissey 1894

The restoration of the historic schooner Ernestina-Morrissey is a quiet success story. The schooner, launched in 1894, is being rebuilt in the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard. Arriving at the yard in April 2014, she is expected to be redelivered in 2019. The schooner, the official flagship of the State of Massachusetts, is being rebuilt under a $6.3 million contract from the state. Once restored, the old schooner will sail again, for the first time since 2005, as a seaborne ambassador for the state, and as a floating classroom for students from kindergarten to those attending the maritime academy. 

The schooner has a remarkable history.  She was built at the John James & Washington Tarr shipyard in Essex, MA, and launched in February, 1894. Named Effie M. Morrissey, after the first skipper’s daughter, she had a very successful fishing career on the Grand Banks, paying for her construction costs on her first voyage.  

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Henderson Island — Pristine, Most Polluted, or Both?

Posted on by June 2, 2017

Photo: Jennifer Lavers

Henderson Island is an uninhabited island in the south Pacific Ocean, the largest of the four islands of the Pitcairn Island group and a part of the South Pacific British Overseas Territory.  It is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  UNESCO describes the island as “one of the few atolls in the world whose ecology has been practically untouched by a human presence. Its isolated location provides the ideal context for studying the dynamics of insular evolution and natural selection. ” 

Sadly, that description in no longer wholly complete or accurate. It is no longer untouched by humans, nor is it strictly speaking isolated. It lies on the western edge of the South Pacific gyre, a vortex of ocean currents which captures and concentrates floating plastic and trash, at least until the currents wash the plastic onto the beaches of islands like Henderson. 

A new study by Dr Jennifer Lavers and Dr. Alexander L. Bond, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that in a 2015 expedition, the researchers documented an estimated 38 million pieces of trash washed up on Henderson’s beaches, amounting to an estimated 17.6 tons of debris on the shores of the tiny island. Dr. Lavers, a research scientist at the University of Tasmania in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that what she saw on Henderson Island was “the highest density of plastic I’ve really seen in the whole of my career.”

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Windjammer Peking Bound for Hamburg in Late June on Combi Dock III

Posted on by June 1, 2017

A recent post on the Combi Lift company blog says that the windjammer Peking, long a resident of New York’s South Street Seaport, will travel back to its original homeport of Hamburg Germany carried by the heavy lift ship Combi Dock III  at the end of June. From their May 26th post:

Stiftung Hamburg Maritim (Hamburg Maritime Foundation) chose Bremen-based heavy lift expert Combi Lift as its logistics partner for the transport of the historic windjammer Peking. The steel-hulled, four-masted barque will be carried home to Germany this summer on-board a Combi Lift ship. Combi Lift, founded in 2000, is a member of the Harren & Partner Group.

At the end of June 2017, Combi Lift’s semi-submersible vessel Combi Dock III (Loa 169.40 metres, 11,000 tdw) will carry the tall ship to northern Germany to be the centrepiece of a new EUR 120 million museum complex under construction in Hamburg’s harbour. Peking has spent more than four decades at the South Street Seaport in New York City, USA. However, extensive repairs and maintenance were not carried out at this time. In September 2016 she was taken to Caddell Dry Dock, Staten Island, to spend the winter.

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Alexander Hamilton’s Lighthouse

Posted on by May 29, 2017

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse marking the shoals which have become known as the “graveyard of ships,” is often referred to as Hamilton’s lighthouse. (The current lighthouse is the second built at the site.) The story goes that when the teen-aged Alexander Hamilton was sent from St. Croix to the North American colonies to pursue an education in the summer of 1772, he sailed on the Thunderbolt, which caught fire off Cape Hatteras and very nearly sank. Young Alexander was said to have helped fight the fire. The ship is said to have come perilously close to drifting onto the deadly Diamond Shoals. Years later, in 1802, as Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton recalled his brush with death and supported building a lighthouse on Cape Hatteras.

That is the story anyway. Is any of it true? Hard to say. As the Secretary of the Treasury, the first lighthouse authorized by the Department of the Treasury was not the Hatteras lighthouse but the Boston light as well as several other lighthouses in New England. That may not challenge the story, but it complicates it.

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Navy SEAL “Leap Frogs” and the Disturbing Number of Parachuting Deaths

Posted on by May 31, 2017

They usually make it look so easy. The United States Navy Parachute Team “Leap Frogs,” a highly trained group of SEAL parachutists, regularly perform at airshows, sporting events and other celebrations. Last Sunday, during Fleet Week in New York, something went tragically wrong. A SEAL Leap Frog skydiver, Remington J. Peters,  died when his chute detached and he fell into the Hudson River near Liberty State Park as thousands looked on in horror.  

The Navy is currently investigating the events which led to the SEAL skydiver’s death.  As relatively rare as such accidents may be, the Military Times published last February the results of their analysis which showed that there has been a 60 percent increase in parachuting deaths among Navy SEALS and other special operators over the previous five-year period, according to 13 years worth of records obtained and analyzed by the publication.  Overall, since 2004, 21 US military Special Operators have died in parachute training.  11 have died in such training accidents between 2011 and 2016 alone.  From the Military Times article, The Navy SEALs and other secretive units are quietly battling a frightening rise in parachute deaths: 

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Last Mission of the USS Olympia — Carrying the Unknown Soldier Home

Posted on by May 29, 2017


USS Olympia at the Battle of Manila Bay

On Memorial Day, an updated repost from six years ago about the last mission of the USS Olympia in 1921, when she carried an American unknown soldier killed during World War I  from a cemetery in France back to the Washington to be in entombed Arlington National Cemetery.   The Olympia was decommissioned the following year. 

USS Olympia is the oldest steel-hulled American warship afloat and Commodore George Dewey’s flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898.  The ship is is now a museum ship at Philadelphia’s Independence Seaport Museum.

Memorial Day: Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery
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Mayflower II at Mystic Seaport — the Restoration Continues

Posted on by May 28, 2017

Here is a fascinating new video from Mystic Seaport Museum describing the restoration of Mayflower II  at the seaport’s Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard.  Mayflower II is a  reproduction of the original Mayflower  built from 1955-1957.  

Restoration Continues: Mayflower II at Mystic Seaport

From the Seaport website: 

Two sawmills slice massive logs of white oak into manageable pieces, sending sawdust floating through the air. Nearby, a shipwright shapes the pieces expertly with a broadax. Piece by piece, Mayflower II is being restored to her original grandeur, and it’s a sight to behold. Continue reading →

The 35th America’s Cup Begins — Is it Still Relevant?

Posted on by May 27, 2017

After being postponed for two days by high winds, the 35th America’s Cup is scheduled to start this morning. Many consider the races to be the greatest show on the water — a thrilling, high-stakes extravaganza featuring cutting-edge technology and the best sailors in the sport. Others view the races as an ego-fueled billionaire’s extravagance featuring obscenely costly beach-cats, wholly unrelated the rest of the world of sailing. There may be elements of truth in both viewpoints.

The races have certainly changed from the more stately America’s Cups of old, before the competing sailors started wearing crash helmets as part of their uniforms. The 35th competition is a continuation and refinement of the “foiling revolution” introduced in the last running of the races. The 50′ catamarans in this year’s race are among the most advanced sailing vessels ever seen and can sail at 45 knots in a 15-knot breeze, and up to 30 knots upwind.

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