The Beaver, a replica of one of ships that were the center of the Boston Tea Party in the run-up to the American Revolution, was relaunched in January after a major rebuild at the Gloucester Marine Railways. The Beaver and the replica Eleanor will be displayed at the new $27 million Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum on Fort Point Channel in Boston, which will open in June of this year. A third ship, the Dartmouth, will be built from scratch, and is expected to be completed in about two years.
Leon Poindexter, the master shipwright leading the project, has been broadcasting a series of Youtube Webisodes. Here is Ballast for the Beaver, episode 45, where concrete is being poured in the ship for ballast. I am not familiar with the use of concrete for ballast in wooden ships. If anyone is able to enlighten me, I would appreciate it. Thanks to Tom Russell at the Traditional Sail Professionals Linked-in Group for pointing it out the video.
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A menu of the last meal served to first-class passengers on board the Titanic has sold at auction for £76,000. The menu was dated April 14, 1912 and featured several courses, such as eggs Argenteuil, consomme fermier and chicken a la Maryland.
Two letters from the Titanic are in the news. One is a letter from Dr. John Edward Simpson, who died when the ship sank, He wrote to his mother on April 11, 1912, on notepaper headed RMS Titanic, and had it mailed from Cohb, Ireland, the last port of call prior to the ship sailing across the North Atlantic. 
So you want to build an unsinkable passenger liner? Well, there is an app for that! OK, not really, but 
For several years we have been 
After posting about far too many needless tragedies on poorly maintained third world ferry boats which sink and kill their passengers, here is something completely different, though still involving a ferry.
This story is so unlikely that it must be true. When the 
In the last days of the age of sail, British sailing ships, limejuicers, as they were known, had reputation as “hungry ships,” of offering poor quality provisions and not much of those. Whether that reputation was or was not wholly justified at the end of the 19th century, a new study now reveals that sailors in the Georgian Navy were well and amply fed for their day. Given that the British Navy had to feed upwards of 140,000 seamen and marines, the Victualing Board seems to have done a remarkably good job.
Some excitement in my neighborhood this morning. Three crew from the tug Katherine G were pulled from the water near Liberty Island in new York harbor, after the tug capsized at around 9:45 this morning. The men were rescued by the New York Police Department’s harbor unit and taken to local medical facilities. No serious injuries were reported. Thanks to 
