Around 1607, colonists in the Popham Colony built the pinnace Virginia, the first English-built ship in what is now Maine and possibly in all of the English-colonized areas of North America. Now over 400 years later, a recreation of the Virginia is nearing completion in Bath, Maine.
Recreation of first ship built in Maine a dream more than 2 decades in the making
On New Year’s Eve, in 20-foot seas and high winds, the 130′ crab boat Scandies Rose operating off the Alaska Peninsula, developed a starboard list and suddenly capsized. Two of the seven crew were able to don exposure suits and were ultimately rescued. The remaining five crew are missing and presumed dead.
I was struck by the similarities between the loss of the Scandies Rose and the Arctic Rose, nineteen years ago. The two boats were very different. Scandies Rose was a crabber in the Gulf of Alaska, whereas the Arctic Rose was a trawler fishing for sole in the Bering Sea.
JARI, Chinese Drone
Both the US Navy and the Chinese Navy are working to develop “ghost fleets” of drone ships. The US Navy has been working on developing unmanned vessels since at least 2016. Four years ago, we posted about Sea Hunter, the first ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), a 132 feet long autonomous drone ship designed to track enemy submarines.
Since then they have experimented with turning two existing commercial fast supply vessels into unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Having successfully completed Phase I testing, the Navy’s Program Executive Office Unmanned and Small Combatants (PEO USC) has started the second phase of an unmanned vessel program that it calls “Ghost Fleet Overlord.”
Adix
I suppose if you plan on smuggling a painting by Picasso worth close to $29 million, using a superyacht might be a stylish choice. For Spanish billionaire Jaime Botin, however, it didn’t work out too well. Forbes reports:
Despite a 2015 high court ruling that Head of a Young Woman was a “national treasure” and could not be removed from the country, Botin kept the painting on-board Adix, his 213-foot sailing yacht, as he sailed from Spain to the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. Botin then hired a private jet to take the painting from Corsica to Switzerland where he had intended to sell it.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN agency responsible for regulating shipping, has set the ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions from ships by 50% from 2008 levels by 2050. Around the world, engineers, ship owners and managers, universities, and governments have been working to develop the new technologies to make meeting this target possible.
As of last summer, support for cutting shipboard emissions has come from a very different source — big banks and financial institutions. A group of leading banks, key industry representatives, and experts have developed the Poseidon Principles, an attempt to tie the banks’ shipping portfolios to the IMO emissions targets. The Poseidon Principles are the first global climate alignment agreement between financial institutions and the shipping industry. So far, the signatories to the principles represent a combined bank loan portfolio of approximately $100 billion – roughly 22% of the total value of all shipping asset portfolios.
Today, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the US Navy officially named the newest of the future Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers, not after a president, a senator, an admiral or a historic battlefield. Instead, they named the carrier after Doris “Dorie” Miller, an African-American Navy Messman, who during the attack on Pearl Harbor, helped save the lives of his shipmates and valiantly fought attacking Japanese forces. For his bravery, Miller was awarded the Navy Cross — the first African-American to receive this honor. Almost two years after his valor at Pearl Harbor, Miller was killed when his ship, an escort carrier, was sunk in battle.
Here is wonderful drone footage by Ryan Smith of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy‘s school ship TS Kennedy as it departs for its Sea Term 2020. The ship sails down Buzzard’s Bay bound for Panama where it will transit the Canal. The ship will cross the Equator and make port calls in Balboa, Panama; Golfito, Costa Rica; Willemstad, Curacao; and Tampa, Florida.
The Kennedy was built as a C-4 class breakbulk freighter, the Velma Lykes, at Avondale Industries, New Orleans, LA, for Lykes Brothers Steamship Company in 1966. She has served as Mass. Maritime’s school ship since 2003. Kennedy was deployed to New York Harbor in support of Hurricane Sandy relief efforts in 2012 and Hurricane Maria at Puerto Rico in 2017.
Sea Term 2020 – TS Kennedy Departs!
For more great drone footage by Ryan Smith, click here or here. Also, check out his Youtube and Facebook pages.
Congratulations to Ewan, Jamie, and Lachlan MacLean, three brothers from Edinburgh, Scotland who rowed across the Atlantic in just 35 days. They departed from La Gomera, in the Canary Islands on 12 December and completed the 3,000-mile row to Antigua as part of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge.
In the race, the MacLean brothers set three world records. They broke the previous record time of 41 days for a trio to row across the Atlantic. They also are the first trio of brothers on record to row across any ocean and also the youngest team of three to complete the crossing. Jamie is 26, Ewan is 27, and Lachlan is 21 years old.
Will the Titanic II ever be built? And if so, when will it sail?
Back in 2012, billionaire Australian businessman Clive Palmer announced the construction of a modern “replica” of the doomed passenger liner RMS Titanic which sank after striking an iceberg in 1912. Palmer’s Titanic II was to be built in a Chinese shipyard and go into service in 2016. Since then the project has moved in fits and starts. The project finances fell apart for several years. The ship delivery dates moved first to 2018 and now to 2022. There has been an abundance of announcements, CGI drawings, and videos, while apparently no steel has actually been cut.
On Tuesday around 3:35 PM the Coast Guard in Galveston, TX was notified that a fishing boat, the 82′ long Pappy’s Pride, had collided with the 600-foot chemical tanker Bow Fortune. The fishing boat had capsized and four crew were in the water. One crew member was subsequently rescued, one died and two remain missing. The tanker was reported to be under pilotage at the time of the collision. Heavy fog was also reported to have limited visibility and to have hampered the search for the missing crew.
How the fishing vessel came to collide with the tanker is unclear. Photographs of Pappy’s Pride show radar and multiple radio antennas. Presumably, both vessels also had AIS.
We are having a relatively warm January with significantly fluctuating temperatures. Similar weather conditions 101 years ago, coupled with a shoddily built storage tank, caused the Great Boston Molasses Flood, which inundated Boston’s North End sending a wall of molasses, killing 21 and injuring 150. A repost about the tragedy.
The Purity Distilling Company built a large molasses storage tank on Commercial Street in Boston’s North End to store molasses until it could be distilled into alcohol. In early January 1919, just a few days before the disaster, a ship had discharged a full load of molasses into the tank. When the cargo was discharged, the weather was cold, only around 4 degrees F. Then on January 15th, the temperature rose suddenly to an unseasonably warm 40 degrees.
There are so few well-done documentary series involving ships and the sea that it seems worth pointing out that the excellent Disasters at Sea has been picked up for a second season. The series is produced by Exploration Production Inc. in association with Smithsonian Networks and Discovery Channel (Canada). Season Two was broadcast in Canada last summer and fall and is now being broadcast on the Smithsonian channel in the US. Episodes are also available on Amazon Prime, YouTube, and other streaming services.
This season’s episodes:
Six years ago, we posted about research that documented that when dogs defecate, they usually align their bodies along the magnetic north-south axis, not unlike the needle of a magnetic compass. It turns out that dogs are not unique in being able to sense the earth’s magnetic field and act like bio-compasses. Many animals, including humans, appear to be magnetoreceptive.
Scientists have documented that cows and deer graze and rest aligning themselves with magnetic north, all other factors being equal. (Wind and sun also affect the directions faced by cows, in particular.)
This morning’s CBS Sunday Morning news program had an intriguing featuring the octopus, in particular, and cephalopods, in general. Both unworldly and highly intelligent they are as close to alien life forms as one can find on the planet. CBS’s Chip Reid visits scientists at New England Aquarium in Boston, and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and talks with Sy Montgomery, author of “The Soul of an Octopus,” about these curious creatures. Well worth watching.
One of the better ways to tell if a model works at predicting the future is to run it in reverse to see how well it predicts the past. Climate change models so far have had their limitations. Most current models have significantly underestimated the rate of climate change. But where does one find accurate climate data for the last century or two? For more than a decade climate scientists have been using weather observations from ship’s logs to build the database they need to track climate conditions over time.
Thousands of ships logs with millions of weather observations have been collected and have provided a veritable treasure trove of climate data. One problem, however, is how to convert information recorded in pen and ink on paper in the old logs into a form that can be used for analysis in computer models.
In addition to more than 24 people who have died in the terrible Australian bushfires, an incredible number of animals have also perished. Estimates of wildlife deaths range from millions to a billion animals. More than 25.5 million acres of land — an area the size of South Korea — have been razed by the fires.
Against this horrific backdrop, here is a minor bit of good news. As we posted previously, the Australian Navy landing ship HMAS Choules, supported by the training ship, MV Sycamore, recently evacuated 1,000 tourists and residents stranded by bushfires in Mallacoota, Australia. Along with the evacuees also came 135 dogs, two cats, two birds, and a rabbit.
The crew of the Choules divided off a section of a vehicle deck to provide a sort of dog-dare care for the dogs. Accommodations for the cats and the rabbit were provided separately. For a video of the shipboard kennel click here.
The Winter 2020 edition of Quarterdeck, hosted by McBooks, is out. If you like nautical fiction, the quarterly e-journal edited by George Jepson is a treasure.
The Winter 2020 edition features an interview with Alaric Bond and a review of the Hellfire Corner; the first book in the Coastal Forces series, due out in February. Additionally, Chris Durbin has an article, The First Landing Craft, Purpose-built for British amphibious operations, as well as a feature on his latest novel, Perilous Shore. Antoine Vanner‘s new novel Britannia’s Innocent is also featured. Articles by Kathy Stockwin, Kydd’s Portsmouth, and Kim Reeman, When Heroes Die, are fascinating.
If you are not familiar with Quarterdeck, it is definitely worth checking out.
Good ideas are rarely new. Container ships revolutionized liner shipping in the 1960s and 70s. Nevertheless, the idea of carrying cargo in easily handled standardized containers goes back at least 2,000 years.
I was reminded of this when reading about the recent discovery of a shipwreck found near the fishing port of Fiskardo on the north coast of Kefalonia, Greece, dating between 1 BC and AD 1, according to Greek researchers. The upper portion of the 34-meter Roman ship is gone, but its cargo of an estimated 6,0000 amphorae is in remarkably good shape. The Daily Mail notes that the Fiskardo shipwreck is one of the largest four found in the Mediterranean Sea, and the largest yet found in the eastern Mediterranean.
An amphora is a distinctive type of clay container usually with two handles, a narrow neck, and often a pointed base. It was widely used in early Mediterranean shipping to carry both liquids and dry goods. While they are commonly associated with wine, they were also used to transport grains and other goods that needed protection from the weather. They came in a variety of different sizes ranging from 5′ tall to less than a foot high. Most were around 3′ tall and carried around 100 pounds of cargo. The pointed end made them easy to sit upright in sand or soil and they could either be carried by one or two persons using the handles or be rolled up a ramp to the ship for loading. Continue reading
Shortly after winning the Sydney Hobart Race for the third time, the maxi-yacht Comanche has been sold by its current owners, Jim Cooney and his wife Samantha Grant, to Russian interests. Perhaps, oddly enough, the transaction brought to mind the yacht America of 1851.
International yacht racing has traditionally been a sport for the rich. The cliche that a yacht is a hole in the water into which the owner pours money, is often repeated because it is, more often than not, highly accurate.
A fun video for a Monday. A timelapse video of the 11-hour transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic on the Ocean Princess in just under 7 minutes. Shot by Steve Noble on February 28th, 2016.