Tis’ the season when Santa shows up in the most unusual places. A small ship-load of Santas was recently observed running across the ice at the bottom of the world. Twenty crew members dressed as Santa (with at least one reindeer) from the ice patrol ship, HMS Protector, took part in a run on the ice surrounding Deception Island in the Antarctic. The event raised funds for the charity East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices (EACH). EACH has raised more than £34,000 from seven Santa runs earlier this month in the warmer climes of East Anglia.
The Soviet submarine S-6 which disappeared on patrol in September, 1941 was been identified on the floor of the Baltic by the Swedish military. The submarine was found southeast of the Baltic island of Oland, in what was, during the war, a heavily-mined area known as the ‘Wartburg minefield’.
To celebrate passing one million pageviews on the Old Salt Blog, we will be giving away copies of my novel, Hell Around the Horn. Kindle readers will be able to download the novel for free from Amazon on Thursday, December 20th and Friday, December 21st. To download your free copy, go to Amazon or click here on Thursday or Friday.
For those who prefer print, we will be giving away ten copies in paperback. To enter to win a copy click here.
The Peruvian navy has laid the keel for its new sail training ship, La Union, at the Marine Industrial Services (Sima) shipyard in Callao. When completed in 2015, the ship will be the largest sail training vessel in South America. The ship will be four masted, with a sparred length of 113.5 m, a sail area of 3,500 m2, and will displace 3,500 tons.
We have reached a milestone here at the Old Salt Blog. We have passed a million pageviews! Specifically, according to Google Analytics, as of this morning, 541,358 unique visitors have viewed 1,052,167 pages on the blog. (The numbers are actually higher as the blog is also syndicated via RSS, email and OpenSalon.com.) For CNN or Huffington Post, one million page views is part of a Thursdays afternoon, but for a personal blog supported by contributors and readers, it is a pretty big deal. Thanks to all our readers and contributors for their support, interest and at times, patience. We literally could not have reached this milestone without you.
As the blog’s founder, host and chief cook and bottle-washer, I have also reached a personal milestone within the last few months. After writing for more years than I care to count, I finally published my first novel, Hell Around the Horn. I have been very gratified. The reviews have been great.
As we can’t really give out party hats, we will be giving away books! To celebrate the two milestones this week, we will be giving away copies of my novel in both paperback and Kindle formats. Tomorrow, we will post about how you can enter a raffle for one of ten paperback copies of Hell Around the Horn that we will be giving away. On Thursday and Friday, Hell Around the Horn will also be free on Amazon in Kindle format. The winners of the paperback copies will be chosen at random. There is no limit on the number of Kindle copies that we will give away.
Again, thanks to all our readers and contributors. We sincerely appreciate your support.
The US news program 60 Minutes aired a feature on salvaging the Costa Concordia last night. The operation is the largest and most complex ship salvage in history. Well done and worth watching.
Illustration: Ezra Smith Design, LLC
There is still more steel to be welded, rigging to be run, and money to be raised, but the SSV Oliver Hazard Perry, Rhode Island’s Tall ship, looks to be on schedule to be sailing in time for the 200th anniversary of Perry’s victory in the of the Battle of Lake Erie next year. The ship is under construction at Senesco Marine in North Kingstown, R.I. Click here to see photos of the work underway at the shipyard. Oliver Hazard Perry Rhode Island, the non-profit profit organization behind the project, will offer sail training programs for all ages. Captain Richard Bailey has been named the ship’s master and Jessica Wurzbacher will serve as the Education Director.
If you are a professional surfer, where do you go to train? Hawaii, comes to mind. The California Coast is possilbe. Australia, certainly. How about in the desert of Dubai? Sally Fitzgibbons, a 22 year old Australian professional surfer on the Association of Surfing Professionals World Tour, has been training in the wave tank at Wadi Adventure, a white water and surfing adventure park in the deserts of Dubai.
On October 2, the government of Ghana seized the Argentine navy sail training ship Libertad in the port of Tema on behalf of US billionaire Paul Singer. The government of Argentina appealed the seizure to the U.N. International Sea Tribunal in Hamburg, Germany. Today the tribunal ruled that Ghana must release the ARA Libertad and its crew “immediately and unconditionally.”
UN Court Orders Release of Argentine Ship in Ghana
The ruling said warships enjoy immunity under international law and seizing the ship was “a source of conflict that may endanger friendly relations among states.” It wasn’t immediately clear whether the ruling is final and whether it can be appealed.
Really great news about the tanker, Mary A. Whalen. (Negotiations are not finalized so perhaps we should say “potentially great news” so as not to jinx anything.) For the last six years, the historic tanker and PortSide New York, the non-profit educational organization based on the ship, have been without a permanent home. If all goes well that may soon change. Portside has announced:
“PortSide is negotiating with GBX▪Gowanus Bay Terminal to have a homeport in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The tanker MARY A. WHALEN would be publicly accessible directly from Columbia Street, at a site next to her first home at Ira S. Bushey’sshipyard and fuel terminal at the foot of Court Street. A home at GBX, a vital, industrial facility with a rich history, would be in keeping with PortSide’s mission to bring the landside community and working waterfront closer together while exploring and promoting Red Hook’s past. Post Sandy, our plans for such Red Hook cultural tourism are more important than ever.”
There is more good news:
Joan Druett’s The Beckoning Ice, the fifth in her series of Wiki Coffin nautical mysteries, begins in 1839, on the sealer Betsey of Stonington, homeward bound from “a short but very profitable season far south of Cape Horn.” The schooner is very nearly wrecked on a massive iceberg, which looms suddenly out of the fog. The terror of nearly hitting the ice island is only made worse by the corpse of a man, apparently bludgeoned to dead, frozen on a ledge on the face of the ice.
The Betsey later crosses the course of the small flotilla of ships, brigs and schooners of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, a joint naval and scientific venture sent to chart the Pacific to help promote American trade. When the sealers report the apparent murder, Wiki Coffin is called to investigate, which will not be immediately easy to do, as the expedition is bound for Orange harbor in Tierra del Fuego. Soon Wiki will also have to investigate the suspicious suicide of a young naval lieutenant as well as avoiding several attempts on his own life. While performing his other duties and coping with bigotry and misunderstanding in the small fleet, Wiki must untangle the skein of secrets and alliances that result in the death of the young officer while evading the determined killers that threaten his own survival.
The Tainted Prize is Margaret Muir’s second book of the Oliver Quintrell series. After sending Captain Quintrell to the bottom of the world in pursuit of Floating Gold, the admiralty is confident in the good captain’s discretion. It is 1803. The Peace of Amiens has collapsed. Captain Quintrell is given command of the frigate HMS Perpetual and is set off on a secret mission to South America to search for a missing frigate and to undertake a diplomatic mission that might impact the outcome of the war with Bonaparte and France. In addition to coping with French corvettes, privateers and slavers, Quintrell and the officers and crew of HMS Perpetual must also face the Southern Ocean and the winding and treacherous Straits of Magellan.
Rotterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Toyko all have storm surge barriers to protect low-lying areas from flooding. In the United States, Stamford, Connecticut; Providence, Rhode Island; and New Bedford, Massachusetts all have storm barriers. Should New York, which suffered significant flooding two years in a row from Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy, follow their example? Many are now demanding that some sort of action be taken to prevent future large scale flooding.
John B. Caddell with tug and crane barge assist on her way to repair yard. Photo: Staten Island Advance
The John B. Caddell, 700 gross ton water tanker, that washed up on Front Street, in Staten Island, NY during Hurricane Sandy a month and a half ago, is back in the water. In a team effort lead by the Coast Guard in coordination with least eight state, local and federal agencies, the tanker was hoisted and hauled off the road and rocky beach and back into the water by Donjon Marine using the Chesapeake 1000 crane barge, reported to be one of the largest on the East Coast. The Staten Island Advance has a wonderful gallery of the before, during and after shots of the tanker salvage:
Gallery: Tanker washed ashore Staten Island by Hurricane Sandy removed to salvage yard
We recently posted about the SS Badger, a 410-foot long coal-fired passenger and vehicle ferry operating in Lake Michigan and the last coal-fired passenger vessel operating on the Great Lakes. Her supporters call her a national treasure, while to her detractors, consider the vessel to be an environmental menace. Since 2008, the vessel has been operating operating on an EPA waiver that allows it to continue dumping 4 tons of toxic coal ash daily into the lake. That waiver runs out on December 19, 2012. Her supporters managed to insert language in a US Coast Guard funding bill to allow the Badger to continue dumping ash for the life of the ship. Last week that language was stricken from the draft bill, which passed the on Wednesday. Unless the EPA grants another waiver, the SS Badger may stop operations in a week.
The government of Australia plans to establish the world’s largest marine reserve in the Coral Sea, covering an area more than one-and-a-half times the size of France. If approved, the Coral Sea reserve, would be approximately 989,842 sq km. While environmentalists have praised the move, the Australian fishing industry has condemned the reserve as unnecessary pointing to a the recent release of a government report showing that more than 90 per cent of fish stocks are sustainable. On the other hand, earlier this year a UNESCO report concluded that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is under imminent threat from industrial development and may be considered for listing as a world heritage site “in danger” within the next year.
The South Street Seaport Museum is reopening on Friday, December 14 with the launch of two new exhibitions – A Fisherman’s Dream: Folk Art by Mario Sanchez and Street Shots/NYC, a presentation of contemporary New York City street photography. They will join ongoing special exhibitions Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions, organized by the American Folk Art Museum, and Romancing New York: Watercolors by Frederick Brosen.
“Superstorm Sandy may have dealt us a body blow but we are getting back up on our feet: today we’re proud to announce that the Museum is ready to reopen and with fantastic new exhibitions. In large part, we are re-opening as a statement of faith in our mission and community, and visitors will have to use stairs and accept heat blown-in from heaters sitting on the sidewalk. But we are ready to welcome all comers,” said Susan Henshaw Jones, President of the South Street Seaport Museum.
Last week, we posted about the documentary “Shipbuilding in the Maritimes,” which aired on Sunday on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Land and Sea. For those of us who do not get the programming on television, the CBC is good enough to post the Land and Sea programs on line. “Shipbuilding in the Maritimes,” a half hour documentary on the once-thriving shipbuilding centers in Atlantic Canada, is embedded below. Worth a look.
At around 1 AM on Friday morning, the Cape Apricot, a cape-sized bulk carrier, chartered to K Line, smashed through a coal conveyor serving the largest of two berths at Westshore Terminals in Vancouver, Canada. An undetermined amount of coal was spilled into Georgia Strait. Westshore Terminals is North America’s largest coal exporting port facility. The bulk carrier took out approximately 100 meters of the conveyor, the causeway, water pipes, electrical lines and an adjacent road.
Ship crashes into dock at Westshore Terminals, spilling coal into water