We all know Murphy’s Law — “That which can go wrong, will go wrong and at the worst possible time.” Anyone who has spent time around boats or ships also knows that Murphy was undoubtedly a sailor. This came to mind last weekend, when I participated in “Seamanship Saturday” at the New York Yacht Club’s Harbour Court in Newport, RI. The program itself went smoothly, thanks to the hard work of the NYYC Seamanship Committee. The program topics, however, focused on what happens when things do not go smoothly on boats and to their crews when sailing offshore.
In the morning, I gave a presentation on damage control, which is to say, how to respond when your boat is on-fire, broken, or sinking. The purpose of my talk was to address how to bring the boat home safely after suffering the most common casualties — from electrical and engine fires; a hull breach; steering loss; a collision at sea with other vessels or floating shipping containers; whale strikes; and down-flooding after a knock-down. I discussed what needed to be done, at least, to buy time to allow the captain and crew to make take-home repairs. The approach was upbeat yet disaster was the backdrop.
Happy 239th birthday to the 
You really can’t make this stuff up. Extreme runner, Reza Baluchi, attempted to run from Florida to Bermuda, a distance of roughly 1,000 miles, in an inflatable bubble with a metal frame, looking something like a giant hamster wheel. It didn’t go well. A few days into the attempt, Baluchi activated a personal locator beacon after becoming disoriented and exhausted. The Coast Guard responded. A chopper lowered a rescue swimmer into the water and found Baluchi lying down inside his bubble. The rescue is estimated to have cost taxpayers roughly $144,000.
The story is regrettably familiar. A historic vessel, unable to find a suitable berth, is forced to move elsewhere. Yesterday, Chip Reynolds, Director of the 
Just over 60 yeas ago, on September 30, 1954, 
The hospital ship Jubilee Hope was recently 
Last May 
A waka, a 600 year voyaging canoe, was recently found on the New Zealand’s South Island’s West Coast. The results of a study by University of Auckland researchers appeared recently in the 
In September, we posted about the discovery of one of two missing ships from the 
Just over a year ago, I was surprised — shocked might be a better word — to hear of a play about a shipyard. 
In 2011, we 
The oceans could indeed be older than the sun. A team of scientists from the University of Michigan now believe that up to half the water on our planet is older than the sun. Earlier theories had assumed that interstellar ice particles evaporated with the formation of Earth and reformed later to create the oceans. Now, these scientists have calculated that if the old theory was valid, that the amount of deuterium found in terrestrial water would be far lower than it is. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen that has an extra neutron attached. The only explanation they have found for the higher levels of deuterium observed is if more of the interstellar ice particles helped form the world’s oceans directly. They calculate that as much as 50% of the earth’s water might come from these ice particles, which have higher levels of deuterium. This might suggest that water on distant planets is far more common than previously thought.
The schooner yacht 
The main mast on the 
Two years ago