Last February we posted about Victor Mooney’s third attempt to row alone across the Atlantic. While Mooney, 45 of Forest Hills, New York, has attempted the voyage three times, he has not come close to succeeding thus far. His first attempt in 2006 lasted only three hours before the boat he was rowing sprang a leak and sank. His second attempt, in 2007, lasted fifteen days before his desalinator broke and he needed to be rescued. His third attempt ended when after one day at sea his boat cracked and sank. He drifted in a life raft for 14 days before being picked up by a passing ship. Now Mooney is planning a fourth attempt in December of 2011.
I am reminded of the fallacy of the old saying about the importance of getting right back up on a horse after you have fallen off. Sometimes when you fall off a horse, it is good to ask yourself if you ever had any business being on the horse in the first place.
Canada’s hunter killer submarine, 
The good folks at the 
The 
On a hazy summer’s morning I happened to see the topsail schooner
The Royal Navy aircraft carrier 
June 8th is officially
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.
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.
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 “
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.
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.
Last July