If you are in the New York area come help celebrate Lilac, America’s only steam-powered lighthouse tender at a Maritime Mardi Gras fundraiser on Fat Tuesday, February 9th from 6 – 8 PM on 79 Walker Street on the 6th floor, (one block south of Canal between Layfatte and Broadway), in Manhattan. Let the good times roll with cocktails, light appetizers, and a silent auction.
Wear your maritime festive best. Mardi gras beads will be provided. Gerry Weinstein will offer tours of his model railroad, steam engines and industrial artifact collection at the end of the evening. The silent auction will include a cruise on the beautiful yacht Ventura, scrimshaw art by Barry Greene, sailing lessons from Sailors NYC, custom maritime tours and more. You must be there to bid! Get your tickets here. Lilac volunteers and former USCG crew and SIU cadets can register for free. If you can’t make it please donate.
Two American sailors, Bob Weise and Steve Shapiro, both 71, have been attempting to sail across the Atlantic from Norway to Maine in a 40′ gaff rigged sloop named Nora. They began the attempt last July and it has not gone well. In the last seven months, they have been rescued nine times. In this case, persistence is not a virtue.
Yesterday, 
The 
Numbers are fine but sometimes the best way to communicate scale is visually. The image above is what it would have looked like if the largest passenger liner of roughly 100 years ago, 
Here on the west bank of the Hudson River, I spent most of the morning digging out from yesterday’s blizzard, which dumped around 30 inches of snow on us. So, it seems like a good time to think of sunshine and warm breezes. The video, after the page break, is of an Albin Nimbus 42, named Sherry Dawn. This summer I hope to be sailing a sister vessel named Arcturus. Right now Arcturus, ex-Obsession, is being worked on by the good folks at 
Anyone who may doubt that we live on a water planet or that what happens at sea has a huge impact for everyone, even those living far inland, need only look to this year’s 
The sad saga of the Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) continues. The 
Only days after hearing good news about 
When I hear “Volvo Round ….” I immediately fill in the blank with “the World.” (OK, technically, the race is named the 
Tremendous news for a great ship. On Monday, Maryland’s 
When I was in high school in Florida in the 70s, the question was not “will the manatees become extinct?” but “how fast?” The manatees appeared to be doomed by a loss of habitat, pollution, slow birth rates and being run over by powerboats. By the late 1960s, only a few hundred 
In 2009, Rich Wilson at 58 was the oldest sailor in the 
The CBS news program “60 Minutes” recently did a report on the sinking of 
A long time ago, on an island far, far away…. In the final scene of the new movie, “
More than 80,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) of the seafloor in the Indian Ocean west of Australia have been searched, looking for where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is believed to have crashed with 239 people aboard in March 2014. So far, they have not located the missing the Boeing 777, but in December, they did find 
Yesterday, two US Navy Riverine Command Boats (RCBs) with a combined crew of ten sailors were apprehended by Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats. One or both of the RCBs had suffered a mechanical failure and had drifted into Iranian waters. 
Atlantic Container Lines’ (ACL)