We have posted previously about the world’s fasted sailboat, the hydrofoil trimaran, Hydroptère, which in November 2009, sailed for one nautical mile at speed of 50.17 knots in Hyères, France. He also has achieved a sustained speed of 52.86 knots for 500m. Now a very different boat, the Vestas Sailrocket is attempting to challenge the flying trimaran for the record.
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I was surprised to read that archaeologists had recently discovered only the second Roman port in Britain. Prior to the discovery in excavations near the Roman fortress of Caerleon, just north of Newport, south Wales, the only other Roman port known to have existed was outside of London.
Archaeologists discover Roman port in Wales
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Thanks to Maritime Great Britain for reminding us that today is indeed Trafalgar Day, commemorating Nelson’s victory over the French and Spanish fleets and his tragic death at the Battle of Trafalgar on this day in 1805. They also reminded us that on this day in 1797, the USS Constitution was launched at Hartt’s Shipyard, in Boston, Massachusetts. The Constitution is the oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy. She is also the world’s oldest floating commissioned naval vessel.
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Image: NASA
Where did our oceans come from? Why is over 70% the earth’s surface covered by water? The answer may be in the dirty celestial snow balls we call comets.
Scientists believe that the earth was originally dry and hot. Comets where one possible source of water. Until recently, however, the water in comets was thought to be fundamentally different from the water in our oceans. Scientists observed higher levels of the hydrogen isotope deuterium, found in what is known as “heavy water” in comets. The water in the earth’s oceans is almost exclusively made of lighter hydrogen. Last week, however, the results of observations made on the comet Hartley 2 were announced which which suggested that the water on the comet has a similar deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio as the water found in our oceans. Comets may be the source of the water in our oceans after all.
Schooner Fame
Some traditions should be honored. I would certainly include rum drinking in that list. Tomorrow the Schooner Fame of Salem, Massachusetts is hosting a Rum and Revolution Cruise, departing from Pickering Wharf Marina, in Salem at 4:00 PM. After all, “rum and sailors have always gotten along like wind and water!” The 1.75 hour long cruise features sailing on a traditional gaff-rigged wooden schooner, seeing lighthouses, forts, and beautiful waterfront homes, and the opportunity to purchase revolutionary beverages based on rum and wine. Revolutionary beverages will be available for $5 to those of age. The Fame of Salem, a replica of the privateer from the War of 1812.
I have kayaked with killer whales. It was many years ago and the memories are still vivid. I can only imagine how awe inspiring it must be to kayak next to a blue whale, the largest creature ever to live on the face of the earth. Here is an amazing video of a kayaker wearing a Go-Pro helmet cam paddling next to feeding blue whales off Redondo Beach, California. The kayaker also jumps off his kayak and swims underwater with the whales. Some amazing video. Thanks to Irwin Bryan for passing it along.
Kayaking with Redondo Beach Blue Whales, with underwater footage and Lunge feeding GoPro
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Archaeologists from the University of Manchester have excavated the first known Viking ship burial on mainland Britain, believed to be roughly a 1,0000 years old. The boat burial site was found near Ockle on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, Scotland. Archaeologist Dr Hannah Cobb said the “artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain.” Thanks to Alaric Bond for passing the story along.
This week Sable Island became the Canada’s newest national park. Almost three hundred kilometers out into the Atlantic off the coast of Nova Scotia, it is a scimitar shaped sandbar which seems to have no business being there at all. It is 44 km long but never more than 2 km wide. It also happens to be on the great circle route, the shortest sailing distance from Europe to New England. Even in good weather, the low-lying island is hard to see and, as it lies where the Labrador current collides with the warm water of the Gulf Stream, is often shrouded in fog. The island has been the graveyard of at least 350 ships since it was discovered around 1520. The first documented ship to come ashore on Sable Island was Sir Humphrey Gilbert‘s flagship Delight in 1583. The last wreck was the yacht Merrimac in 1999. The island has earned it’s nickname, “the Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
To see a map of the ships wrecked on the island click here – The Graveyard of the Atlantic.
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Usually downrigging a schooner involves lots of coiling, carrying, hauling, the breaking down of shackles and turnbuckles, and depending on the rig, attempting to free up the top mast so that it can be lowered gently to the deck, rather than dropping it like an unguided missile. The last time I helped downrig a schooner, I spent hours in the cross-trees, helping those who knew far better what they were doing than I, and generally enjoying the view on a brisk Fall day. A rendezvous at the bar that afternoon ended the day most satisfactorily.
I see now that the folks at the Sultana Project have outclassed us all. They have turned a downrigging weekend into a Tall Ship and Wooden Boat Festival with sailing, food, music and even a talk by Dava Sobel, the New York Times best selling author of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. This will be the Sultana Project’s eleventh annual Downrigging Weekend celebrating the end of the sailing season.
Photo: BBC
Recently the BBC published an article, Nigeria’s coast ‘threatened by shipwrecks’, focused on the 100 rusty shipwrecks which line Nigeria’s 853km (530-mile) coast. The ships are causing coastal erosion and pollution. Nigeria is not the only country on the West coast of Africa with “graveyard of ships” however.
Photo: Steve Earley, The Virginian-Pilot
Last Friday, 39 schooners set off from Baltimore, Maryland sailing 127 miles down the Chesapeake to Portsmouth, Virginia in the 22nd Annual Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race. This year the first schooner to cross Thimble Shoal with an elapsed time of 23 hours and 36 minutes was the America 2.0, with Andrew Neuhauser at the helm. The schooner Woodwind, captained by Ken Kaye, won Class A honors, while Adventurer, Mark Faulstick, captain, and the Avelinda, Diane Sternberg, captain, won Class B and C honors, respectively.
Click here for more race results and here for more photos.
Thanks to Tom Russell on the Linked-in Traditional Sail Professionals list for pointing out the photos.
Photograph: AP
The current recommended response on a merchant ship on being boarded by pirates is to radio a distress call, disable the ship’s engines and to retreat into a “citadel,” a safe locked-down space aboard the ship and await either rescue or until the pirates simply give up and go away. That is exactly what the officers and crew of the MV Montecristo did when boarded by pirates last week.
Once they retreated to the citadel, however, they apparently lacked a means to communicate with their NATO rescuers. Whether they neglected to bring portable radios or batteries into the citadel is not clear. Lacking all else, they relied on a more traditional means of communication – they stuffed a message in a bottle, stuck a flashing beacon on top and threw the bottle out a port hole into the sea. When NATO forces retrieved the bottle and learned that the crew was safe and secure behind locked doors, they launched a raid on the ship and captured the pirates.
Message in a Bottle: Old-School S.O.S. Helps Rescue Hijacked Ship
Thanks to Irwin Bryan for passing the story along.
Those of us of a certain age, who were active in merchant shipping, remember the tanker industry in the 1980s. And none too fondly. After a period of rising charter rates and robust new construction, the market effectively collapsed in the 80s, resulting in a large fleet of laid up tankers. Some new ships steamed straight from the shipyard to lay-up. It is too soon to tell if conditions will turn as dark as they were thirty years ago, but the signs are not encouraging.
Charter rates are now the lowest they have been in 14 years and the number of large tankers in lay up are approaching levels from the 80’s. To reinforce the comparison, a new Aframax tanker, managed by Wilhelmsen Ship Management, recently sailed directly from being delivered by a shipyard to layup in Malaysia, the first recorded tanker to go directly from delivery to lay up since the 1980s.
Most Supertankers Idled Since ‘80s Still Won’t Buoy Charter Rates: Freight
In August, we posted about an experimental unmanned “roboship” being developed as a coastal patrol craft. Recently there have been proposals to use USVs (unmanned surface vehicles) to fight pirates. USVs also known as autonomous surface vehicles (ASV), are any surface vessel operating without a crew. At least so far, the idea is to use the USVs for surveillance and intelligence gathering. While the USVs could be used for more aggressive activity, it is highly unlikely that the technology and control systems are sufficient to send armed unmanned vessels out to attack targets at sea, not to mention issues of international law. The larger issue may have nothing to do with technology. Thus far the nations involved in anti-piracy activities have lacked the political will to prosecute the pirates. As long as the navies of the world play catch and release with pirates, it seems unlikely that new technology will necessarily make much of a difference. Thanks to Miroslav at Antic.org for passing the story along.
The future of the oldest, just barely surviving, composite clipper ship in the world, the City of Adelaide, is again in question. Shortly before it was due to be scrapped in Scotland last August, an agreement was reached to send the City of Adelaide to her namesake city in Australia. Work has been started on preparing the ship for transport. Now, the Australian Culture Minister, John Hill, says that the Australian government will not fund the project. Mr Hill went on to suggest that he needed guarantees that Clipper Ship City of Adelaide Ltd, the group hoping to restore the ship, had funds to restore the ship before it would be granted a permanent berth on the city’s quayside. Four years ago, the government spent AU$18 million to build pens in the City of Adelaide zoo for pandas on loan from China. It appears that Australian history cannot compete with borrowed bears.
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The Liberian flagged container ship, MV Rena, which ran aground on the Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga, New Zealand last week is continuing to suffer structural cracking and is continuing to spill bunker oil and losing containers overboard. Several beaches on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island were closed after oil and containers from the ship washed ashore. Attempts at salvage has been prevented by bad weather.
Jeffrey Allison is a fascinating gentlemen. Now 73, from Middleton Tyas in the UK, he only started sailing when he retired from a career in engineering. Since then, he has sailed across the Atlantic six times, as well transiting the Panama Canal, and sailing the Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans. He has just returned from a 40 day circumnavigation of the Arctic. Allison and his crew, Australian crewmate Katherine Brownlie, 28, are the first to circumnavigate the Arctic in a clockwise direction. Two yachts previously circumnavigated the Arctic counter-clockwise in 2010.
Allison made a previous attempt to circumnavigate the Arctic in 2009 but was arrested by the Russian coastguard for allegedly crossing into Russian territorial waters.
We are rapidly approaching the bi-centennial of the War of 1812, a largely forgotten conflict which was, in many respects, a continuation of the American War of Independence from Great Britain. The war was characterized by American incompetence and bumbling on land and surprising success on the seas. The early days of the war were marked by American victories at sea in which three American heavy frigates defeated and burned or captured three British frigates in single-ship battles. In the battle between HMS Shannon and USS Chesapeake in June of 1813, however, the Americans would not be so fortunate. The Shannon captured the Chesapeake.
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Lantern sharks, a type of small dogfish sharks, are well known for their bioluminescence, indeed that is how they were given their name. Researchers have recently discovered that the rare splendid lantern shark can adjust its coloration and lighting so as to become effectively invisible to predators. Harry Potter apparently is no the only one with an invisibility cloak.
Lantern Sharks Can Become Invisible, Glow-In-The-Dark
“The photophores replace the down-welling light from the sun, which is absorbed by the shark’s body,” lead author Julien Claes explained to Discovery News. “The silhouette of the shark therefore disappears when seen from below.”
Photo : Maritime New Zealand
Bad weather is adding to an already bad situation as salvage and clean up crews struggle to staunch the flow of oil from the container ship, MV Rena, which has been grounded on Astrolabe Reef in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty near Tauranga for the last week. Reports say that one of the main bunker tanks has been breached, dramatically increasing the volume of oil spilled. An estimated 130 – 350 tonnes of oil have leaked as of Tuesday morning, making this the the largest maritime oil spill in New Zealand’s history . 30 containers are also reported to have fallen off the ship.