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.
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.
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 
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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.)
