My next door neighbors left last Tuesday for a 10 day cruise in the Eastern Caribbean on the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line ship Explorer of the Seas. I saw them shortly before they departed. We were both shoveling snow from our front sidewalks. The Explorer of the Seas would be sailing from New York in a winter snow storm and my neighbor commented that at the very least it would be “a memorable trip.” It turns out that this voyage will be memorable for reasons other than weather. It is now being reported that close to 600 of the more than 3,000 passengers have been sickened by a norovirus aboard the ship. The cruise schedule was modified and now has been shortened. The ship is on her way back to a berth in Bayonne in New York harbor. I only hope my neighbors were among the roughly 80% of the passengers not made ill by the virus.
The Vega desperately needs a mizzen mast. Specifically, they are looking for a fir or spruce to shape the 10m x 26cm mast and a shipping company able to transport the wood from either Brisbane, Australia, or Vancouver, Canada, to Singapore. If they cannot find a replacement mast by April, their 2014 humanitarian mission, delivering medical and school supplies to over 50,000 people in remote island communities, may be at risk.
Their website and Facebook page refer to the craft as the “Historic Vessel Vega,” which is appropriate given that the ketch was built in 1892 in Norway and has had a long illustrious and varied career. In recent years, however, it would be more appropriate to refer to her as the “Humanitarian Vessel Vega,” as under the command of Captain Shane Granger and his crew, the Vega has been delivering critically needed supplies to villages in very remote parts of Eastern Indonesia and East Timor. In 2011, Captain Granger and the Vega’s crew were honored with the Asia Pacific Laureate Foundation annual award for Social Services in recognition of “Humanitarian Services to Isolated Island Communities.”
Today, Tampa, Florida will be “invaded” by pirates. Every year about this time, Tampa celebrates the Gasparilla Pirate Fest notionally in honor of Jose Gaspar, reputed to be the “Last Buccaneer.” It is described as “a swashbuckling good time” involving silly costumes, parade floats and heavy drinking. This has been going on in Tampa since around 1904, when some of the city’s elite formed the ‘Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla’ and staged a mock invasion by Jose Gaspar and his crew.
Who was Jose Gaspar? He is claimed to be a pirate who is said to have raided the west coast of Florida during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In fact, he is entirely fictional. There is no historical record of his existence and the first stories of his exploits did not appear until the 20th century. At least no one is claiming that he sailed with a ship full of cannibal rats, not yet anyway.
A recent study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) published in the journal eLife suggests that of more than a thousand species of sharks and rays in the world, one in four species are at the brink of extinction. Overfishing is the greatest threat to these species. Demand for shark fin soup is a major cause of the depletion of both sharks but also some species of rays. It has been estimated that over 11,000 sharks are killed per hour for their fins. For a truly astonishing graphic representation of what that means click here.
The progress in protecting sharks and rays is decidedly mixed. The good news is that limits were put on shark and ray fishing last year in Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting in Bangkok. New Zealand also recent;y banned shark finning. The very bad news is that a massive trade deal now being negotiated, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is reported to undo the Bankok limits. Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.
I may owe Chris Reynolds an apology. In a reply to a comment about our post, Lyubov Orlova, Ghost Ship Crewed by Cannibal Rats Drifting Toward the UK — Phony Hysteria on a Slow News Day?, I suggested that Reynolds, Director, Irish Coast Guard, “appears to one of those helping to fuel the hysteria, not that the media needs much help.” That was probably unfair as we later received a comment from Chris Reynolds, as follows:
actually I never said I thought it was still afloat since the EPIRBs went off but the fact is no one cant prove it sunk. the ship had a number of EPIRBS in lifeboats we are told so the signals are only an indication. However professionally speaking its demise is pretty certain. the rats thing came from an Icelandic April Fools prank and some creative journalism. There ya go. Be careful believing what you read.
PS We are not annoyed at Canada as this is such a rare event.
The Twitterverse has gone crazy (crazier?) over reports of the Ghost Ship Swarming With Cannibal Rats Bound for Britain. Dozens of newspaper websites have feaverishly picked up the story. In all the foolishness, I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel “Scoop” in which an unlikely journalist “scooped” the competition by reporting on fictitious battles in a civil war in an obscure African country. The story of the “Ghost Ship” Lyubov Orlova is a bit like that — there appears to be no there there. All indications are that the ship sank many months ago and, even if didn’t, there aren’t likely to be many surviving rats on the ship, in the unlikely event that the ship is still afloat. In all the hub-bub, the British Maritime & Coast Guard Agency (MCA) saw fit to release a statement:
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) has received no sightings of the former Soviet cruise ship ‘Lyubov Orlova’ since April last year and there is no evidence to suggest it is still afloat.
Any ‘ghost’ ship entering European waters is highly likely to be reported due to the large number of vessels passing through the area. We would then act accordingly.
Photo: Sheldon Pettit
The world’s oldest surviving clipper ship, City of Adelaide, has arrived in Port Hedland, Western Australia. She has been carried from Scotlandon the deck of the heavy-lift ship MV Palanpur, with intermediate stops to load and discharge other cargo. MV Palanpur is in Port Hedland discharging six trains loaded in Norfolk. If all goes well, City of Adelaide will arrive in its namesake city in just less than a week. In the mean time, the City of Adelaide Preservation Trust is continuing to raise money to bring the 1864-built ship back to Adelaide, to prepare a site and to preserve the ship. Thus far, they have raised $156,000 of their $750,000 fundraising target. Click here to help support the historic ship.
MV Lyubov Orlowa
A story has exploded across the UK press about the Lyubov Orlova, a cruise ship which broke free from its tow in a winter storm and was abandoned in the Atlantic in February of last year. What evidence exists suggests that the ship sank in the mid-Atlantic in March. Nevertheless, in the past 24 hours more than a half-dozen newspapers in the UK and the commonwealth have published stories with lurid headlines like that of the Independent, which screams “Ghost ship ‘crewed by cannibal rats heading to Britain.” Similar stories have been published by the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Metro, the Mirror, This is Cornwall, News.com.au and the International Business Times. Even the German Web.de gets into the act with its article, “Geisterschiff: Treibt das “Rattenschiff” auf Großbritannien zu?”
This makes such a wonderful story because, while all evidence suggests that the the ship sank last year, there is no absolute proof that it did. Also, all rats are cannibals and it is likely that there rats aboard the ship when it was towed out of Newfoundland. So, viola, the lost and probably sunken ship becomes the “Ghost Ship Crewed by Cannibal Rats Drifting Toward the UK.” Except that it probably isn’t drifting anywhere, and if it were the rats aboard may have already eaten each other, so that if the ship is afloat, there may only be one fat rat left, if it doesn’t starve first.
Last June, we reviewed Joan Druett’s Judas Island, the first book her Promise of Gold Series. Here is an excerpt from a recent review by Cindy Vallar from her wonderful Pirates and Privateers blog. Captain Jahaziel “Jake” Dexter believes a pirate’s old sea journal contains the map to the lost treasure of Panama. Back in 1670 the Spaniards feared that Henry Morgan intended to steal their gold, so they loaded it onto a ship with a group of nuns. The ship and all aboard were never heard from again. Nearly two centuries later, Jake and his crew arrive at Judas Island in hopes of retrieving that gold. While his men dig on the spooky island, Jake remains aboard his brig, waiting for his mate to return. Charlie has rowed over to a ship to broker a deal for whale oil, which they will sell in Valparaiso, Chile for a tidy profit. What Charlie returns with, however, is a passenger – and a female one to boot. Read the rest of the review on the Pirates and Privateers blog.
When I started this blog, I had intended it to be, at least in part, a book blog of works about ships and the sea. Of late, however, I have been completely negligent in posting reviews. I will attempt to get back on track. V.E. Ulett’s recent novel, Blackwell’s Paradise, a sequel to her excellent Captain Blackwell’s Prize, seems like a great place to start.
We wrote in our review of her first book, that Captain Blackwell’s Prize falls equally well in the categories of nautical adventure and historical romance. It is the sort of novel that readers of C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian can enjoy along with fans of Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier. Ulett continues this balance between adventure and romance in Blackwell’s Paradise, with Captain James Blackwell and his wife, Mercedes, beginning on a Royal Navy frigate sailing on a mission to the Pacific and continuing somewhat unexpectedly on the Hawaiian islands. In parallel stories, Ulett captures the wild life among battling Hawaiian kingdoms, as well as that of the early settlement of Honolulu, where fur traders, whalers and the naval ships of several nations, all compete for trade. Blackwell and Mercedes are well drawn and fascinating characters on both the familiar surroundings of a Royal Navy ship and the more exotic environs of the Sandwich Islands. Great fun. Highly recommended. Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other on-line retailers.
The two posts today present a jarring juxtaposition. On the West Coast of the United States, dolphins steal the show at a surfing competition while in Japan fishermen are beginning the yearly slaughter of dolphins at Taiji Cove. The beauty of the first only reinforces the horror of the second. Tellingly, the dolphins playing in the surf appears to be getting more media coverage than the slaughter.
Over the weekend, a pod of dolphins joined in at a surfing competition in Santa Barabara, California. An estimated dozen or more dolphins rode the waves along with surfers at the 2014 Rincon Classic.
Dolphins Surfing In Santa Barbara: Dolphins steal the show at Santa Barbara surf competition
Tragedy at Taiji, photo from a past slaughter
Despite domestic and international protest, the annual mass slaughter of bottlenose dolphins is underway in a cove near the Japanese village of Taiji. In 2010, The Cove, a documentary about the yearly slaughter, won the Academy Award last night for best feature documentary. Since then, the level of protest around the world has risen dramatically, but the slaughter continues.
Annual Japanese Dolphin Slaughter Begins in Taiji Cove
Both US and British ambassadors have condemned the “drive killings”, where fishermen lead hundreds of the mammals to a cove in Taiji, in the western Wakayama prefecture, to select some to sell to marine parks. The rest are either released or killed for meat.
Roger & Margaret Pratt Photo: Mirror
Terrible news from St. Lucia. Roger Pratt, 62, was killed while defending his wife from intruders on their Premier 41 sailboat, Magnetic Attraction, near the town of Vieux Fort on the island nation of St. Lucia in the eastern Caribbean. The Daily Mail is reporting that Pratt was beaten and stabbed several times by the men who boarded the sail boat late Friday night. Margaret Pratt was also injured in the attack. The BBC reports:
He said that officers heard that three armed men had boarded the boat, named the Magnetic Attraction, and attacked the couple before fleeing.
“Margaret went in search of her husband and found him floating in the nearby waters. Roger was retrieved and transported to St Jude Hospital via ambulance along with his wife. He was pronounced dead on arrival while Margaret was treated and discharged.”
While oceans in Northern latitudes are feeling the icy blast of winter, the antipodes are in the middle of a very hot summer. Indeed, for Australia, there maybe too much of summer’s sun, as the continent suffers under a brutal heat wave. The Southern oceans, at least, are in full bloom. Recently, NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on its aqua satellite captured dramatic images of a plankton bloom swept up in a large ocean eddy.
As the close-up image shows, an eddy is outlined by a milky green phytoplankton bloom. Eddies are masses of water that typically spin off of larger currents and rotate in whirlpool-like fashion. They can stretch for hundreds of kilometers and last for months. As these water masses stir the ocean, they can draw nutrients up from the deep, fertilizing the surface waters to create blooms in the open ocean. Other times, they carry in nutrients spun off of other currents.
Thanks to Alaric Bond for passing the story along.
Admiral Vernon, “Old Grog”
Recently there have been multiple articles in the press and across the Internet citing a recent study published in the Danish Journal of Archaeology (Dec. 23, 2013) which claims that grog was consumed in Norway as far back as 1,500 BC. (The article is available on-line, though not for free. I chose not to spend the $172 to purchase the issue of the journal, so I am relying in the various reports of their findings.) Physics.org is fairly typical: “The new biomolecular archaeological evidence provides concrete evidence for an early, widespread, and long-lived Nordic grog tradition, one with distinctive flavors and probable medicinal purposes…” Science 2.0 is similar with the addition of a pinch of snark: “Like most things, somewhere along the way the British navy has tried to take credit for it, so you often see it called a rum drink. Instead of being rum-based, ancient grog was a hybrid beverage made from whatever local ingredients they could turn into alcohol, including honey, bog cranberry, lingonberry, bog myrtle, yarrow, juniper, birch tree resin, wheat, barley rye — and sometimes even from grape wine imported from southern or central Europe.”
My only response to this is to say — no, no no. I have no doubt, whatsoever, that ancient peoples found ways to get plastered with various concoctions which may have included fruit. Nevertheless, grog has a specific history and origin which dates back only to the 1740s.
The skull of the Hobbit, or Homo floresiensis. Photo: e_monk/Flickr
For the land-bound, the sea is a boundary. For sailors, it is a path to other shores. But how long have humans been sailing? We can be reasonably sure that humans have been sailing in rafts, boats or ships for tens of thousands of years, based on artifacts found on islands far enough out to sea to make either walking or swimming impractical. One unlikely group of now-extinct early humans may push the date of the first sailor back to one million years.
Homo floresiensis, Flores Man, is an extinct species of hominid discovered in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Because Flores Man stood at only about one meter or around three feet tall, the species has been nicknamed, hobbit. The hobbits, apparently lived on Flores as recently as 12,000 years ago. Dating of stone tools suggests that the hobbits arrived on Flores roughly one million years ago. The unanswered question is, how did they get there? Flores is, after all, an island. Where the ancestors of the Hobbits the first sailors?
Life on a tugboat can be tough. Tugs are small vessels with very big engines, with just enough buoyancy to stay afloat and upright. They generate great forces and move around vessels much, much larger than themselves in often challenging conditions. A quick look at three tug casualties in the last few days. Fortunately there were no reported fatalities.
In the English Channel on Saturday morning, nine miles off the coast of Dungeness, the general cargo vessel, Rickmers Dubai, cut between the tug boat Kingston and its tow, the crane bargeWalcon Wizard, resulting in all three vessels colliding. The crane barge was reported to be seriously damaged but no crew injuries were reported. As a general rule, never, ever, cut between a tug and its tow. Three Vessels Collide in English Channel
Piracy off the coast of Somalia last year dropped to the lowest level since 2004. In 2012, Somali pirates hijacked 14 ships, whereas in 2013, they successfully hijacked two, both of which were released in a day’s time as a result of naval action. Worldwide piracy is at a six year low.
The West coast of Africa was the one area where piracy got worse last year. Nigerian pirates venturing as far waters off Gabon, Ivory Coast and Togo, were linked with at least five of the region’s seven reported vessel hijackings last year. The region with the largest number of pirate attacks was Indonesia though these were characterized as primarily “low-level opportunistic thefts.”
Ships on the East River — Once a City of Ships
Sometime during the Civil War, the poet Walt Whitman wrote a poem about New York City, titled “The City of Ships.” The first stanzas begin:
City of ships!
(O the black ships! O the fierce ships!
O the beautiful, sharp-bow’d steam-ships and sail-ships!)
City of the world! (for all races are here;
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and
out, with eddies and foam!
For a period of roughly forty years from the opening of the Erie Canal to the end of the Civil War, New York City was one of the leading shipping centers of the world. The North Atlantic packet trade was dominated by New York ship owners, sailing fine packet ships built in New York ships yards. The Rainbow, the first extreme clipper ship, was built in New York, sliding into the East River from Manhattan’s Corlear’s Hook. The Young American, Sea Witch, Challenge, Comet and scores of others, which followed, would set records both for speed and profits. New York merchants earned vast fortunes in the China trade and the California clipper trade. Many New York institutions, from Columbia University to the Metropolitan Museum of Art were funded by money made in silk, porcelain and the opium trade. New York ship designers and builders Webb, Griffiths, Steers and others, were, for a time, the world’s finest, building ships powered by sail and steam. In the Civil War, Ericsson built the revolutionary battleship USS Monitor in just over 100 days in shipyards and engine works in Manhattan and across the East River in Greenpoint.
In early December, we posted about Stanley Paris’ attempt at a solo circumnavigation in his 63′ Kiwi Spirit after suffering a variety failures to rigging and sails, Paris has decided to give up the attempt and sail for Cape Town. Today, he posted the following message on his blog: