Canada’s hunter killer submarine, HMCS Corner Brook, limped back to base last weekend after running aground during a training exercise in the waters of Nootka Sound off the central east coast of Vancouver Island. The accident leaves Canada without an operational submarine. Canada’s other three are also out of service. Oops.
Accident leaves Canada without operational submarines
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The good folks at the Bayshore Discovery Project say that “Delaware ‘Bay Day’ is the largest FREE festival in the tri-state region.” I have no way of knowing whether that is literally true, but nevertheless it sounds like great fun. ‘Bay Day’ will commence tomorrow, Saturday June 11th, in the historic New Jersey fishing villages of Bivalve and Port Norris, beginning with a parade in Port Norris at 11 AM and finishing up with the NJ Championship Oyster Shucking Contest, at 6PM. In between there will be lots of music, food, games and activities for all ages.
Photo: Steve Haines for The Boston Globe
Rebuilding a historic ship has got to be part craftsmanship, part engineering, and part treasure hunt. In the case of the oldest surviving sailing whale ship, the Charles W. Morgan at Mystic, CT, one of the challenges has been finding good quality shipbuilding timber. In August of 2009, we posted about a literal windfall of live oak trees knocked down by Hurricane Ike in Galveston, TX which yielded over around 175 tons of timber for the rebuilding of the Morgan.
Now several years later, with supplies again running low, a new stock of shipbuilding timber has been discovered in the Charleston Navy Yard in Boston, MA. Construction crews working on a new Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital facility discovered an underground supply of 140 live oak and white oak timbers in what had once been a timber basin for the Navy Yard. The timbers had been preserved by the mud for nearly a century. The timbers, set aside for future wooden ship construction or repair but long forgotten, will go to the rebuilding the Morgan, which the Seaport Museum hopes to launch in 2013.
Lucky find in Charlestown saves whaler’s restoration
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The US Postal Service is issuing a set of four stamps honoring the US Merchant Marine throughout its history. The four stamps feature a clipper ship modeled after the Sovereign of the Seas, launched in 1852; an auxiliary steamship, based on the ships of the Collins Line; a World War II Liberty Ship; and a container ship, based on Matson Line’s R.J. Pfeiffer. Illustrator Dennis Lyall of Norwalk, Connecticut, created the stamps under the art direction of Phil Jordan of Falls Church, Virginia. These are not the first stamps honoring the U.S. merchant marine. See also Merchant Marine Stamp of 1946, Steamship Stamp of 1944, and First Day Covers.
Thanks to Irwin Bryan for passing the news along.
Photographer Scott Haefner and a few of his friends snuck aboard ships in the Suisan Bay Reserve Fleet near San Francisco, CA and photographed and documented the rusting fleet. Fascinating images. The Mail Online ran an article today about his work. For more images, see Haefner’s site: Inside the Ghost Ships of the Mothball Fleet
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On a hazy summer’s morning I happened to see the topsail schooner Unicorn leave the gas dock at Liberty Landing marina on the Hudson River. The Unicorn is a particularly lovely topsail schooner converted from a North Sea fishing vessel. As I admired the well balanced and robust lines of the Unicorn, I noticed that everyone aboard appeared to be female. I didn’t know then that Dawn Santamaria, one of the owners of the Unicorn, had founded “Sisters Under Sail,” a program to introduce girls to tall ship sailing. Last Saturday, Dawn Santamaria, was honored with the 2011 Leadership In Women’s Sailing Award at the National Women’s Sailing Association Conference, in Marblehead, MA. Congratulations to Ms. Santamaria. See also our post from last August, “Sisters Under Sail” – Schooner Unicorn at Tall Ships Chicago .
The Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Invincible was sold to Turkish scrappers last February. Now bids are open for the sale of HMS Ark Royal. While scrapping seems a likely outcome the tender allows that “alternatively the vessel may be purchased for re-use/refurbishment for non-warlike purposes.” Now Shiptalk has word that a Devon based diver is bidding to sink the ship as an artificial reef off Torbay to promote sea life and provide a dive site for recreational divers.
In addition to the bid to sink the ship, “plan[s] to use the Ark Royal as a floating commercial helipad in London. Other proposals include turning it into a school, a nightclub or a base for security personnel during the Olympics.”
All bids are due by 1000 BST on June 13th.
June 8th is officially World Ocean Day, “a global celebration of ocean conservation,” sponsored by the United Nations since 2008, and coordinated internationally by The Ocean Project and the World Ocean Network. The theme for this year and next is : Youth – the Next Wave for Change. Most activities this years seem aimed at educating children about the oceans. Other than that it is hard to tell what is going on as both the World Ocean Day and The Ocean Project websites are down this morning, which is not terribly encouraging. Nor am I overly impressed with their nifty marketing idea of “Wear Blue – Tell Two.” The idea is to wear blue on World Ocean Day and tell two friends why you are wearing blue and/or two things they didn’t know about the orcean, or somethiong along those lines. Sadly, I doubt that that “wearing blue and telling two” will do much to address the very real problems of ocean conservation.
And speaking of “music of the sea”, an intriguing story from Australia. When Matt Waller, a tour operator in Neptune Bay, Australia, attached speakers to shark cages and played the heavy metal band AC/DC, he discovered that the great white sharks became less aggressive and more inquisitive, which is odd because AC/DC seems to have exactly the opposite effect on human teenagers.
Heavy Metal Under the Sea: Sharks Act Calmer When Listening to AC/DC
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The 32nd Annual Sea Music Festival at Mystic Seaport starts this Thursday night, June 9th, and runs through Sunday, June 12th. More than 5,000 people gather each year to hear Mystic Seaport’s Chantey Staff along with a solid core of performers carry on classic musical traditions of the golden age of sail. The festival features music from maritime cultures around the world, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal, Australia, Iceland, Poland, Netherlands, France, Canada and Africa, as well as native peoples within the United States. In addition to the performances, the 32nd Annual Music of the Sea Symposium will also take place on Saturday and Sunday.
Traditionally, ships in port use auxiliary generators to power shipboard electrical systems. APL, the Singapore based container lines, is now going “cold-iron,” shutting down the auxiliary generators on their ships docking when calling on Oakland, California and using shore power instead to meet the their electrical needs. They expect to reduce emissions by 50,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides and 1,5000 pounds of particulates from its ships annually in Oakland. The State of California has mandated cold-ironing for container ships by 2014. APL is several years ahead of schedule.
A maritime first: APL ‘cold-irons’ ships in Oakland to clear the air
Archeologists cannot say for sure what the lead pipe which penetrates the hull of a nearly 2,000 years old wreck of a Roman ship off the town of Grado in Italy was used for. Some think that it was a supply line to an onboard tank which carried live fish to market. If so, the approximately 55′ ship may have carried on one the earliest onboard fish tanks.
June 25th of this year is being celebrated as the “Day of the Seafarer.” We will be joining with other bloggers and journalists from around the world to say “thank you” to the world’s 1.5 million seafarers for the invaluable and often overlooked contribution that they make every day. Kipling once write that “transportation is civilization.” Seafarers play a key role in keeping our civilization alive and functioning.
One of the ways to show our appreciation is to acknowledge the problems still faced by seafarers. When things go wrong, it is usually the seafarer who suffers first and the most. We can think of no better example of this than the nightmare faced recently by the crew of the Sahmo Dream.
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The 31-meter Turanor, a catamaran yacht fitted with 536 square meters of photovoltaic panels, has successfully sailed halfway around the world, from Monaco to Brisbane, Australia, powered solely by the sun. The Turanor‘s captain and crew are half way toward completing their goal of piloting the first solar powered vessel to circumnavigate the world.
World’s largest solar-powered yacht reaches milestone in record voyage
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D
ead zones are areas where there is too little oxygen in the water to support fish and other aquatic life. They are usually caused by fertilizers and/or other organic materials causing algae blooms which deplete the oxygen in the water. Dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico from the run-off from fertilizers and chemicals flowing into the Mississippi have been forming yearly since the 1970s. Now there is serious concern about the impact this year’s flood in the Midwest may have on the waters of the Gulf.
Chemicals in Farm Runoff Rattle States on the Mississippi
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Until I saw the video I didn’t grasp just how large this anchor is. It is believed to be from the pirate Blackbeard‘s flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which ran aground in 1718 while trying to enter Old Topsail Inlet in North Carolina, now known as Beaufort Inlet. The wreck of what is believed to be Blackbeard’s ship was discovered in 1996 by Intersal Inc., a private research firm. To learn more about the excavation go to – Queen Anne’s Revenge Online.
Thanks to Irwin Bryan for the passing the article along.
Rear Adm. Sandra Stosz has been named as the 40th Superintendent of the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Ct. She is the first woman to lead one of the nation’s five military service academies.
New leader takes the helm at Coast Guard Academy
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Last July we posted about divers finding intact bottles of champagne, believed to date from between 1782 and 1788, in the hold of a shipwreck on the Baltic seabed. In November, a bottle of the “world’s oldest champagne” was opened and tasted by experts who judged it to be quite palatable. Earlier today, two bottles of the shipwreck champagne went on auction in Finland. Despite expectations that each bottle might sell for as much 100,000 euros (approximately $140,000), the winning bids were 30,000 euros ($43,500) for a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and 24,000 euros for a bottle of Juglar. This morning some sources were enthusiastically suggesting that the champagne might go for “140 million dollars a bottle,” apparently adding three zeros to the earlier $140,000 estimate.
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A recent report by Greenpeace directly contradicts Japanese government assurances that the radiation in the water near the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is being dispersed and diluted over time. Significant levels of radioactive contamination have been recorded in local seafood.
Greenpeace: Japan nuclear plant radiation accumulating in marine life
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One of Johan's Arks
If a group of birds are a flock, a group of whales is a pod, and fish gather in schools, what would one call a group of Noah’s arks? A fleet would be the easy answer, but that somehow doesn’t quite fit. How about a flood of arks?
However one might wish to describe them, there are at least six or seven arks, either completed, under construction or planned in the Netherlands, Turkey, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States.
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