A 150′ foot long fishing trawler carried away last March by the tsunami off the east coast of Japan has been spotted drifting in the Pacific Ocean, 120 miles off Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada. About 5 million tons of debris … Continue reading
Category Archives: Current
The waters around Tampa Bay may appear to step back in time tomorrow as the World War II Victory ship SS American Victory leaves the dock for her first cruise in nearly three years. The critically acclaimed “Re-Live History Cruise” will feature reenactors, … Continue reading
Divers have found five more bodies in the wreckage of the Costa Concordia which ran aground and sank on January 13, 2012 off the island of Giglio, Italy. The presumed death toll remains at 32, with only two of the roughly 4,200 passengers and … Continue reading
If HMS Hermione, commissioned in 1783, became a symbol of Royal Navy cruelty and bloody mutiny, the French light frigate l’ Hermione, commissioned in 1779, would become a symbol of American independence. On March 21, 1780, the 23 year old Gilbert du … Continue reading
Thanks to Dexter Donham for pointing out this trailer for Vanishing Sail, a documentary still under production and expected to be out in 2013. Filmed in the Grenadines, Vanishing Sail looks at the sailing vessels that once were both the lifeblood of Caribbean commerce. From … Continue reading
The twenty eight year old bulk carrier Oriental Nicety was recently sold for scrap for $16 million. The ship was originally a tanker and has four owners and as many names. She is best known as the Exxon Valdez, the single hull … Continue reading
Earlier this month, 90 year old Winnie Breegle spoke at the 2012 Women’s History Month celebration at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, FL. She had quite a story to tell. Not only was she a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency … Continue reading
We posted previously about “Pirates and Privateers,” a documentary on CBC’s Land and Sea. The 20 minute documentary is now available on-line. It presents a distinctive view of piracy and privateering from the perspective of the Canadian Maritimes, not often seen by those of us … Continue reading
The luxury cruise ship Silver Shadow may have lived up to its name on Friday morning when it collided with a container ship in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. There were no reported injuries on the cruise ship, though passengers reported being knocked off their … Continue reading
James Cameron wants to dive to deepest part of the ocean – the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, 35,800 feet (5.8 nautical miles) below the surface. To do so, he plans on using a single person submersible designed to dive … Continue reading
In 1904 and 1905, archaeologists Haakon Shetelig and Gabriel Gustafson excavated a burial mound at the Oseberg farm near Tønsberg in Vestfold county, Norway that contained a well-preserved Viking ship. The Osberg ship was reconstructed and has became Norway’s largest tourist … Continue reading
Coelacanths apparently evolved in their current form around 400 million years ago. They were thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago, during the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction – that is, until 1938 when a fisherman in South Africa pulled one up … Continue reading
Way back in 1984, I worked for Malcom McLean’s United States Lines, when the 4,400 TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) containership, the American New York, was delivered. She was this first of McLean’s fleet of “Jumbo Econships.” In those days, he … Continue reading
In November, we posted about how a drought on the Rhine River was exposing unexploded World War II munitions, and then in December about the evacuation of half of the German city of Koblenz, when several large bombs were found buried in … Continue reading
The US Navy wants to install a $100 million offshore training range, which would include an undersea array of cables and sensors for training warships, submarines and aircraft about 50 miles off the Atlantic coast of southern Georgia and northern Florida. Environmentalists … Continue reading
Norwegian Jarle Andhøy, 34, who calls himself a “Wild Viking,” is in trouble again. Andhøy and two others are sailing the 54-foot yacht, Nilaya, off Antarctica. They have reported that the yacht has a broken boom and that they are heading for an unspecified Argentine … Continue reading
At first this sounded like a joke. Pirates like to tweet, have blogs and are on Facebook. Really? According to security expert, Jessica Lincoln, director of intelligence at Rubicon Resolution, “Somalia is a very sophisticated economy, it has one of the best mobile phone communication systems … Continue reading
This week we posted that the Pacific nation of Kiribati is considering purchasing land on Fiji as a possible site to relocate as rising waters threaten to submerge their home islands. As distant and exotic as Kiribati’s problem may sound an article in the … Continue reading
The ship’s bell on the Costa Concordia has gone missing. According to Reuters, “underwater thieves have evaded an array of laser systems that measure millimetric shifts in the Costa Concordia shipwreck and 24-hour surveillance by the Italian coast guard and … Continue reading
Retirement has not been easy for the Battleship New Jersey. After serving with distinction for 45 years in World War II, the Korean Conflict and the War in Vietnam, the highly decorated battleship became a museum ship in Camden, New Jersey in … Continue reading