A short video introduction by Antione Vanner to his latest historical naval adventure novel, Britannia’s Mission, set in 1883. Vanner’s “Dawlish Chronicles” series of naval adventures are set in the late Victorian era when technological progress was more rapid than at any previous time in history.
Introducing “Britannia’s Mission” – the Seventh “Dawlish Chronicles Novel”
Regardless of what one may think of the political career of the late President George H.W. Bush , who died recently at the age of 94, it seems worthwhile to remember his service as one of the youngest pilots in the US Navy during World War II, service for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism under fire.
When he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor, George H.W. Bush, a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, decided that he wanted to be a Navy pilot. Immediately after graduation, on his 18th birthday, George Bush enlisted in the Navy and began preflight training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After completing the 10-month course, he was commissioned as an ensign in the US Naval Reserve on 9 June 1943, several days before his 19th birthday, making him one of the youngest naval aviators.
Vice Adm. Scott Stearney, commander of US Naval Forces Central Command and of the US Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet, was found dead on Saturday in his residence in Bahrain. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and the Bahraini Ministry of Interior are investigating Stearney’s death, the Navy said, but foul play is not suspected. CBS News reports that Defense officials are calling the death an “apparent suicide.”
Admiral Stearney took charge in May of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, as well as a broader naval coalition there that includes more than 20,000 United States and allied maritime forces.
The Trump administration has approved seismic testing related to oil and gas exploration off the US Atlantic coast. The testing could harm tens of thousands of dolphins, whales and other marine animals. The testing uses blasts from high-powered airguns to map the ocean floor to estimate the whereabouts of oil and gas.
The decision is likely to further antagonize governors in states along the Eastern Seaboard who strongly oppose the administration’s proposal to expand federal oil and gas leases to the Atlantic. Every state executive on the coast below Maine opposed the plan. Federal leases could lead to exploratory drilling for the first time in more than a half-century.
As we creep toward winter and the weather gets cold and nasty, it feels like a good time to think of boats in warmer waters. One such boat is likely to be Jimmy Buffett’s new Drifter, a Surfari design by Ted Fontaine and built by Pacific Seacraft in North Carolina.
The boat is definitely distinctive with a broad stern, (or a fat ass depending on one’s sense of aesthetics,) a wide-open cockpit, and salon which, as they are on the same level, are effectively one open space. Twin rudders, twin engines, a hydraulic lifting keel, a modernist pilothouse, and carbon fiber just about everything makes the boat a love it or hate it proposition. Or, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if this is the sort of boat that you like, you will like this boat.
Earlier this month, Canada apologized for turning away the MS St. Louis filled with Jewish German refugees fleeing the Nazis in 1939. Canada was not alone in turning away the refugees. The United States and Cuba also refused the refugees access.
With immigration and refugee policy at the center of significant policy disagreement, it seems worthwhile to remember the ill-fated voyage of the German ocean liner St. Louis in 1939. The ship carried 908 Jewish refugees who were fleeing from Nazi Germany. The ship and its passengers were denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada. Finally, the ship turned around and returned to Europe. Despite the US government’s refusal to accept the refugees, private Jewish aid groups in the United States did manage to place most of the refugees in Belgium, France and Holland, to avoid returning them to Nazi Germany. Tragically, many were later captured when the Nazis invaded. Two-hundred-and-fifty-four of the refugees are believed to have died in the German death camps. The voyage has been the subject of at least one book and two movies. The movie, Voyage of the Damned, in 1974 was based on the book of the same name by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts. A second movie, The Voyage of the St. Louis, was released in 1995. Here is an A&E documentary from 1998, narrated by Patrick Tull.
Yesterday, the House of Representatives, in a provision of a U.S. Coast Guard reauthorization bill, voted to grant a waiver exempting the riverboat Delta Queen from certain fire safety regulations. The bill, which now only requires the president’s signature to take effect, may potentially allow the historic riverboat to return to service.
The Delta Queen is a passenger riverboat delivered in 1927. Its hull is steel, while its deck and deckhouse are of wood supported by steel framing. The wooden deckhouse does not meet the structural fire protection requirements of the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) regulations, as interpreted by the US Coast Guard in the Safety at Sea Act of 1966 (P.L. 89-777). From 1966 through 2007, the Delta Queen operated with a series of legislative waivers. The last waiver ran out in 2008 and the riverboat has been laid up ever since. Assuming that the new exemption is finalized, the riverboat may be able to reenter overnight passenger service.
Recently retired Rear Adm. Mark C. Montgomery, ex-U.S. Pacific Command Director of Operations, had been nominated by the current administration to be an assistant administrator with the U.S. Agency for International Development. His confirmation appeared to be assured after Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings last September. Then in mid-November, the White House notified the Senate that it had withdrawn Montgomery’s nomination. No explanation was given publicly. What happened? The answer is “Fat Leonard.”
On Sunday, two Ukrainian naval gunboats and a tug departed from the Black Sea port of Odessa, bound to Mariupol in the Sea of Azov. As they approached the Kerch Strait, connecting the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, they were intercepted by Russian border patrol vessels. One Russian vessel apparently rammed the tug and others later opened fire on the two gunboats. The Russians subsequently seized the three Ukranian vessels. Twenty-four Ukrainians were taken prisoner. Six Ukrainian sailors were reported to be injured. The Russians also blocked the Kerch Strait by anchoring a tanker across the channel. On Monday, the Russians reopened the strait.
This is a bizarre story which we have been following for, literally, years. It looked for an instant like it might be resolved and then things fells apart once again. Tommy Thompson — engineer, treasure hunter, alleged swindler, and the current occupant of a federal prison — had made a deal to turn over 500 missing gold coins from the wreck of the SS Central America, which sank in 1857 off the South Carolina coast. Thompson has been in held in prison on charges of contempt, pending the return of the missing coins, since he was apprehended as a fugitive in 2015.
Last week, the deal fell through when Thompson said he did not know how to obtain the coins. He alleges that his then-girlfriend gave the coins to a stranger in the lobby of a self-storage business in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2010. Thompson testified that he couldn’t recall the details of the exchange, other than making plans on the phone. He said that the stranger presumably deposited the coins in Belize, where Thompson had set up a trust. He said that the trust, which he believes is holding the coins, has not responded to his communications.
The U.S. Navy’s new supercarrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford has had more than its share of problems. The ship has a reported 23 new or modified technologies, a number of which have been problematic, to be kind. They are still working the bugs out of the electromagnetic catapults. The ammunition elevators are not working properly. The propulsion plant has issues. And the list goes on.
One of the complaints has been about the urinals. It is not that they do not work. Rather, there aren’t any. The Navy says that this was intentional. As they say in the software business, this is a feature, not a bug. The accommodation blocks have been redesigned to more easily suit both male and female crews. Rather than designate male and female accommodation spaces, with and without urinals, the Navy decided to provide only water closets, making the toilets gender-neutral.
Andrew Fitzgerald, the last of the four-man crew of the Coast Guard Motor Lifeboat CG-36500, which rescued the crew of the SS Pendleton, has died at the age of 87.
On February 18, 1952, the 36′ motor lifeboat set out from Station Chatham, Massachusetts, to attempt to rescue the crew of the T2 tanker SS Pendleton, which had broken in half in a winter Nor’easter off the New England coast. In the volunteer crew, Andrew Fitzgerald served as the engineman, while Coxswain Bernie Webber was in command, with Richard Livesey, and Ervin Maske serving as seamen.
The lifeboat designed to have a capacity for 12 including the crew, nevertheless, they succeed in rescuing 32 of the 33 survivors in the stern of the T2 tanker a the height of a North Atlantic winter storm. Despite high winds and monstrous seas, the overloaded motor lifeboat made it back to Chatham. Webber, Fitzgerald, Livesey, and Maske were all awarded the Gold Lifesaving Medal for their heroic actions. The rescue of the survivors is often said to be the greatest small-boat rescue in the history of the Coast Guard.
Happy Thanksgiving! Today has been celebrated as a day of Thanksgiving in the United States on the third Thursday of November since 1863. The holiday is notionally based on a harvest feast in 1621 between Native Americans and Puritans who had arrived on the ship Mayflower. In honor of the day, here is a short video of the replica Mayflower II arriving in New York in 1957. The Mayflower II is currently undergoing a multi-year restoration in the Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard at the Mystic Seaport Museum.
Photo: Oscar Garcia-Pineda
Fourteen years ago, Hurricane Ivan destroyed an oil-production platform owned by Taylor Energy in the Gulf of Mexico. The wells associated with the platform have been leaking ever since and may soon become the largest recorded offshore spill. Federal officials estimate that the spill, if not addressed, could continue through the end of this century. Now, the Washington Post is reporting that the US Coast Guard has ordered Taylor Energy Company to contain and clean up the spill, or face fines of $40,000 per day.
Up to 700 barrels of oil per day have leaked from Taylor Energy’s former site 12 miles off the coast of Louisiana since the platform was destroyed during Hurricane Ivan in 2004, according to an analysis issued by the Justice Department. Based on reports from contractors hired by Taylor Energy, the government had previously estimated that the spill amounted to zero to 55 barrels per day. The spill, so far, is estimated to range between 1.5 million barrels and up to 3.5 million barrels. That would rival the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest offshore spill in the nation’s history, which spilled 4 million barrels of oil into gulf waters.
Of the more than 2,700 Liberty ships built during World War II, only two are still operational in the United States. One, the John W. Brown, now docked in Baltimore, may become homeless when its five-year agreement for free berthing at Rukert Terminals’ Pier C in Canton, Maryland expires at the end of next September.
The Baltimore Sun quotes, Richard Bauman, 65, a retired ship pilot for the state of Maryland who serves as captain and master of the John W. Brown, saying “We’ve spent a good bit of time looking for a new, permanent home, but we haven’t really had a whole lot of luck. They’re not going to throw us out, but they run a business, and they would like to have us find a place where we can stay permanently.”
As we posted yesterday, over last weekend, the Maritime Museum of San Diego celebrated the 155th birthday of the Star of India by taking her for a sail. Here is nicely done, roughly ten-minute, video by Barrett Canfield of Sunday’s sail on the grand old ship. The museum’s other ships Californian, San Salvador, and America can be seen sailing along with with the Star of India.
Photo: Ted Walton/Maritime Museum of San Diego
This weekend, the Maritime Museum of San Diego is celebrating the 155th birthday of the Star of India by taking her for a sail. The museums other ships Californian, San Salvador, and America are sailing along with with the Star of India.
It has been five years since the grand old iron ship, built in 1863 as the Euterpe, was last fully underway under sail. The Star of India is the oldest ship still sailing regularly and also the oldest iron-hulled merchant ship still floating. The ship circumnavigated the globe 21 times.
One year after the submarine ARA San Juan disappeared on a routine mission, with 44 aboard, the wreckage of the missing submarine has been located in 2,600 feet of water in the Atlantic. The submarine was located by Ocean Infinity, a US company.
Contact was lost with the submarine on November 15, 2017. The submarine had reported an electrical short following a leak in the vessel’s snorkel. Eight days later, the the Vienna-based Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organisation said that it had detected a possible explosion a few hours after the sub’s last contact.
Thanks to David Rye for contributing to this post.
We recently posted about Ross Edgley, who became the first person to swim around Great Britain. He is not, however, the only long-distance swimmer to have been on an epic voyage. Last June, we posted about Ben Lecomte who began an attempt to swim across the Pacific Ocean. The expedition was initially delayed by typhoons and had to turn back in July, taking a 20-day break before restarting. Swimming from Japan toward the United States, Lecomte has swum more than 1,200 nautical miles so far, and is roughly a third of the way across the mighty ocean.
Now, more than 150 days into the expedition, Lecomte has been swimming up to eight hours a day, weather permitting. After each day’s swim, Lecomte eats and sleeps aboard the support boat, a 20-meter sailboat, called Seeker. Lecomte is supported by a crew of eight and is performing a “staged swim” (resuming the swim in the exact location in which he left the water) using a GPS tracking device, enabling him to accurately track the number of miles he completes thus enabling him to reach a new world record in open water swimming.
For several years, autumn and winter winds have carried a ghost fleet of derelict boats to the coast of northern Japan. Many of the boats were empty, although some carried corpses. This year has set a new record — 89 derelict vessels so far this year, as compared to 59 in 2017. In the previous five years, an average of 44 boats drifted ashore each year. This year 12 corpses have been found on five of the derelicts. In 2015, 25 bodies were found on the drifting boats.
The boats appear to originate from the Korean peninsula, carried across the Sea of Japan on seasonal winds. Some of the boats are thought to have contained refugees seeking to escape from oppression in North Korea. In 2017, eleven North Korean survivors were found on drifting boats, along with fifteen dead.
It is also considered likely that some of the vessels are fishing boats. North Korean fishermen are under intense state pressure to fulfill fishing quotas for the Kim Jong Un regime and are reported to soften sail without adequate fuel or supplies.