For sailors who still watch the skies, Jupiter will be passing the earth on Monday at its closest approach since 1963. The planet will not appear as big or as bright again until 2022.
Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
You can see it low in the east around dusk. Around midnight, it will be directly overhead. That’s because Earth will be passing between Jupiter and the sun, into the wee hours of Tuesday.
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We have previously posted about efforts to permanently moor the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy in Portland, Maine. The Navy is is considering proposals from Portland and Rhode Island. Many in Portland are not happy at the prospect of mooring the aircraft carrier in the harbor however. ““It’s not a good fit,” said David Marshall, a City Council member. “It would block a good portion of our view corridors, and it ends up being a potential liability for the city.” A recent editorial in the Maine Sunday Telegraph, sums up the problem succinctly, “Everything about the project is too big except the level of public support behind it.”
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Dodge Morgan, Who Sailed Around World, Dies at 78
Dodge Morgan, the first American to sail solo nonstop around the world, a feat in which he cut the previous record time nearly in half, died Tuesday in Boston. He was 78 and lived on Snow Island in Harpswell, Me., a 30-acre sanctuary that he owned and where he moored six sailboats.
The cause was cancer, his fiancée, Mary Beth Teas, said.
Aboard the 60-foot sloop American Promise, Mr. Morgan slipped into the port of St. George, Bermuda, at 1:31 p.m. on April 11, 1986, completing the 27,000-mile circumnavigation in 150 days 1 hour 6 minutes. He had sailed out of Bermuda on Nov. 12, 1985. The voyage — often through roiling seas and occasionally past icebergs — shattered the previous record of 292 days set by a British sailor, Chay Blyth, in 1971.
gCaptain is one of my favorite blogs. It has a done a great job of covering the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Now gCaptain’s John Konrad has written a book, Fire on the Horizon – The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster, assisted by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Tom Shroder. It is due out in March of 2011 but can be pre-ordered now. Should be a fascinating read.
Fire on the Horizon – The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster
On April 20, 2010, the half-billion-dollar floating oil rig Deepwater Horizon became a household name when it blew up, killing 11 people, shattering a multinational company’s reputation, and leaving an unprecedented swath of devastation in its wake. Told by veteran oil rig captain John Konrad and award-winning Washington Post journalist Tom Shroder, Fire on the Horizon is the remarkable story of this tragedy—the worst environmental disaster in the history of the Unites States—a riveting chronicle of engineering hubris at odds with the Earth itself, of corporate greed and unforgettable selflessness.
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Lanier W. Phillips, comedian Bill Cosby and former Washington Redskins star and the Dallas Cowboys’ first starting quarterback, Eddie LeBaron, were honored Wednesday with the U.S. Navy Memorial’s Lone Sailor award. I, of course, know Bill Cosby and as a young boy I watched LeBaron, the shortest pro- quarterback I have ever seen at only 5’7″, scramble so as not to be crushed by the the larger players, but I had never heard of Lanier W. Phillips. His story is perhaps the most interesting of the three.
For shipwreck survivor, a new honor and an old story
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I am not a big gamer but Salvo! does look like fun. It is also on sale for the rest of the month. There is even a free demo.
Salvo! is a turn based wargame covering naval warfare from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Players can command a wide variety of ship types and do battle amongst all the major seafaring powers of the eras along with treacherous pirate scum. Campaign and scenario based, Salvo! also supports a thorough suite of editing tools that allow gamers to modify/create ships and scenarios. Additionally, players can do battle against live opponents even cross platform (PC versus Mac gamers).
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Jewel of the Seas
As cruise ships grow ever larger safety professionals have questioned whether passengers will be able to get to the life boats in time in case of an emergency. (See Captain D. Peter Boucher’s BIGGER IS BETTER – NOT on his Nautical Log blog for as discussion of the problems of moving people to the boats on the new large ships.)
With that in mind, there is a very interesting research project ongoing. Researchers from the University of Greenwich’s Fire Safety Engineering Group used one hundred video cameras to document passenger movement in a live assembly drill at sea on the the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Jewel of the Seas.
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Ancestry.co.uk. has published, on-line records, held by National Archives of 19th Century prison ships providing a glimpse into the lives of the estimated 200,000 inmates.
Prison ship records from 19th Century published
The records outline the disease-ridden conditions on the “prison hulks”, created to ease overcrowding elsewhere.
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Marryat with helicopters?
David Hayes made a discovery that is too good not to share. He came across a book cover of a reissue of Frederick Marryat‘s The Mission by Tutis Digital Publishing. The cover shows a helicopter hovering low over the ocean about to pick up a commando in dive gear. Exciting stuff. Anyone not familiar with Marryat who purchases the book, however, might be surprised to learn that it was written in 1845 and has no helicopters of any sort. Captain Frederick Marryat was a Royal Navy captain and a prolific writer of nautical fiction. He also wrote travel and children’s books.
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On an exhilarating manta ray night dive off Kailua-Kona, Hawaii in August, a manta ray steals a cameraman’s rig. Thanks to Bill Nyden for pointing this out.
Manta Ray Absconds With $5,000 Camera
The once-in-a-lifetime encounter between an underwater cameraman and a larceny-minded manta ray is now part of posterity.
Travis Matteson was filming a school of mantas when what was described as the biggest fish in the bunch swam by, grabbed his $5,000 Canon 5D Mark II underwater rig and swam away. With the camera still rolling the entire time, the manta then got an opportunity to do its own filming of the underwater neighborhood before dropping the it right below the boat. Camera and diver were subsequently reunited.
Book ’em Danno: Klepto Manta Mugs Cameraman
“Lord Nelson’s love of bling may be the reason he was shot dead at the Battle of Trafalgar, a medal expert claimed yesterday.”
Whether or not Nelson’s fondness for wearing his medals made him an easier target at Trafalgar, one of those medals, the Breast Star of the Order of the Bath, is soon to be up for auction in London. Recently we posted about a Nelson victory poster which failed to sell at auction. The medal is expected to do much better. The Breast Star of the Order of the Bath is expected to fetch up to £500,000. Experts have hailed the medals as “the most important piece of Nelson memorabilia to go under the hammer more than 100 years.”
LORD NELSON’S MEDALS MADE HIM A TARGET AT TRAFALGAR
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As reported in Sail Magazine, the next America’s Cup will be sailed in 2013 in 72′ catamarans with wing sails.
According to officials, the new AC72 class will regularly attain speeds of 30 knots, “excite fans” as they “zip around the racecourse” and leave their 11-member crews “exhilarated and drained after a day of adrenaline-fueled racing.” I’ll bet!
The Brig not the Brigantine Niagara
There was an amusing bit of bantering and ballyhooing about ship jargon in the New York Times yesterday. In an article about the remains of ship found in the excavation near the new World Trade Center (see our previous posts here) The Gudgeon Did It: A Small Detail Settles a Maritime Mystery, David Dunlop explains that until archaeologists identified the gudgeon, they weren’t sure which end of the ship was which. Dunlop then, somewhat gleefully, notes that “thirty-six years in this business, and never before have I had the chance to use the words gudgeon and pintle in an article.” So far, so good. Then the argument broke out.
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Last week we posted about Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) installation of offshore buoys off the coast of Oregon to capture and convert wave energy into electricity. It appears that they will also be playing a key role in the world’s largest wave energy site set to go live soon off the Cornish coast. The installation known as a “Wave Hub” is a sub-sea cable connecting t0 a socket with four 300 meter “tails” to which electricity producing wave generators will be attacked. wave OPT’s PowerBuoy will be connected to one segment of the project early next year. Other companies including WestWave, Fred Olsen Limited and Oceanlinx will also be connecting to the project.
World’s biggest Wave Hub installed off UK coast
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Duck Boat being struck by barge
On July 7th, we posted about a collision between a barge towed by the tug Caribbean Sea and a disabled “Duck boat” DUKW 34 at anchor in the Delaware River off Philadelphia. Two of the 35 passengers on the duck boat drowned in the collision.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a preliminary report on Friday, which says, among other things, that the mate in command of the tug did not respond to multiple radio calls from the DUKW 34 and other boats in the river prior to the collision. A record of marine VHF traffic of Channel 13 made by the Burlington County Bridge Authority documents the attempts to contact the tug. There was no lookout on the barge itself and it is unclear whether the DUKW 34 was ever visible to the tug over the bow of the barge. The mate on watch has refused to speak to investigators, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination.
The graphic below shows the relative position of the tug and barge and the DUKW 34 at the time of the collision.
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Jiaolong, 蛟龙, in Chinese folklore, is a shape-shifting water dragon. For several months this summer the Chinese government has been quietly testing a new submersible, named Jiaolong, designed to dive to 7,000 meters. If successful, it will be the deepest diving submersible in the world, diving deeper than the Japanese Shinkai 6500, which can dive to 6,500 meters and the American submersible Alvin which can dive to 4,500 meters.
Early last month we posted about an ice island four times the size of Manhattan, a 100-square-mile block of ice 600 feet thick , that broke off from the Petermann glacier in Greenland. In a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, the ice island has collided with Joe Island, a small rocky outcrop in the Nares Strait, west of Greenland. Joe Island appears to have won as the ice island has now broken in two.
An historic poster that originally sold for just a tuppence to celebrate Lord Nelson’s victory over the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar went on the auction block this week. It was expected to fetch £40,000 but bids failed to meet the reserve price.
More details on the capture of the M/V Magellan Star. The crew and the ship management company kept their heads and their sense of humor when the ship was boarded by Somali pirates on Wednesday. When the pirates boarded the ship, the officers and crew disabled the engine and retreated to a hidden safe room. As reported by the BBC:
The hijack began on Wednesday when pirates boarded the 8,000-tonne container ship, which flies the flag of Antigua.
But after searching the vessel for three hours, they were unable to locate the crew, according to the ship’s German owners, Quadrant.
The pirates then phoned the shipping company in Hamburg to ask where the crew were hidden.
“They were told the crew was on holiday,” said spokesman Juergen Salamon.
“They then asked how to switch the engines back on, but were told they were broken.”
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Thanks to Ulrich Rudofsky for forwarding these slideshows of the Waterford Tug Roundup. Click here to view the slideshow from Friday aternoon.