In yesterday’s New York Times, Rose George of Leeds, UK was an Op-Ed Contributor. In her essay, Flying the Flag, Fleeing the State, she starts off by calling many ship operators criminals and comparing them to Somali pirates: But maritime lawlessness isn’t confined to pirates. Thanks to a system of ship registration called “flags of convenience,” it is all too easy for unscrupulous ship owners to get away with criminal behavior. It is a shame that she is so free in making such inflammatory and factually inaccurate comparisons. Ms. Rose is apparently writing a book about the merchant marine. Her previous book was about sewage. (No, I am not making that up.)
In a limited sense, Ms. George has a point – too many sailors are still not treated well or fairly by their employers and some ship owners are not scrupulous in obeying environmental laws. The problem is that Ms. Rose lacks the context to understand what she is complaining about. Simply put – she misses the point.
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A sign of changing times. A Russian submarine will be participating in a NATO undersea rescue exercise off the Spanish coast scheduled for next month.
For hundreds of years, coastal schooners carried cargoes up and down the hundred harbored coast of Maine. By the early part of the last century, the schooners were being replaced by trucks and trains. In 1936 Captain Frank Swift started buying laid up schooners to cruise in the Maine summers. Schooners that had carried stone, lumber, hay and all manner of goods, began carrying vacationers. Now 75 years later the Maine windjammer fleet is still going strong, preserving the schooners and their heritage while delighting tens of thousands who have sailed on them.
As the sands of Fire Island are swallowing 
The Ducks have returned to the Delaware River. Not mallards, but duck boats. 
The Coast Guard released a report yesterday that was highly critical of Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon drill rig, which exploded and sank last year.
It is not champagne, but whiskey bottles which are still appearing from the sands where the sailing ship Stuart wrecked 110 years ago on Easter Sunday off the Llyn peninsula of Northern Wales.
In July of last year 
Douglas Faulkner, who died recently, had a varied and highly accomplished career as a naval and marine architect. He was involved in the design and testing of the first British nuclear submarine, 
The MV Asphalt Venture was hijacked by Somali pirates on September 28, 2010. After negotiating and being paid a multi-million dollar ransom, the pirates released the ship and part of the crew yesterday, but continued to hold seven Indian seafarers hostage, reportedly in retaliation for the arrest of Somali pirates by the Indian Navy in recent weeks. ‘It is a major shift in the pirate-hostage equation which will need to be considered and addressed by the international community,’ said general secretary Abdulgani Y. Serang of the National Union of Seafarers of India (NUSI).
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.