A ship partialy in a bottle, Click for larger image
After a multi-year, £50 million restoration, interrupted by a near catastrophic fire, the composite clipper ship, Cutty Sark, reopened last April. Not everyone was impressed. Andrew Gilligan, the Telegraph‘s London Editor, called the restoration “a clucking, Grade A, … turkey.” In September, the British architectural trade journal, Building Design, awarded the restoration of the historic tea clipper the 2012 Carbuncle Cup for the worst new building design in Britain. The Victorian Society’s new director Chris Costelloe has opined that it’s a pity that commercial motives were placed above heritage interests.” Ouch.
While attending the Historical Novel Society 2012 conference in London last week, I spent a few hours crawling through the venerable ship. There is indeed both good news and bad. The bad is primarily related to what happens when the party planners and corporate events schedulers overrule the naval architects and ship restorers. Nevertheless, there are areas where, Andrew Gilligan’s complaints notwithstanding, the ship presentation seems much improved over the previous incarnation.
On March 29, 2010, the Panamanian-flagged ro/ro 
The schooner Bluenose II has been launched in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The local news outlets referred to the event as the “relaunching” of the schooner though as the hull was completely replaced and only some portion of the Douglas fir deck was re-used, it is effectively a newly built vessel. The Bluenose II is a replica of the original Bluenose, a Grand Banks fishing schooner famous for its graceful lines and speed under sail. See our previous post, 
An interesting article on the day after Nelson’s birthday – after using synthetic mastic, a modern caulking material commonly used in yachts, for the last fifteen year without success, the folks restoring Nelson’s 
The replica of the 
The press release says that the 
Imagine an antique Victorian desk purchased for £30, that has a stuck drawer. A determined auctioneer, working on the drawer with a screw driver for around 20 minutes, managed to un-stick it only to find that the object blocking the drawer was a small bone cribbage board with a label on the back that read: ‘The cribbage board used by Victory Nelson & Admiral Quilliam.‘ The cribbage board had been hidden in the drawer for more than 70 years. The cribbage board will be auctioned and is expected to attract bids of several thousand pounds. Thanks to 
After ten sea trials and over 25 years of construction and refitting, China has put its first aircraft carrier into service. Long rumored to be named Shi Lang, the carrier has instead been named 
Bill King
Scientists have said that global climate change will bring us severe and unusual weather. That would be a hard point to argue. Here are two recent, apparently somewhat contradictory or perhaps merely odd, news stories about the sea and the global climate. The ice on the Arctic Sea has melted to record low levels while it has reached record highs in the Antarctic.
The first word one associates with speed under sail is probably not barge. Nevertheless, Thames River barges are no slackers when the wind is blowing. Recently, the folks at