Cruise Ships : Out With the Old, Will There Be Employment For the New?

Posted on by January 2, 2021

Sovereign and the Monarch in Turkish scrapyard

In early February, outbreaks of the coronavirus began to occur on cruise ships. On one quarantined ship, the Diamond Princess, one infection spread to over 700 cases and seven deaths from COVID-19. In March of 2020, the cruise industry was effectively shut down by a Center for Disease Control (CDC) “No Sail Order.” Recent attempts to restart even limited cruising have not been notably successful.

Not surprisingly, several cruise lines have ceased operations and at least 11 cruise ships have been sent to the scrapyards. Nevertheless, 16 new cruise ships were delivered in 2020, most of which sailed directly to layup. Now in 2021, an additional 30 cruise ships are scheduled to be delivered from shipyards around the world. Incredibly, another 31 ships are scheduled for delivery in 2022.

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New Year’s Repost: Watching the Ball Drop — the Nautical Origins of a New Year’s Tradition

Posted on by January 1, 2021

The USNO Millennium Time Ball

Last night in New York City, people watched, primarily on-line or on television, as a jeweled ball dropped in Times Square at exactly midnight to mark the arrival of the New Year, 2021. In past years, the crowd in Times Square numbered up to a million people. This year, as a result of the pandemic, there were literally only a few dozen people in attendance.

Nevertheless, the ball still dropped at midnight. The six-ton Waterford crystal ball covered in 32,276 LED lights was not actually “dropped” but lowered from a flag pole on the roof of One Times Square. In New York City, the tradition dates back to 1907. But where did the tradition of dropping a ball to mark the time originate?  The practice dates back to 1829 and was related to helping sailors calculate their position at sea. Here is an updated repost.

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The North Pole — Where Time & Direction Have No Meaning

Posted on by December 31, 2020

A few years ago, we posted about the RMS Warrimoo, which is remembered, as the story goes, for crossing the intersection of the international dateline and the equator at precisely the turn of the century from 1899 to 1900. In doing so, the ship was said to be in two different days, two different months, two different seasons, two different years, and also in two different centuries-all at the same time. There may even be some truth to the sea story. Click here to read more.

While the story of the RMS Warrimoo was a once in a century event,  Katie Weeman, writing in the Scientific American Observations blog, discusses a well-known spot in the ocean where time itself becomes almost meaningless. Likewise, even the concept of direction gets fuzzy, at best. She is referring, of course, to the North Pole.

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SOAR Oyster Buyback Reseeding Reefs

Posted on by December 30, 2020

The pandemic has been brutal to the restaurant industry. Likewise, the small-scale oyster growers of Barnegat and Delaware bays have been extremely hard hit as restaurants cut back on their orders or shut down altogether. 

One bit of good news, however, is a new partnership formed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and The Nature Conservancy, intended to support the oyster industry while also helping to restore damaged and dying reefs in coastal waters.

NJ Spotlight News reports that the initiative, called Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration (SOAR), has designated $2 million to buy back some 5 million oysters from over 100 oyster farmers in New England, the mid-Atlantic, and Washington state. Once the bivalves are purchased, they are transported back to the water to be “replanted” on existing oyster reefs in need of restoration.

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New Blue Whale Population in Indian Ocean Identified by Unique Song

Posted on by December 29, 2020

A new blue whale population has been discovered in the Arabian Sea and Western Indian Ocean according to a study recently published in the journal Endangered Species Research. The conclusion is based not on sightings or DNA samples, but rather on recordings of the unique whale songs that distinguish this whale population from other blue whales in the region.

At up to 100 feet long and weighing up to 170 tonnes, blue whales are the largest creatures ever to exist on the earth. Nevertheless, they are often easier to hear than to see.

The unusual song was picked up at three different underwater locations separated by 3,500 kilometers (2,175 miles) of ocean. First recorded in 2017 off the coast of Madagascar, these unique calls were later identified in the western Arabian Sea, off the coast of Oman, and also in the Chagos Archipelago in the central Indian Ocean.

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New Zealand’s Astrolabe Reef Reclaiming the Rena — 2020 Shipwreck Survey

Posted on by December 28, 2020

Almost a decade ago, the container ship MV Rena ran hard aground on Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga on New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. The ship, carrying 2,100 containers and 1,700 tonnes of heavy fuel, would break up resulting in New Zealand’s worst marine ecological disaster. It resulted in a $700 million salvage operation to remove the wreckage, along with scattered debris on the reef.

Tauranga diver and ecologist Phil Ross has been monitoring the wreckage of the Rena since 2012, making dives at least yearly to monitor how the reef is recovering from the damage done by the grounding,

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Update: Golden Ray Salvage, Cutting Begins on Stern Section

Posted on by December 27, 2020

Salvors on the heavy-lift barge VB-10,000 have begun making the second cut through the hull of the stranded car carrier Golden Ray which rolled over in shallow water shortly after departing the Port of Brunswick, Georgia on St. Simons Sound in September 2019.

The 656-foot-long ship is now 114 feet shorter after the VB 10,000 cut off the vessel’s bow section on Nov. 28. The first cut that was originally expected to take a few days, took three weeks after being delayed by weather, the pandemic, and a broken link in the cutting chain.

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Underwater Christmas Trees

Posted on by December 6, 2024

A Christmas repost from a few years ago. Spirobranchus giganteus are beautiful underwater creatures, only about 1.5 inches tall, which look like tiny decorated Christmas trees. They are almost too attractive to be described as what they are, tube-building polychaete worms. They are, however, often referred to as Christmas tree worms. Each worm has two brightly colored crowns that protrude from its tube-like body. The crowns look like miniature fir trees often in a wide range of brilliant colors. The worms live in tropical waters around the world. Here is a video of spirobranchus giganteus, Christmas tree worms, from Taiwan.

Spirobranchus giganteus in Green Island, TAIWAN

Sting — Christmas At Sea (Live from Durham Cathedral)

Posted on by December 25, 2022

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.

Sting – Christmas At Sea (Live from Durham Cathedral)


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Chicago’s Christmas Tree Ship in the Year of the Pandemic

Posted on by December 24, 2020

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.

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Update: Massive Iceberg Threatening South Georgia Island Now Breaking Up

Posted on by December 23, 2020

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.

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The Long Goodbye of the HMS Hermes/INS Viraat

Posted on by December 22, 2020

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.

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Halcyon Days in a Pandemic Year

Posted on by December 21, 2020

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.

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WWI Anti-Submarine Warfare with Seagulls, Sacks and Hammers

Posted on by December 20, 2020

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.

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The Great Solstice Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn

Posted on by December 19, 2020

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. 

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