Photo: Craig Greenhill Source: The Daily Telegraph
Earlier in the month we posted about New York harbor’s “graveyard of ships”. Yesterday the Daily Telegraph featured an interesting article about Sydney’s ship cemetery – an abandoned wrecking yard in Homebush Bay where several wooden barges and at least five ships slowly rot or rust away.
What secrets lie in Sydney’s ship cemetery?
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Bad news and good news. The Tacoma Tall Ships Organization is no more and the hoped for Tacoma Tall Ships Festival in 2011 will not be happening, a victim of the recession. On the other side of the globe, however, the Australian Wooden Boat Festival on Hobart’s historic Sullivan’s Cove waterfront is on its way in February 2011, and this year it will be free!
Tacoma Tall Ships Festival sunk by recession
Tasmania’s Wooden Boat Festival free next year
Thanks to Alaric Bond for passing on the information about the Australian Wooden Boat Festival
Brad Van Liew has won the first leg of the Velux 5 Oceans Singlehanded Round the World Race arriving in South Africa in only 28 days after his departure from La Rochelle, France.
Van Liew wins 1st leg of race – Charleston sailor reaches Cape Town tired but happy
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Donald McNarry, who has died aged 89, was considered by model ship enthusiasts to be the master of “extreme” miniature shipbuilding.
He took up model making as a hobby when he was a boy and built model ships for the rest of his life. From 1955 he worked as a freelance professional and created some 350 models of historic ships covering the period from 700BC to the late 1960s. His styles of presentation included scenic, waterline, full-hull and the traditional Navy Board type – almost all of them constructed according to miniature scales ranging from 100ft to one inch to 16ft to one inch.
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After waiting out the hurricane season in the Canary Islands 15-year-old Dutch sailor Laura Dekker has resumed her attempt to sail around the world alone on her 38′ ketch Guppy. Ms. Dekker had been at the center of a ten month Dutch court battle to determine whether she would be allowed to sail alone. If she completes her around the world voyage prior to the middle September 2012, she will earn the title of the youngest solo circumnavigator, a designation now held by Australian Jessica Watson. As Dekker plans on making multiple stops in her voyage, Watson will likely continue to retain the title as the youngest sailor to complete a non-stop solo circumnavigation.
After more than a year long ordeal, British sailors Paul and Rachel Chandler were released today by Somali pirates. The retired couple was seized by the pirates on October 22, 2009.
Paul and Rachel Chandler released by Somali pirates after 388 days
Armed pirates have held Paul, 60, and Rachel, 57, for a year and three weeks, since they were seized in the dead of night as they slept aboard their yacht off the Seychelles, 800 miles east of the African coast.
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How could an fire in one of two engine rooms do sufficient damage to the electrical distribution system on the Carnival Splendor to completely disable the ship? The answer isn’t obvious. The Carnival Splendor is diesel electric powered, which is to say, instead of the ship’s engines connecting to the propellers by shafts, each of her two propellers is driven by an electric motor. Diesel engines connected to generators provide the power to drive the propellers, as well as to make the ice cubes, heat the hot tubs, and provide all the other electricity needed by this small city at sea.
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Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born today 160 years ago in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father grandfather and great-uncles were light house engineers and designers, but Robert was too sickly as a child to follow in the family profession. Instead, he became a writer, one of the greatest of the Victorian era. Despite a lifetime of ill health, he was a prolific author, writing numerous classics, including Kidnapped, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and a book for young adults first called The Sea Cook and later renamed Treasure Island. The modern image of the 17th century pirate is lifted almost verbatim from Treasure Island published in 1883. (I suspect that without Long John Silver, it is unlikely that there would ever have been a Captain Jack Sparrow. )
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It started as a tweet ( a post on Twitter) from Carnival Cruise Lines: “You can view Sr Cruise Director, John Heald’s new blog post about his experience onboard Carnival Splendor here.” OK, that sounded interesting, I suppose. It turned out it wasn’t anything like what I expected. The blog post starts out by recounting a dream of a naked woman named Megan and a bit later, Heald comments that “I didn’t realise how serious was this until something slapped me in the face as hard as the time I tried to grope Sally Poole’s breasts behind the bike shed at school.” There are also references to flatulence and “ruin[ing] a really good pair of underpants.” As corporate damage control goes, this is a bit novel.
Nasco Diamond
On Thursday morning, Nasco Diamond loaded with 55,000 tonnes of nickel ore from Indonesia to China was reported missing and believed to have sunk off the southern coast of Japan. Five of the twenty five crew have been accounted for, with at least one fatality. Empty rafts and oil slicks were seen near where the crew members were rescued. Japanese and Taiwanese Coast Guards continue to search for the remaining missing twenty crew.
Rescue launched for Chinese crew off southern Japan
Today the International Association of Dry Cargo Shipowners, Intercargo, issued a statement about the risks of transporting nickel ore. If the moisture content in the ore is too high, the water in the ore can separate during the voyage, creating a free surface effect which can destabilize a ship and potentially lead to capsizing.
Bernard Cornwell’s The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War is not strictly speaking nautical fiction but does focus on an ill-fated expedition that ended as the worst American naval defeat prior to Pear Harbor.
At first glance, The Fort has all the elements of good historical fiction. The American revolutionary war remains a popular topic. The historical events in the book are not well known. The novel shows a well known historical figure, in this case, Paul Revere, in a wholly new light. Perhaps most importantly, the tale is told by a skilled writer. USA Today described Cornwell as the “reigning king of historical fiction” and I would be loathe to disagree. Nevertheless, The Fort is somewhat disappointing.
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The Canadian War Museum is marking the 100th anniversary of Canada’s navy with a fascinating new online exhibit – Canada’s Naval History.
Canadian War Museum launches online naval history exhibition
“Canada’s Naval History explores the wide range of this country’s naval experiences over the past century, making this a valuable addition to the Museum’s online offerings,” said Mark O’Neill, Director General of the Canadian War Museum. “This online exhibition is both an innovative means to preserve and share Canada’s naval history with all Canadians, and a wonderful way to mark the Canadian navy’s centennial.”
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On this anniversary of the armistice on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day or the eleventh month that ended the “war to end all wars,” it seems worthwhile to remember the often overlooked role of merchant mariners in national defense. Though it was kept secret during the war and largely ignored afterward, 1 in 26 mariners serving aboard US merchant ships in World WW II died in the line of duty, suffering a greater percentage of war-related deaths than all other U.S. services.
Update: One blogger has plotted the trajectories and determined that the contrail was that of US Airways flight 808. At least no one is claiming that it was a weather balloon. The Daily Show has its own spin.
On Monday night what appeared to be a missile launch from the Pacific ocean was video-taped 35 miles out to sea, west of L.A. and north of Catalina Island. Thus far, no one has been able to identify who launched the missile or even if a missile was launched.
Perhaps the best news for the stranded passengers on the disabled cruise ship, Carnival Splendor, is that the flush toilets aboard are back in service and that the ship is proceeding slowly under tow to the mainland. Still lacking refrigeration on the ship, the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy have delivered, by helicopter cases, Spam, boxes of croissants and other easy-to-transport food and supplies. The supplies are being airlifted to the ship on a Navy Seahawk helicopter from the aircraft carrier, USS Ronald Reagan, which arrived on the scene on Tuesday.
Two tugs are now towing the ship with a third as escort. A statement by Carnival announced, “Given the ship’s speed and current position, we have decided to take the vessel to San Diego where it is expected to arrive late Thursday. Additionally, we are in the process of making all the necessary hotel and flight arrangements for our guests. If the ship is unable to maintain sufficient speed under tow, it is possible that we could revert to the previous plan and dock in Ensenada.”
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Thirty five years ago today the ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald, loaded with more 26,000 tons of taconite pellets, sank in a November gale in Lake Superior. All 29 of her officers and crew were lost. The sinking was the greatest disaster in the history of the Great Lakes and was made legendary by a song by Canadian folk singer Gordon Light foot. (A video of the song after the jump)
Despite repeated investigation of the wreck site, no single cause for the sinking has been agreed on. The US Coast Guard analysis suggested that ineffective closure of the hatch covers could have caused the sinking while the Lake Carriers Association believe it was due to damage following a grounding. A third theory suggests that a rogue wave sank the ship.
EDMUND FITZGERALD – unexplained 35 years later
Edmund Fitzgerald: The song, the survivors, the anniversary
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Klondike shipwreck brought to life with 3D scans
A Gold Rush-era shipwreck at the bottom of a Yukon lake is coming to life with the help of cutting-edge digital 3D scan images. The images were produced in June by researchers working on the wreck of the A.J. Goddard, a 19th-century sternwheeler that vanished in Lake Laberge in 1901. Researchers from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology captured images of the sternwheeler with underwater sonar scanners supplied by the U.S. firms BlueView Technologies and Oceangate. Millions of captured images were then assembled into a 3D model, similar to a recent map of the wreck of the Titanic off the east coast of Newfoundland.
Update: Tugs have been dispatched from Long Beach to tow the stricken cruise ship to Ensenada, Mexico to disembark passengers.
An early morning fire on Monday in the engine room on the Carnival Splendor has left the ship dead in the water in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico. The 952-foot Carnival Splendor is one of Carnival Cruise Lines’ biggest ships at 113,000-tons with a reported compliment of 3,299 passengers and 1,167 crew members. The fire is reported to be extinguished and there are no reported injuries
The U.S. Coast Guard has sent three cutters and a helicopter and the Mexican Navy is reported to have sent a patrol boat and aircraft.
Carnival Splendor Catches Fire Off Mexico, Ship in Limbo
Coast Guard responds to fire aboard cruise ship en route to Puerto Vallarta
Thanks to Irwin Bryan for the heads up.
William Hammond’s new novel, For Love of Country, was released in October. Set in the early 1780s in the years following the American Revolution, the novel follows the adventures of the seafaring Cutler family of Hingham, Massachusetts, and the supporting cast from the first novel of the series, A Matter of Honor.
An interview with William Hammond based on an interview originally published in Astrodene’s Historic Naval Fiction:
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Sad news from over the weekend. A post-mortem on the 35 dead pilot whales was cancelled Sunday due to bad weather.
