The West Island College “Class Afloat” school ship Concordia, en route between Recife, Brazil and Montevideo, Uruguay, is reported to have sunk last night off the coast of Brazil. All 64 passengers and crew were reported safe after being rescued by the Brazilian Navy and Air Force.
Canadians rescued after ship sinks off Brazil
All 64 passengers and crew of a Canadian sailing ship that sank in high winds have been rescued from life rafts off the coast of Brazil.A distress signal was picked up from the three-masted SV Concordia around 1700 (1900 GMT) on Thursday. A Brazilian Air Force plane spotted the rafts from the Concordia floating about 300 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro three hours later. The passengers and crew were plucked from the sea early on Friday.
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Nuclear power as a propulsion system for merchant ships was the future that never arrived. The
Containership operations has always been like riding a roller coaster, with many highs and lows and unexpected twists and turns. One sign of this is the fluctuating speeds of container ships over the years, going from slow to fast to slow to fast to and now to slow, once again.
Does politics make for strange shipmates?
The Sea Shepherd farce continues. The ex-captain of the Ady Gil cut through anti-boarding nets to board a Japanese whaler and was immediately arrested. In related news, Sea Shepherd crew onboard the Steve Irwin, a vessel named for the television host of the show “Crocodile Hunter,” are now throwing fake crocodile eggs at the Japanese whalers.
Here is an intriguing article suggesting that we humans have been taking to the sea for far longer than had been previously recorded. Recently stone tools have been found on the island of Crete which date back at least 130,000 years and may be much older. As Crete has been an island for more than five million years, this suggests that those who carried the tools to the island were very ancient mariners indeed. Thanks to John for passing the article along.
An interesting perspective from the The 
Strange but true. Digital memory cards are indeed an amazing technology.
As truly awe inspiring as the huge and high tech America’s Cup boats are, we shouldn’t forget that iceboats are the real speed demons on the water (even if it is frozen.) Will at the Tugster blog has some 
Over thirty years ago when I was in college studying naval architecture, a classmate of mine got a summer job working as a naval architect for Sun Shipyard helping to design some part of the new deep sea mining ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, being built for Howard Hughes’ Global Marine. Years later my friend was chagrined to learn that the ship he was working on was not intended for deep water mining but was a top secret CIA project to raise the K-129, a sunken Golf Class Soviet submarine. The cover story was that the ship was intended to raise magnesium nodules from the deep ocean floor.
Last October, we wrote about how researchers are using eighteenth century Royal Navy ship logs to study climate change. (See