In June we posted about the missionary/hospital steamer, the Chauncy Maples. Launched in 1901, she is the oldest ship in Africa. She is being restored to return to duty as a traveling clinic on the 560 kilometer long Lake Malawi. The Chauncy Maples Malawi Trust has been attempting to raise £2 million to fund the project. Last Friday, Thomas Miller, a London-based specialist insurance company, which has been spearheading the drive, announced that they are half way to their goal, having raised over £1m pounds.
Failing Acoustic Tiles on USS Virginia
Aren’t all submarines supposed to be stealthy? I suppose some are stealthier than others. The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong is reporting concerns by China’s neighbors that China may have already built a stealth submarine. On the other side of the world, the acoustic urethane tiles on the US Navy’s Virginia Class attack submarines have been flaking off at sea. The tiles are believed to dampen sound from the subs and make them more “stealthy,” at least until they fall off.
Today is the birthday of Rear Admiral Eugene Bennett Fluckey, known as “Lucky Fluckey,” who died in 2007 at the age of 94. In addition to having one of the truly great nicknames, he was one of the greatest submarine skippers of World War II, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor and four Navy Crosses among other honors. As commander of the USS Barb, Lucky Fluckey is credited with the most tonnage sunk by a U.S. skipper during World War II: 17 ships including a carrier, cruiser, and frigate. He also commanded the sole landing by U.S. military forces on the Japanese home islands during World War II, when he sent a landing party ashore to blow up a coastal railway line, destroying a 16-car train. Fluckey also inventing the night convoy attack from astern by joining the flank escort line. Fluckey latter described his World War II operations in Thunder Below!: The USS *Barb* Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II. He wrote: “Though the tally shows more shells, bombs, and depth charges fired at Barb, no one received the Purple Heart and Barb came back alive, eager, and ready to fight again.”
The Penobscot Marine Museum, Maine’s oldest maritime museum, is having a busy October, full of events and exhibitions. This Friday and Saturday, October 8th and 9th, the museum offers a range of free events as part as part of Searsport’s annual Fling Into Fall festival. On Friday, October 8, the bluegrass group Phat Grass will play at the Public Safety Building at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, October 9, From Away Downeast will present a concert of traditional maritime music in Union Hall at 2:30 p.m. Other activities will include a Jack-o’-Lantern and Scarecrow Competition, and free museum admission and store discounts. Also, Down-East goes Wild West with a Cowbow Action Shooting demonstration on the museum’s back lawn.
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One of the largest port complexes in the US has been shut down since Sunday morning after a barge accident almost knocked a high voltage tower into the Houston Ship Channel. Over thirty ships have been blocked by the shut down of the ship channel. An economic loss of almost $1 billion is estimated to result from the shutdown. The ship channel is not expected to open until at least Tuesday night.
A press release by Congressman Elijah E. Cummings, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, strikes me as either sad, funny or perhaps a bit of both. The press release is titled: Cummings Continues Investigation Into American Commercial Fleet and is subtitled: Cummings eager to understand what can be done to expand the number of U.S.-flagged vessels carrying U.S. commercial cargo.” One is tempted to ask, why did it take you so long to notice?
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Mogens Frohn Nielsen
Sad news from Shipgaz:
Fulton captain has passed away
Legendary captain Mogens Frohn Nielsen has passed away at the age of 75. Mogens Frohn Nielsen pioneered the use of sailing ships as floating schools for youngsters with problems. He started the new way of learning in the late 1960s on the schooner Odeysseus. From 1970 he took command over the restored schooner Fulton, owned by the Danish National Museum, and managed by Fulton Stiftelsen. He left the institute in 1983 and has since been lecturing up to 110 times a year.
The "Black Swan" Photo: Michael Townsend
A new exhibition opened at the at the Maryland Science Center, Odyssey’s Shipwreck! Pirates & Treasure, that will run through January 30, 2011.
Exploring pirates and shipwrecks at the Maryland Science Center
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Sea monsters exist. They break ships in half and pull them below the waves. Sometimes they swallow them whole. Most who encounter them never return to tell the tale and those few who do, until very recently, were rarely believed.
I am referring to rogue waves, which until only the last decade or so, have been dismissed as myths, merely sailor’s tall tales. Only in roughly the last ten or fifteen years has the existence of rogue waves been fully documented and accepted by oceanographers. Scientists are only beginning to gain some understanding of how and where the waves rise up from the oceans to crush the unfortunate and the unlucky.
I am intrigued, fascinated and a bit frightened by rogue waves, so when I saw Susan Casey’s new book, “The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean” I was excited. I want to learn more a about rogue waves and this book looked like it could tell me what I wanted to know. Sadly, was I wrong. Very wrong.
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A comment on our post, Happy National Coffee Day – Coffee, Edward Lloyd, Ships and Shipping, by Barista Uno host of the excellent Marine Cafe blog raised two interesting points. He commented:
There ought to be an International Coffee Day. Coffee, after all, is the second most traded and shipped commodity in the world. One day of the year to pay tribute to the great coffeehouses of the past and present, the coffee farmers and the ship operators and seafarers who transport the produce. Wouldn’t that be nice?
I agree whole heartedly with Barista Uno. After a bit of research it appears that National Coffee on August 29th is also celebrated as International Coffee Day. Who established these “days” is still a mystery to me. As far as I am concerned every day is coffee day.
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An interesting article by Dan Moreland, Captain and owner of Picton Castle from Sail Training International.
USCG Canned Meat?
I will admit to doing a double take when I saw the USCG press release announcing “Coast Guard Cutter Harriet Lane returns home after 9-week patrol.” I wondered, who would name a ship the Harriet Lane? For the record, the USCGC Harriet Lane was named for Harriet Lane, niece and official hostess of President James Buchanan. The current Harriet Lane is also not the first. There was also a revenue cutter by the same name in 1857.
For those familiar with sailor slang, however, Harriet Lane is also slang for canned meat. Harriet Lane was a murder victim, who was chopped up by her killer around 1875. Merchant sailors came to call any canned meat, Harriet Lane. Fanny Adams, also a long remembered, if also dismembered, murder victim, became Royal Navy slang for tinned meats as well. To the best of my knowledge, there is no USCG Fanny Adams, thank goodness.
When I had a sailboat, I hated motoring. The diesel was loud and vibrated, completely different from why I went out sailing in the first place. Tag Yachts in South Africa, in partnership with Electric Marine Propulsion and International Battery, may have solved the problem in their new 60-foot catamaran named Tang. When not under sail, the boat is powered by electric motors. When sailing the propellers are turned by the boat’s wake and recharge the batteries. There are also twin diesel generators to recharge the batteries when not under sail or on shore power. The catamaran is built of carbon fiber. The owner plans on sailing the boat to Florida and to make an appearance at the Miami Boat show in February.
Wind-generated electricity powers 60 foot hybrid-electric catamaran
This week 1,000 Royal Navy Medical Officer Journals were made available to the public at the British National Archives in Kew. The journals are revealing, if often disturbing by modern standards. From drunken mutinies to disease outbreaks to a walrus attack, the journals paint a colorful picture of 18th- and 19th-century ship life.
USS Arthur W. Radford
Perhaps not a case of swords into plowshares, but at least a destroyer into an artificial reef. In November, the 535 foot decommissioned Navy destroyer, USS Arthur W. Radford, will sink beneath the waters off Cape May Point to become the longest vessel ever turned into an East Coast artificial reef.
Destroyer Arthur W. Radford to become reef off New Jersey coast
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Coffee House by Hogarth
Happy National Coffee Day! I don’t know who decided that today was National Coffee Day, nor even why we should necessarily be celebrating it. However, as a confirmed and happily contented coffee addict, perhaps this is a good time to reflect on coffee, ships and shipping.
Coffee may have had a far greater impact on shipping than even, dare say it, rum. The first English coffee houses sprang up in London around 1650. Edward Lloyd started Lloyd’s coffee house on Tower Street in 1668.
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Given all the reporting on piracy off the Horn of Africa, we hear very little about another crisis – the flood of refugees fleeing the instability and chaos of Somalia’s clan wars. Last year 74,000 people crossed the Gulf of Aden in smugglers’ boats to reach Yemen, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
On Monday the USS Winston S. Churchill attempted to render aid to an overloaded skiff drifting in the Gulf of Aden with 85 refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia. The skiff’s engine had broken down. According to a statement released by the Navy:
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Yesterday we posted that scientists are not sure where all the plastic floating in the vast Atlantic and Pacific garbage patches is going. Sadly, the answer is probably not that a big vacuum cleaner is vacuuming the stuff up to recycle it. Nevertheless, here is a great story about Electrolux, which is facing, believe it or not, a shortage of recycled plastic with which to make vacuum cleaners. Electrolux has launching its ‘Vac from the Sea’ initiative to gather plastic from the ocean and along the shoreline and to turn that plastic into vacuum cleaners.
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The Mariners Museum in Newport News, VA has a new exhibition: Endangered Species – Watermen of the Chesapeake, featuring extraordinary B & W portraits of watermen who work the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. For those of us not in the area, the website includes photography and video of the waterman, including clips from “The Last Boat Out,” a documentary about waterman on the Chesapeake which aired on PBS last spring.
“The Last Boat Out” PBS Opening Sequence from Seltzer Film & Video on Vimeo.
We have previously posted about the plastic “garbage patches” in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans – great current vortexes where floating plastic trash has accumulated. As reported in Scientific American scientists studying the garbage patches have noticed that despite that their size has stayed relatively constant despite an steady influx of plastic into the oceans, raising the question “where is all the plastic going?” It may be breaking up into smaller pieces and/or sinking or it may be being easting by marine life and entering the the food chain. The best answer is that no one knows.
Ocean garbage patches are not growing, so where is all that plastic going?
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