Photo: Will van Dorp
Not quite three weeks ago the 50′ steel pinky schooner Le Papillon came ashore on Fire Island, a barrier island off Long Island, northeast of the entrance to New York harbor. Will van Dorp at the Tugster blog has taken some amazing photographs of the schooner, first being battered by waves and now being swallowed up by the sand, like a scene from a slow motion horror movie. (Go to Will’s blog for more and larger photographs.) Le Papillon may yet be salvaged but it will be a race against time and the shifting sands of Fire Island.
As we posted earlier in the month, the 300 foot long tanker Gluckauf ran aground on Fire Island in 1893 about twenty miles up the beach from where Le Papillon now lies. The Gluckauf was never salvaged and was also swallowed by the shifting sand.
Great news. The Sloop Providence, replica of the American Revolutionary sloop of the same name is sailing again after being laid up for 3 1/2 years. She was purchased last year from the City of Providence by boat builder and captain Thorpe Leeson. The current Sloop Providence dates back to 1976 and has been used in two of the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies. Over the weekends she was sailed from Providence to Newport, Rhode Island and was open for tours on Sunday at Bowen’s Wharf. The new owners plan to employ the sloop on charters and educational missions.
Oopps. In what is being described as a “school-boy error” the British Ministry of Defence posted a report on-line which revealed secret information about the UK’s nuclear powered submarines. The sensitive material was “redacted” by turning the background black, so that the text was not readable. The text was not removed, however, so that anyone who cut and pasted the text to another document could read, copy or distribute the “secret” information. The MOD was unaware of the breach until it was pointed out by a journalist.
New York and Philadelphia are major ports and centers of art and culture. By all rights both should be home for major and successful seaport museums. Sadly that is not the case. 
Sixty years ago today, the Royal Navy submarine 
I can imagine a couple of bird watchers who become excited when they sight puffins on Pembrokeshire’s Ramsey Island. There haven’t been puffins on the island since the 1890s when they were killed off by rats. The rats are gone now, but the only puffins on the island are plastic decoys, installed on the cliffs in hopes of luring real puffins back to their former home. Apparently the use of plastic decoys has been successful on other islands, so the folks on Ramsey are hoping that their plastic puffins will do as well.
For those in the area this looks like fun. 
One hundred and eleven years ago today the US Navy accepted its first successful submarine, the 
Hundreds of dead dolphins and sea turtles are washing ashore on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. No one knows exactly what is killing them though many point to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill of a year ago. In the mean time, BP is spending roughly $100 million in advertising to “clean up” its image.
Reports now indicate that