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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Prinsendam
Passengers should embark and disembark by the gangway only. Three stories, two of them tragic, of unusual arrivals and departures from cruise ships last week.
On the Holland America cruise ship, Prinsendam, passengers were shocked when a powered hang glider made a crash landing on the upper deck while the ship was docked in Portimao last week. The 25-year-old Brazilian pilot suffered a broken leg.
Photo: T. Michalis - MarineTraffic.com
Well planned passive resistance proved to be an effective tactic for the crew of the MV Lugela this weekend. Earlier this month we posted about the hijacking and subsequent recapture of the M/V Magellan Star from Somali pirates by US Marine commandos, after the crew had disabled the engine and hid in a safe room. On Saturday, 900 miles off the cost of Somalia, pirates attacked the MV Lugela, a 4,000 dwt cargo ship with a Ukranian crew. In accordance with a prepared response plan, the crew locked themselves in the engine room with stocks of food and water, after disabling the helm and other bridge controls. After failing to gain access to either the crew or the engine room, the pirates have reportedly given up and left the ship, allowing the crew to regain full control.
'SS Robin' arrives at the UK port of Tilbury on Saturday. Photo: Andy Howes
An update on our post from last June on the SS Robin, an 1890 built steam coaster, the last of her kind and the oldest complete steamship in the world. She arrived in Tillbury last week aboard a a custom built pontoon barge in time to celebrate her 120th birthday.
The Australian Hospital Ship Centaur was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off the coast of Queensland, Australia, on 14 May 1943. Of the 332 medical personnel and civilian crew aboard, 268 were killed. The exact position of the sunken ship was unknown until December of last year when the ship wreck was positively identified. On Friday, an at-sea memorial service was held aboard the HMAS Manoora over the site of the sunken ship.
After 67 years, ‘cloud of sorrow’ is finally lifted
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This sounds completely nuts. It might possibly work but there is the question of scale to be addressed. Hurricanes, or typhoons in the Pacific, need warm water to provide energy to the storm. The idea is to built a fleet of submarines to dive in the path of a typhoon and pump cold water to the surface to deprive the storm of its source of power. (I’m not making this up.)
Inventor creates ‘submarine’ to block typhoons
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