We hope everyone is having a joyous holiday season. Here is a repost of a beautiful version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “Christmas at Sea,” performed by Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, better known as Sting.
Every year, the Christmas Ship, with the support of the US Coast Guard and volunteer groups, delivers Christmas trees to families in need in Chicago’s communities. This year was no exception, but because of the pandemic, it was a bit different.
In past years, the USCG Cutter Mackinaw delivered trees to the Navy pier where volunteers, including Sea Cadets, Venture Crews, Sea Scouts, and Young Marines, off-loaded the trees and loaded them into trucks to be distributed to more than one thousand deserving families.
This year, the Navy Pier is closed to the public and volunteers could not get to the cutter. Nevertheless, in early December, the Cutter Mackinaw arrived with 1,200 Christmas trees. Taking up the challenge, the cutter’s crew offloaded the trees and packaged and loaded them to be delivered. More than a half dozen community groups helped deliver the trees to Chicago-area families.
A view of the A68a iceberg from a Royal Air Force reconnaissance plane near South Georgia Island on Nov. 18. Image: UK Ministry of Defence
In November we posted that the world’s largest iceberg, dubbed A68a, was drifting on a collision course with the island of South Georgia. The iceberg calved from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice-shelf in 2017. The berg weighed roughly one trillion tons and measured 4,200 sq km, or almost the size of the state of Delaware. The fear is that the iceberg might run aground on the sloping seabed around South Georgia, threatening wildlife, particularly penguins and seals.
It now appears that that the massive iceberg is breaking up.
Ship scrapping is a slow and methodical process. A ship is typically run up on the scrapping ways, which can be a concrete platform or a sloping sandy beach. As burners cut away the upper sections of the ship, it gets lighter and floats a little higher allowing winches to pull the ship a bit farther up the ways. As more steel is cut away the ship is pulled progressively farther ashore until the entire structure is reduced to scrap metal to be hauled away for resmelting in a local steel mill.
I recall years ago watching the ship breaking yard in Kaohsiung, Taiwan from a ship in drydock just up the harbor in China Shipbuilding. A ship being scrapped in the breaking yard looked like the carcass of some great beast being slowly but inexorably devoured by ants.
For the past month, the aircraft carrier INS Viraat, ex HMS Hermes has been slowly cut up and dismantled at an Alang shipbreaker’s yard in Gujarat, India. Breaking her up completely is likely to take a year.
According to an ancient sailors’ legend, we are in the middle of the Halcyon days – seven days of calm on either side of the winter solstice. The legend says that the halcyon bird builds a floating nest on the sea on the winter solstice and has the ability to calm the seas so as to be undisturbed when laying its eggs. The halcyon is generally associated with the kingfisher.
The source of the belief in the bird’s power to calm the sea originated in a myth recorded by Ovid. The story goes that Aeolus, the ruler of the winds, had a daughter named Alcyone, who was married to Ceyx, the king of Thessaly. Ceyx was drowned at sea and Alcyone threw herself into the waves in a fit of grief. Instead of drowning, she was transformed into a bird and carried to her husband by the wind.
Anti-submarine warriors?
One of the great things about writing historical fiction is discovering odd sets of facts, often buried in the archives, that capture both the desperation and the madness of a given time. Often, as the cliche goes, you just can’t make this stuff up. Here is an account of how the Royal Navy attempted to fight back against German submarines in World War I using trained seagulls and hammers. The schemes worked about as well as one might expect.
On Monday night, December 21, the planets Jupiter and Saturn will appear closer together in the night sky than they have on any night since March 4, 1226. At their closest alignment, the planets will be a tenth of a degree apart or roughly equivalent to the width of a dime held at arm’s length. Depending go the atmospheric conditions, the conjunction of the two planets may appear as a single bright object in the south-western sky, just after sunset.
The conjunction of the planets feels portentous. For skygazers with a clear horizon, it will be a once in a lifetime event. Given its relatively close proximity to the holiday, many are calling it the Christmas Star. As the conjunction falls on the winter solstice, some astrologers are heralding it as the beginning of a time of rebirth.
Severe weather off the east coast of Australia has left beaches in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales and on the Gold and Sunshine coasts covered in a thick layer of sea foam, attracting crowds of curious locals, and, at least potentially, venomous sea snakes.
News.com.au reports that the foam went viral across the globe after a local Byron Bay woman interrupted a live weather update to search for her missing dog, Hazel, who was later rescued from the mess.
At roughly this point in the last sailing of the Vendee Globe in 2016-2017, 5 boats had been forced to retire after being damaged by collisions with UFOs, unidentified floating objects.
In this year’s race, 18 of the 33 boats competing are carrying a new high-tech collision avoidance package dubbed OSCAR. The electronics package, installed at the boat’s masthead, uses day and thermal cameras combined with artificial intelligence, to provide a second set of ‘eyes’ for the solo skipper both day and night.
How well has OSCAR worked so far? It may still be too soon to judge. That being said, of the 4 racing boats damaged by UFOs in the current race, at least two had OSCAR units installed.
Sail-assist propulsion on commercial ships is developing rapidly, featuring a range of technologies including rotor sails, rigid wing sails, ventilated turbo sails, and even conventional fabric sails.
One thing that all these rigs have in common, however, is that when they are not converting wind energy into power to propel the ship, they can interfere with operations, whether loading and discharging cargo or navigating under bridges. Now, in addition to fixed installations, engineers are designing rigs that can be moved or tilted out of the way.
Today, steel was cut for the first National Security Multi-Mission Vessel (NSMV) at Philly Shipyard, Inc. The NSMV is designed to be a state-of-the-art training vessel for America’s state maritime academies. The ship will also be available to support humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions.
In May 2019, MARAD awarded TOTE Services, LLC, a company involved in ship management, marine operations, and vessel services, a contract to be the Vessel Construction Manager (VCM) for the NSMV program. In April 2020, TOTE Services awarded Philly Shipyard, Inc. a contract to construct up to five NSMVs.
A year ago we posted about the innovative ideas and products developed by the Dutch firm, eConowind. They have developed a Ventfoil, a fixed airfoil-shaped spar with an internal fan that uses boundary layer suction to generate thrust. Ventfoils can be installed to provide sail-assisted propulsion on new ships, or retrofitted on existing vessels. There is also a modular version in which two Ventfoils can be deployed from inside a 40-foot container. The Ventfoils can be raised or lowered from the container in about 5 minutes.
Recently, an eCononwind Ventfoil container was installed on the TMA Logistics container barge Ms. Royaal, operating on the IJsselmeer and the Wadden Sea, between Harlingen and Amsterdam. The conditions were close to perfect. The route is typically very windy. That being said, the single eConowind container sail unit produced fuel savings of 10%, enough to justify further testing.
Today, the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine have begun to be distributed in the United States. It seems like a good time to look back at the voyage of the orphan boys in the vaccine ship that sailed from Spain in 1803.
Now know as the Balmis Expedition, it was officially called the Real Expedición Filantrópica de la Vacuna (Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition) and was a three-year mission, from 1803 to 1806, to Spanish America and Asia led by Dr. Francisco Javier de Balmis with the aim of vaccinating millions against smallpox. It was the first large scale mass vaccination of its kind.
This is a wonderful half-hour documentary hosted by Tom Cunliffe about Jolie Brise. Jolie Brise is a gaff-rigged pilot cutter/racing yacht built and launched by the Albert Paumelle Yard in Le Havre in 1913 to a design by Alexandre Pâris. Tom Cunliffe is a British yachting journalist, author, and broadcaster.
Here are his comments on the video: Here’s a ‘lock-down special’ released early for Christmas about one of the greatest cutters of them all, Jolie Brise. This boat truly changed my life. She deserves this professionally made, TV-quality show, so pour yourself a glass of the finest and shut the cabin door on the world for half an hour.
Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Ltd. (MOL) has reached a coal transport deal with Tohoku Electric Power Co., Inc., which will use a new 99,000 DWT collier equipped with a retractable wing sail propulsion system, known as the Wind Challenger. Construction of the vessel will start at Oshima Shipbuilding with the goal of going into service in 2022.
The new ship will feature a single retractable sail, mounted near the bow, which is expected to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) by about 5% on the Japan-Australia route or about 8% on the Japan-North America West Coast route, in comparison with a conventional vessel of the same class.
The US Navy has selected Captain Amy Bauernschmidt as the first woman to command a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Capt. Bauernschmidt was selected for the position by the fiscal year 2022 aviation major command screen board. It has not been announced which of the Navy’s 11 nuclear-powered carriers Bauernschmidt will command.
Other officers who were picked for nuclear aircraft carrier command include Capts. Colin Day, Gavin Duff, Brent Gaut, David Pollard, and Craig Sicola.
Capt. Bauernschmidt also made history, when, in 2016, she became the first female executive officer of a nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Yesterday afternoon saw unusual traffic on the Hudson River in New York’s inner harbor. A humpback whale was seen swimming in the Hudson, off Pier 84, on Monday afternoon. The whale is no stranger to New York waters. Gotham Whale‘s lead researcher Danielle M. Brown identified the whale as NYC0089, first spotted in 2018, and recently photographed on November 27th. For a slideshow of wonderful images taken by Bjoern Kils of New York Media Boat, click here.
📸 A humpback whale surfaces near the Statue of Liberty in this photo taken from a boat on New York Harbor. pic.twitter.com/OancSlqft0
— ABC News (@ABC) December 9, 2020
Last week, the container ship ONE Apus lost or had damaged over 1,900 containers in a storm in the Pacific. The lost or damaged containers representing close to 25% of the ship’s cargo. The casualty represents more containers than are typically lost in a year worldwide off all container ships, according to the World Shipping Council.
What happened on the ONE Apus? Why did so many boxes go over the side? It may be too soon to say. The ship just arrived in Kobe, Japan, and will be the subject of a detailed investigation as soon as the remaining damaged boxes are unloaded. That being said, one possible explanation is that ONE Apus experienced parametric rolling, a phenomenon that can induce violent rolling, particularly in large containerships.
An interrupted broadcast of a football game, a newsbreak during a performance by the New York Philharmonic, a weather report followed by an announcement from President Roosevelt that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Reports of attacks on the Philippines. Here is a compilation of news reports from Sunday, December 7th, 1941, seventy-eight years ago today.
The one-year-old, 14,000 TEU capacity container ship, ONE Apus, has set a dubious new record. It encountered severe weather about 1,600 nautical miles northwest of Hawaii while sailing from Yantian in China to Long Beach, California. In the violent storm, it is believed to have lost or damaged over 1,900 containers, a record for boxes lost over the side. Of these, 40 are believed to be Dangerous Goods containers. Container News suggests that the ship may have lost up to 25% of its cargo. The ship was diverted to Kobe, Japan for assessment.
To put the scope of this casualty in context, the loss on the ONE Apus appears to be greater than the total yearly loss of containers from all ships worldwide. Continue reading