Guest Post by Joan Druett — Tim Severin, Seaman, Adventurer, Author

Posted on by January 17, 2021

Originally posted in award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett’s World of the Written Word. Reposted with permission.

I was saddened to learn that Tim Severin, a truly remarkable man who was a living inspiration, passed away last month.

The Irish Times has a feature on his life, focused (of course) on his first big hit, The Brendan Voyage. 

Tim was born in Assam, India, the son of an English tea planter — that planter being an employee, not the owner of the plantation, as his son was always anxious to point out.  As was usual in those days, Tim was sent to boarding school in England at the age of seven.  One cannot help but wonder how his mother felt to wave goodbye to such a small boy, but it is easy to imagine how tough it must have been for the boy himself, English boarding schools being notorious.  Was he bullied?  Probably.  There would have been an emphasis on toughness and survival instincts, which would have served him very well in the strange adventures ahead.

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Saildrone Launches 72′ Surveyor for High-Resolution Ocean Seabed Mapping

Posted on by January 16, 2021

Saildrone‘s new 72’ long Surveyor is described as the world’s most advanced uncrewed surface vehicle (USV), equipped for high-resolution mapping of the ocean seafloor.

The Saildrone Surveyor is a step up from the 22′ long Saildrone Explorer, yet both combine wind and solar power to perform autonomous long-range data collection in the harshest of ocean environments. The Saildrone wing technology enables a mission duration of up to 12 months, without the need to return to land for maintenance or refueling. The 22′ Saildrone Explorer travels at an average speed of two to three knots and can reach top speeds above eight knots; the 72′ Saildrone Surveyor travels at ten knots.

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Flight 1549, NY Harbor Ferries, & the Two “Miracles on the Hudson”

Posted on by January 15, 2021

An updated repost, a look back at the twin miracles on the Hudson from twelve years ago today. On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency water landing in the Hudson River. If the plane’s pilots, Captain Chesley “Sulley” Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles had not glided the plane in at exactly the right angle and airspeed, it is likely that the plane would have broken apart and that all the 155 passengers and crew aboard could have died.

The landing is often called the “Miracle on the Hudson.” There was, however, a second miracle on the Hudson that day. Remarkably, New York harbor commuter ferries began arriving at the flooding plane less than four minutes after the crash.  Had it not been for the ferries’ rapid rescue of the passengers from the icy waters, the “miracle” might have ended as a tragedy.

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ShantyTok : The Wellerman and the Sea Shanty Boom on TikTok

Posted on by January 19, 2021

Of all the strangeness that has already transpired in 2021, the most pleasant and least expected has been the explosion of sea shanties on TikTok. If you are not familiar with TikTok, it is a social networking platform that is used to make and share short-form videos. Recently, it has been awash in sea shanties. 

Why have sea shanties become so popular on TikTok? It seems to have all begun with Scottish postman and aspiring musician, Nathan Evanss. (Evans is his last name, but he uses the name  Evanss online.)  During the pandemic, the 26-year-old began posting songs to TikTok, mostly covers of Scottish folk tunes. He was modestly popular attracting around 10,000 views per song. One viewer requested a sea shanty “Leave Her Johnny, Leave Her” which remarkably got over a million views. Evanss decided that sea shanties were worth looking into.

His next shanty, “The Scotsman” attracted 2.8 million viewers. Then things went a bit crazy when he posted “The Wellerman” in December that has now been watched 4.3m times. 

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CNO on Navy Shipbuilding Mistakes : May Not Be Able To Recover In This Century

Posted on by January 13, 2021

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday aboard the littoral combat ship USS Detroit

The US Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday was blunt when he was recently quoted saying, “I don’t mean to be dramatic, but I feel like if the Navy loses its head, if we go off course and we take our eyes off those things we need to focus on, I think we may not be able to recover in this century.”

Paul McCleary writing in Breaking Defense observes that for months, Gilday has been pointing to the extremely expensive failures of the Littoral Combat Ship, Ford-class carrier, and Zumwalt destroyer — all of which are years behind schedule and billions over budget — as a cautionary tale for what is to be avoided in building new ships.

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The Berthing Barge and the Lightning Carriers

Posted on by January 12, 2021

Depending on which news report you listen to, the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford either can’t reliably land planes and is continuing in its dubious status as a “$13 billion berthing barge,” or, more optimistically, it may be ready to deploy sooner than expected. Which is correct? Only time will tell. It is possible that both are right. 

Not only is the Ford the world’s largest aircraft carrier, and the largest warship ever constructed in terms of displacement, she is also the most expensive and one of the most delayed. Commissioned in 2017, her first deployment is expected to be sometime in 2022.

The Navy is also taking a very different tack regarding airpower.  They are outfitting certain amphibious assault ships as “Lightning Carriers,” a sort of hybrid aircraft carrier flying the Marine Corp’s F-35B Lightning II short take-off and vertical landing stealth strike-fighter planes. The Lightning fighters can be carried on the new America-class amphibious assault ships or the older Wasp-class ships.

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America’s Cup: Team New Zealand AC75 Te Rehutai Capsizes at 35 knots

Posted on by January 11, 2021

A video clip for a Monday.  During a practice match against British challenger INEOS Team UK, Peter Burling, Team New Zealand skipper, lost control of the AC75 Te Rehutai during a gybe. While sailing at about 35 knots, the boat took a nose-dive and rolled on its beam ends. Remarkably, there were no reported injuries or significant damage to the boat.

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GE’s Mega Offshore Wind Turbine, When Bigger May Be Better

Posted on by January 10, 2021

Sometimes size matters. We have recently seen ever-larger container ships delivered from Asian shipyards. This year, the HMM Algeciras claimed the title of the world’s largest container ship with a carrying capacity of 24,000 TEUs. It is one of twelve eco-friendly container vessels delivered or under construction at Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering in Ulsan, Korea.

Bigger is not always better, of course. The Ultra Large Crude Carrier (ULCC) tanker Seawise Giant, later Knock Nevis, at 565,000 DWT was by many standards just too large. It was too large, for example, to transit the English Channel at a full load. After a long and generally successful career, it was scrapped in 2009 and no tanker has been built as large since.

These thoughts on size were triggered by a new and larger offshore wind turbine design developed by GE. The Haliade-X offshore turbine features a 14 MW, 13 MW, or 12 MW capacity, 220-meter rotor, a 107-meter blade. By comparison, in recent years the average offshore wind turbine capacity has been around 3.6 MW. Relatively newer turbine designs installed off Block Island and off Virginia have used 6 MW turbines, less than half the capacity of the Haliade-X.

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British Shipbuilding 1940s — Steel Goes to Sea

Posted on by January 9, 2021

Here is a fascinating short video of British riveted steel shipbuilding in the 1940s. The shipyard in the film is the Burntisland Shipbuilding Company in Fife. The ship being built is thought to be either the MV Dalhousie or the SS Ger-y-Bryn. Both ships were sunk by German vessels by April 1943. Thanks to W. H. Bunting for pointing out the video.

Shipbuilding – 1940’s British Council Film Collection – CharlieDeanArchives

Remembering the USS Narwhal, Once the Navy’s Stealthiest Submarine

Posted on by January 8, 2021

Last October, the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard completed the year-long dismantling of the US Navy nuclear-powered attack submarine USS Narwhal (SSN-671). Commissioned in 1969, the submarine was a one-of-a-kind, an experimental design that would become one of the most successful boats of her era. She was the quietest attack submarine in the U.S. fleet in the 1970s and was routinely deployed to watch Soviet submarines in the Atlantic and around Soviet-supported satellite states in the Mediterranean Sea.

Sound is the enemy of a stealthy submarine. The technologies developed for the Narwhal have helped make US submarines among the quietest in the world’s navies. What made the Narwhal so quiet?

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Covid-19 Vaccines, Horseshoe Crab Blood, and Big Pharma Vampires

Posted on by January 9, 2021

As the race is on to distribute Covid-19 vaccines around the globe, horseshoe crabs, or more specifically, horseshoe crab blood, is playing a major role in ensuring that the vaccines are safe to be injected into peoples’ arms. In fact, horseshoe crab blood plays an important role in the safety of all vaccines, but the surge in demand for Covid-19 vaccines is raising new concerns about potential overharvesting.  Here is a repost updated for the pandemic from about a year and a half ago.

Horseshoe crabs are an ancient variety of arthropods, which are not actually crabs. Having remained largely unchanged in about 450 million years, the horseshoe crab is considered by many to be a living fossil. One of the reasons that horseshoe crabs have survived so long is that they have a highly robust immune system. Indeed, the horseshoe crab’s bright blue blood has remarkable antibacterial properties. 

The good news for humans, and the bad news for horseshoe crabs, is that amebocytes in the horseshoe crab blood are highly sensitive to tiny amounts of bacteria and will coagulate around as little as one part in a trillion of bacterial contamination. Limulus Amebocyte Lysate, or LAL, a compound processed from horseshoe crab blood is used to test for contamination of anything that might go inside the human body: every shot, every IV drip, and every implanted medical device.

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Golden Ray Salvage Update: Stern Cut Completed, Block Hauled Away

Posted on by January 6, 2021

The salvage of the stranded car carrier Golden Ray is accelerating. Salvors on the heavy-lift barge VB-10,000 are using a heavy chain to cut the ship into sections to be carried away by barge. The recently completed the second cut, separating the ship’s stern, which has been lifted onto Barge 455-8 to be hauled away to a recycling facility in Louisiana to be scrapped. On-water response teams recovered oil released from the wreck during lifting operations.

The first cut, which separated the bow of the ship, took approximately three weeks to complete while the second cut took only eight days. There is some concern that now that the bow and stern sections of the ship have been removed, that managing oil and debris from the ship will become more challenging. 

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The Unsinkable Molly Brown and the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse

Posted on by January 5, 2021

Thanks to Captain Richard Bailey for mentioning the time ball on the Titanic Memorial in the Financial District of downtown New York City. We neglected to mention it in our post “Watching the Ball Drop — the Nautical Origins of a New Year’s Tradition.”

The memorial, a 60-foot tall lighthouse with a time ball on a staff rising above it, feels just slightly of place, as it is largely surrounded by buildings and several blocks from the East River, at the entrance of the South Street Seaport. It has not always been so landlocked, however. There is also a  fascinating story behind the memorial.

In 1912, Denver socialite and philanthropist Margaret Brown rushed home from a trip to France on learning that her eldest grandchild was seriously ill. She immediately booked passage on the first available liner leaving for New York, the RMS Titanic.

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Royal Navy Bomb Disposal Expert Lt Cmdr Sean “Central” Heaton Awarded MBE

Posted on by January 4, 2021

In recognition of his accomplishments and service, Lt Cmdr Sean “Central” Heaton has been made an MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), in the New Year Honours list.

World War II had been over for more than 70 years, when in 2018, an unexploded 500-pound Luftwaffe bomb was found on the bottom of London’s King George V Docks – next to London City Airport. The discovery led to the cancellation of all flights to and from the airport, evacuation of more than 100 homes, and closure of the Channel Tunnel and other public services.

The bomb was safely disarmed by a team of Royal Navy experts led by Lt Cmdr Heaton, working side by side with civilian authorities and agencies over a three-day operation.

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Boarding a Fast Attack Nuclear Sub in the Arctic During ICEX 2020

Posted on by January 3, 2021

A video for a Sunday afternoon. In March, the US Navy officially commenced Ice Exercise (ICEX) 2020 in the Arctic Ocean with the construction of a temporary ice camp, Camp Seadragon, and the arrival of two US Navy fast-attack submarines. 

Destin Sandlin from the Smarter Every Day Youtube vlog was allowed to go aboard the USS Toledo during ICEX. The video below captures what it is like to board a US Navy fast-attack submarine in the Arctic.

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