In the late 60s and early 70s, hovercraft ferries were the ships of the future. Hovercraft, flying on cushions of air, operated across the English Channel carrying passengers and cars at speeds of 40 to 60 knots. Some imagined that one-day hovercraft would cross the Atlantic at 100 miles per hour. That day never arrived. The hovercraft turned out to be too expensive, too inefficient and uncomfortable. The last cross-channel hovercraft ferries stopped operating in 2000, driven from the water by high fuel costs and the slower but more comfortable alternative provided by the Channel Tunnel.
On Friday, more 4,000 longshoremen walked off the job shutting down piers and container terminals in New York and New Jersey. By Saturday, the most longshoreman had returned to work. Strangely, no one seems to know why the wildcat strike took place.
As reported by NJ.com: “We do know it’s an illegal walk-off,” said Phoebe Sorial, general counsel for the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor. “We did not hear about it beforehand and we don’t know why it’s happening.”
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.
Now, even veteran yachtsman is saying enough is enough. In a recent BBC interview, Sir Robin said, “This is no longer a joke. It costs between £6,000 and £8,000 every time a lifeboat is launched. These guys are costing the RNLI a fortune. They need to frankly pack it in or, I hate to say it, get the hell out of our waters.”
Yesterday, we posted about the boiler problems on the historic steamer Sabino at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic CT. During a major restoration of the steamer, built in 1908, it was determined that the boiler will need to be replaced. The museum’s website notes that “the vessel will operate as a dockside exhibit for the foreseeable future until her boiler is replaced.” A previous captain of the steamer also raised questions as to when or whether the Sabino would be returned to service in an op/ed in The Day, a local Connecticut newspaper. The Museum has now issued a statement about the future of the Sabino, which reads in part:
“We are disappointed in the decision we needed to make, but we believe it is in the best interest of the vessel to be launched this year and back in the public experience as a dockside exhibit,” said Steve White, president of Mystic Seaport. “That is what is best for her wooden hull and it will give the public access to the vessel while we work to complete the project.”
“We maintain our commitment to returning Sabino to steam operation,” he added.
The steamer Sabino, built in 1908, has been a popular attraction at the Mystic Seaport Museum since 1974, offering boat rides on the Mystic River to an estimated 33,000 passengers yearly. The steamboat; which the museum bills as the oldest wooden, coal-fired steamboat in regular operation in the U.S.; will not, however, be in operation this summer and it is unclear as to whether she will be put back in service in the foreseeable future.
During a major restoration in the Museum’s Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard, it was determined that the boat’s boiler was beyond repair and would need to be replaced. What is happening next is unclear.
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, RMS Titanic, was followed closely by the largest cruise ship of today, MS Allure of the Seas. Judged by gross tonnage, which is a measure of the volume of the ship rather than the weight, the MS Allure of the Seas at 225,282 GT is almost five times larger than the Titanic, at 46,328 GRT. This comparison is an approximation as the tonnage rules have changed over time. Nevertheless, the image tells the story. Thanks to Dr. Alan Rice for passing the image along.
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 Deltaville Yachting Center, in eastern Virginia on the Chesapeake . In the meantime, I will just admire the lovely Sherry Dawn.
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 El Niño . The US East Coast is being battered by a major blizzard this weekend. Does El Niño, a warming of surface waters in the Pacific, have anything to do with the blizzard, a full continent away? Louis Uccellini director of NOAA’s National Weather says that it could have contributed to the storm. “It really does set the background for this storm to develop and track the way it is tracking.”
The impact of El Niño has not been all bad. After five years of drought on the West Coast, the warmer waters of El Niño have brought much-needed rain to a parched California. Folsom Lake, east of Sacramento, for example, has risen a remarkable 44 feet in just over a month.
The sad saga of the Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) continues. The USS Fort Worth, the third Freedom Class LCS delivered, was testing its engines at dockside in Singapore and seriously damaged the ship’s combining gear. The LCS have both diesel and gas turbine engines. The combining gear is a complex set of gears which “combines” the output from the ship’s Rolls Royce MT-30 gas turbines and Colt-Pielstick diesel engines to the ship’s water jets. Initial reports say that the casualty was caused by the crew allowing the gear to run dry without adequate lubrication, leading to overheating. Whether the casualty was indeed due to operator error or a class-wide problem remains to be seen.
Only days after hearing good news about funding for the Pride of Baltimore II, there is very grim news about the organization which operates the Hudson River sloop Clearwater. The Clearwater organization announced that it is facing deep financial problems and that it is canceling its yearly music festival. As announced on the festival website today:
Dear Friends,
We are saddened to announce that Clearwater will not be holding its Great Hudson River Revival this year. As you may have heard, the sloop is undergoing its largest restoration ever. It is a restoration that costs $5,000 a day and will run until at least June 2016. We must take this time to focus our effort on making sure the boat can sail again this year. The sloop Clearwater is the foundation of our organization, the vessel that brings people to the Hudson River and an inspiration to all who love her. Our work to protect the Hudson River is still our primary mission.
When I hear “Volvo Round ….” I immediately fill in the blank with “the World.” (OK, technically, the race is named the Volvo Ocean Race, not the Volvo Round the Word Race.) I had never heard of the Volvo Round Ireland Yacht Race, which perhaps is not too surprising because Volvo only became a sponsor in 2015. Nevertheless, I had also never heard of the Round Ireland Yacht Race either. The biennial race will be celebrating its 18th sailing this year when a record 60 yachts, from all over Ireland and the British Isles, cross the starting line in Wicklow Bay on Saturday, June 18, 2016. The Round Ireland Yacht Race is Ireland’s premier offshore sailing race and is held every two years by Wicklow Sailing Club in association with the Royal Ocean Racing Club. The 704 nautical mile race was first held in 1980 and still retains the original course; “leave Ireland and all its islands excluding Rockall to starboard.” After the page break, a short video preview:
Tremendous news for a great ship. On Monday, Maryland’s Governor Hogan announced a $1.5 million private-public partnership with the replica Baltimore clipper, Pride of Baltimore II. Under a new agreement, the state will commit the funds to Pride of Baltimore Inc., the nonprofit that owns and operates the Pride, over the next three years.
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 West Indian manatees remained in Florida coastal waters. Manatees appeared sure to follow their cousin, Steller’s sea cow, which was hunted to extinction in the late 1700s. Now remarkably, almost fifty years later, manatees have come swimming slowly back from the brink.
In 2009, Rich Wilson at 58 was the oldest sailor in the Vendee Globe non-stop single-handed round-the-world yacht race. He finished ninth of the thirty boats which began the race. Wilson was the only American in the eleven finished.
The Vendee Globe is said to be the world’s toughest ocean race. Wilson suffered broken ribs, a gash in his face and compressed vertebrae as he sailed 28,790 miles in 121 days. Now at 64, he is preparing to do it again in the eighth Vendée Globe, which starts on November 6, 2016.
“Go Around Again” is a video documentary about Rich Wilson, written and directed by Rick Groleau.
The CBS news program “60 Minutes” recently did a report on the sinking of El Faro. Overall, they did a reasonably good job for a mainstream media report on shipping. There were a few minor glitches but overall, not a bad job. There was, however, one glaring problem. The report was titled, “Lost in the Bermuda Triangle.” Really? The Bermuda Triangle? Why dredge up that tired old scam? Why hasn’t the Bermuda Triangle nonsense just gone way?
A long time ago, on an island far, far away…. In the final scene of the new movie, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the young heroes finally track down Luke Skywalker, the Jedi master who has gone into hiding. They find him on the windswept peak of an island far out to sea on a distant planet. By this point in the movie, I could not have cared less whether they found the missing Skywalker, but I was captivated by the setting. I recognized the island as Skellig Michael.
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 the wreckage of a ship, believed to date from the 1800s. The Australian Joint Agency Coordination Centre, the agency directing the search for the plane, sent out a second ship to take a closer look at the shipwreck using and an underwater drone. Experts at the Shipwreck Galleries of the Western Australian Museum have said the wreckage is probably a ship made of steel or iron from mid-to-late 19th century or possibly the early 20th century.
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. The Iranians released the two boats and the sailors, nine men and one woman, today. The incident raised one question, at least in my mind, “what is a Riverine Command Boat?”
Atlantic Container Lines’ (ACL) Atlantic Star, the newest and world’s largest Container/Roll-on Roll-off ship, has arrived on the North American East Coast, calling at Halifax and on Saturday, in New York. Notwithstanding its name, the ships of Atlantic Container Lines have always featured room for both containers and wheeled vehicles. Atlantic Star, the latest and greatest ConRo, is the first of five of ACL’s new G4 class ships, representing the fourth generation of this hybrid ship type. The new ships will have a container capacity of 3800 TEUs plus 28,900 square meters of ro/ro space, with a car capacity of 1307 vehicles.