The 12 Plankton of Christmas

Posted on by December 25, 2010

Sing with me now – “On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a Phaeocystis globosa.”  OK, it may not be a melodic as “a partridge in a pear tree,” but it may be more interesting.  Dr. Richard Kirby, a Royal Society Research Fellow at Plymouth University has come up with the “12 Plankton of Christmas.”    To see more of Dr. Kirby’s work check out his book, Ocean Drifters: A Secret World Beneath the Waves.

Thanks to Julian Stockwin for tweeting about the 12 Plankton of Christmas.

Abby Sunderland’s “Unsinkable: A Young Woman’s Courageous Battle on the High Seas”

Posted on by December 22, 2010

Last June, we posted about Jessica Watson’s book and album release.   Jessica Watson is the now 17 year old Australian sailor who can rightly claim the title of the “youngest to sail solo and unassisted around the world.”    Now Abby Sunderland,  who attempted to claim that title as well, but whose boat was dismasted in the Indian Ocean, has teamed up with Lynn Vincent to write a book of her own.   Vincent, was the ghost writer for Sarah Palin’s book, “Going Rogue.”    Sunderland’s book will be titled, Unsinkable: A Young Woman’s Courageous Battle on the High Seas.   It will be available this spring, but can be pre-ordered from Amazon.

500 Seafarers held hostage by pirates at Christmas

Posted on by December 23, 2010

The real victims of piracy are invariably the seafarers who are held for ransom often under grim conditions for long periods of time.  From a statement relased by the Round Table of international shipping associations – and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF):

500 Seafarers held hostage by pirates at Christmas
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USS Pegasus and the Littoral Combat Ships

Posted on by April 5, 2012

David Hayes passed along a video of the USS Pegasus, a hydrofoil patrol boat that was billed as the “vanguard of the new navy,”  thirty five years ago.   While the Pegasus was not the first of many hydrofoils as was intended in 1975, the development of high speed coastal craft did not stop.   The US Navy is currently building two classes of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).    Maritime Executive reported today that the Congress has approved contracts for Marinette Marine and Austal to each build ten littoral combat ships for the US Navy.   Will the new LCS class ships serve as the “vanguard of the new navy?” Only time will tell.   Video of the USS Independence (LCS2) after the jump.

Pegasus : Vanguard of the New Navy (1975)

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Did the Fixed CO2 System on the Carnival Splendor Fail?

Posted on by December 21, 2010

The Maritime Blog and the Professional Mariner are pointing to two Marine Safety Alerts issued by the Coast Guard today which may suggest that the fixed CO2 system on the Carnival Splendor failed.

The Safety Alerts do not identify the ship by name but note:

A machinery space fire onboard a relatively new vessel was effectively responded to and extinguished by the vessel’s quick response team firefighters using portable extinguishing equipment.  However, before it was declared completely extinguished and approximately five hours after the fire started, the master of the vessel made the decision to release CO2 from the vessel’s fixed firefighting system. It failed to operate as designed. Subsequently, crew members were unable to activate it manually and CO2 was never directed into the machinery space.
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Coast Guard Videos of the Year 2010 – Vote for your Favorite

Posted on by December 21, 2010

The U.S. Coast Guard is posting the top 11 rescue/mission videos of 2010.  Starting today they will be posting one video per day.  There are three ways to vote for your favorite video. Either “like” the video on the Coast Guard Youtube channel, “like” your favorite on the Coast Guard Facebook fan page or leave a positive comment on the Coast Guard Compass blog for that video.   In the mean time, here is a compilation of the eleven best videos.   Click here to view the Day 1 Video – Coast Guard rescues father and son caught in surf. The professionalism, courage and skill of these Coast Guardsmen is absolutely breathtaking.

Coast Guard Videos of the Year 2010

Lighthouse Ice Sculpture – Welcome to Winter

Posted on by December 20, 2010

The photos and video clip are almost a week old but nevertheless seem like an excellent way to welcome in the winter. This ice sculpture is the Cleveland Harbor West Pierhead Lighthouse on Lake Erie.  Happy Winter Solstice to everyone North of the equator.  And we hope that our our friends in the Antipodes enjoy their summer.

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Laura Dekker Arrives in St. Maarten

Posted on by December 19, 2010

Fifteen-year-old Dutch sailor, Laura Dekker, arrived in St. Maarten after a 2,200 nautical-mile voyage from the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa. She sailed from Gibraltar on August 21 and spent two months in the Canary Islands waiting for the hurricane season to pass. She left the Cape Verde Islands on December 2nd.  She is attempting to become the youngest person to sail around the world alone.

Teenage sailor on solo voyage reaches St. Maarten
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First Solstice Lunar Eclipse in 456 years

Posted on by December 19, 2010

Sailors in the western hemisphere will see the first lunar eclipse to fall on the solstice in the last 456 years.   According to NASA, the last time the two celestial events happened at the same time was in AD 1554.

Solstice Lunar Eclipse

The eclipse begins on Tuesday morning, Dec. 21st, at 1:33 am EST (Monday, Dec. 20th, at 10:33 pm PST). At that time, Earth’s shadow will appear as a dark-red bite at the edge of the lunar disk. It takes about an hour for the “bite” to expand and swallow the entire Moon. Totality commences at 02:41 am EST (11:41 pm PST) and lasts for 72 minutes.
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Holy-calamari, Batman! Flying squid!

Posted on by December 18, 2010

Though often confused with flying fish, the Japanese flying squid, Todarodes pacificus, uses jet propulsion to leap out of the sea and fly up to 65ft to escape predators.   Graham Ekins, 60, a retired deputy head teacher from Boreham, Essex, recently documented their aerial performances in the waters south of Japan.  Thanks to Alaric Bond for passing the article along.

Jet-propelled calamari: Rare photos of squid species that can leap through the air to dodge predators

Richard Pendered – Helped Break “Shark” Enigma Cipher And to Sink the Scharnhorst

Posted on by December 18, 2010

Perhaps foreshadowing our own information age, World War II’s “Battle of the Atlantic” between German submarine wolf-packs and Allied convoys was largely won and nearly lost by the code breakers of Bletchley Park.   In 1940, Alan Turing had begun to break the German Navy’s “Dolphin” cipher which was based on an Engima code machine with three encoding rotors.  Within a little over a year the German wolf-packs were  temporarily  withdrawn due to mounting  submarine losses.   In 1942, however the Germans  introduced a new four rotor Engima machine using what was termed the “Shark” cipher.  Richard Pendered and a small team of codebreakers would finally break the “Shark” cipher ending a ten month period of major Allied convoy losses in what those in Bletchely Park referred to as the “Shark blackout.”

Richard Pendered

Richard Pendered, who has died aged 89, was one of the small team of Bletchley Park codebreakers who broke the “Shark” Enigma cipher used by German U-boats during the Second World War; his work also led directly to the sinking of the battlecruiser Scharnhorst.
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Brigantine Søren Larsen Larsen Available for Sale by Syndication

Posted on by December 17, 2010

The brigantine Soren Larsen was built in Denamrk in 1948 and traded extensively in Baltic, British and European ports until 1972.  In the 1970s she starred in the popular BBC television drama series, The Onedin Line.   She has also appeared in the movies “The French Lieutenant’s Woman“, “Count of Monte Cristo” and “Shackleton.”   In recent years she has been based in New Zealand and has sailed the  South  Pacific  to romantic and barely accessible islands during the  Southern  hemisphere winter and the beautiful New Zealand coast from November to April.  Now the owners are putting the ship up for sail on a syndication basis.  From a message from Geoff Fraser of Workboats International who is representing the owners:
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What is AMVER?

Posted on by December 17, 2010

What is AMVER?  They are the most amazing world-wide maritime search and rescue network that you probably have never heard of.  AMVER stands for the Automated Mutual Assistance Vessel Rescue System. It was founded over fifty years ago, in 1958, and currently over 19,000 ships are enrolled.  How does it work?  The ships, which voluntarily enroll in AMVER, report their positions on a regular basis.  When an distress call is received, often by a triggered EPIRB,  AMVER calculates the closest ships to the vessel in distress and vectors them to the stricken vessel.

Just last week an AMVER enrolled vessel, Sunbelt Spirit, diverted toward an EPIRB signal and picked up two Canadian men  in a liferaft off the coast of Nicaragua in a joint SAR operation with the US Coast Guard.   Roughly two weeks ago the AMVER enrolled container ship CGA-CGM La Scala rescued four sailors from a capsized sailboat one thousand miles east-southeast of Bermuda.  (There is a video of the La Scala rescue after the jump.)

[iframe: title=”YouTube video player” class=”youtube-player” type=”text/html” width=”480″ height=”295″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/norpDJHf8Ns” frameborder=”0″]
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HMS Temeraire, USS Olympia, and the American Racer – A Few Thoughts on Ship Preservation

Posted on by January 12, 2011

American Racer on her way to the scrap yard Photo: daver6@sbcglobal.net

Bernard Cornwell‘s introduction to his review of  Sam Willis’s book, “The Fighting Temeraire,”  is as dramatic as it is sadly accurate. He writes:  At Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia, the battle-cruiser USS Olympia lies glorious and doomed. The oldest steel warship in the world today, she has a poignant history.  In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, she was Adm. Dewey’s flagship at the battle of Manila Bay, and in 1921 she carried the body of the first officially designated Unknown Soldier, felled in World War I, back from France to the U.S.  The Olympia is magnificent.  If nothing is done to save her, she will be towed offshore and sunk as an artificial reef.”
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