A Whale - Slots along sides are skimmer suctions
Update: According to her AIS (Automatic Identification System) the A Whale is now off Louisiana. Thanks to Buck for pointing it out. Click here to see per position on the chart.
A Taiwanese-owned, Liberian-flagged tanker, the A Whale, has been modified for skimming up to 500,000 barrels of oil-contaminated water a day. To put this in context, if the system works as intended, it could skim in less than two days an amount of oil equal to all the oil skimmed in the past 70 days of the ongoing Deepwater Horizon spill. The A Whale is designed to operate offshore where most skimmers have difficulty operating. It is currently in Norfolk, VA awaiting approval of separate waivers from the Coast Guard and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to allow it to begin testing. Because the A Whale would be operating well offshore it is not believed to require a Jones Act Waiver.
Giant oil skimmer makes stop in Norfolk on way to Gulf oil cleanup
We are five days late but nevertheless would like to wish 
Two species of Asian carp, the bighead and the silver, were imported in the US in the 1970s by catfish farmers to eat algae in ponds. In flood in the 1990s, Asian trout escaped in the Mississippi River basin have been multiplying wildly and heading north. A few days ago an 20 pound Asian bighead carp was caught by a fisherman in Illinois’s Lake Calumet, on the South Side of Chicago. That is north of the electric fences installed to stop the carp and only six miles from Lake Michigan.
In 1898, the 
An interested court case between a private salvor and the State of New York appears to have been settled in favor of the state. The salvor, Northeast Research, claimed the 19th century schooner, which it claims is the Caledonia.
It says something about our society that a missing prop from a classic movie, specifically Bruce, the mechanical shark from
Happy Solstice to All. One way that at least some New Yorkers mark the beginning of the summer is to observe or participate in the 
A section of upper New York harbor, just north of Ellis Island, has been taken over for the