A fascinating look at the research of Denise Herzing, who has been studying dolphins in the Bahamas for 25years. Next year she is beginning an attempt to use technology to engage in two way communication with dolphins.
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Ann Weaver is a researcher who has been studying dolphins in Boca Ciega Bay, with a particular focus on how to to minimize the impact of local construction projects on the dolphins.
Today, we have three posts about dolphins and humans interacting. I went to high school on the Gulf Coast of Florida, which has some of the largest bottlenose dolphin populations in the world. When I am in Florida visiting family, I always look forward to kayaking between the mangrove islands of Boca Ciego Bay where pods of dolphin and porpoise fish and play along the edges of the channels, often swimming around and under my kayak. Magnificent creatures. On Friday, Warner Brothers released Dolphin Tale, a movie about the first dolphin ever to be fitted with a prosthetic tale. It is set in Clearwater, Florida, not far from where I went to high school. A review:
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Photo: DR
Tommorrow, the Charente-Maritime/Bahia Transat 6.50 sets off from La Rochelle, France bound for Salvador de Bahia, Brazil via Funchal, Madeira. Roughly eighty sailors from sixteen countries will sail the Open/Mini 6.5, a 21 foot long ocean racer, across the Atlantic.
One experienced competitor, Jean-Marc Allaire, will not be sailing. Last week, his boat, Karantez VI, was found under full sail off Cap Ferret with no one aboard. A short time later a body was found on Lège-Cap-Ferret’s beach, which was identified as Allaire. Allaire was on his way to the start of the race when he apparently fell overboard. The Charente-Maritime race began 34 years ago in 1977, which was also the year of Jean-Marc Allaire’s birth. Our sincere condolences to his family and friends.
Thanks to Michael Kingdom-Hockings for pointing out the story.
Photo: RIA Novosti. Sergey Guneev
What is interesting about this story is how it has been reported. Here is what we know: The fishing boat, Donets, ran into the Russian nuclear submarine, Svyatoy Georgiy Pobedonosets (St. George the Victor,) in the Avachino Bay on the far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, causing minor damage, K-433 Svyatoy Georgiy Pobedonosets (St. George the Victor) is a Delta III class nuclear-powered submarine that has been in service with the Russian Navy since 1980.
Most other details of the story get a bit hazy.
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Happy autumnal equinox. The first day of Fall. I know of no good sailor’s tradition for the autumnal equinox. It seems to be too busy a time to stop for such foolishness. Everyone is trying to get the last trips of the season in or is already getting ready for winter. In the Northeast, I always wondered why I didn’t have at least as much sense as the geese, who were all flying south to warmer climes.
I would like to suggest an autumnal equinox tradition of putting on warm socks. There is a sailor’s ritual of burning one’s socks at the vernal equinox socks, presumably the socks one wore all winter. (See: Spring equinox – Sailors burn their socks) Putting on a warmer pair now, has a certain seasonal symmetry. If anyone has other, and no doubt better, autumnal equinox traditions I would love to hear of them.
All sailors should be watching the sky this afternoon and evening. NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research satelitte, about the size of a bus and weighs 6.5 tons is expected to plunge to earth sometime this afternoon or early evening Eastern time. NASA isn’t sure where it will land but thinks that it will miss North America. Odds are that the space junk will land in the ocean. (UPDATE: 2:PM EST – NASA now thinks that it may land in North America after all.) Let us hope that crashing satelittes do not become an equinox tradition. To have a satellite fall on the first day of Fall seems wholly unnecessary.
The Forth Bridge - Painted at Last
I recently learned a new figure of speech – “like painting the Forth Bridge,” which refers to a job which is never completed. Or at least it used to mean that. The Forth Bridge is a cantilever railway bridge over the Firth of Forth in the east of Scotland. It is is a marvel of British engineering, so large that for the last 121 years, teams of painters have been continuously painting the bridge. The job took so long that by the time the painters were finished, they needed to start again. Now however, the bridge will be coated with glass flake epoxy paint, which is similar to that used in the offshore oil industry. This improved paint technology will mean that the bridge will not require painting for 25 years. A good figure of speech bites the dust, to coin a phrase.
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The US military’s previous policy toward gay service members; “don’t ask, don’t tell; officially came to an end yesterday. Naval officer, Lt. Gary Ross, chose the day to marry his partner of eleven years, Dan Swezy, in Duxbury, Vt. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Marine recruiters who had been invited to set up a recruiting booth on the first day of the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center, a gay community center, were pleasantly surprised by the reception, which was friendly, even if the number of potential recruits was modest. Over the 18 years which DADT was official policy, the US Navy, Marines and Coast Guard discharged over 4,200 gay officers and enlisted personnel. The Army and Air Force discharged more than 6,000. Thanks to Alaric Bond for passing along one of the articles.
Updates on three previous posts: On Monday, Able Seaman Ryan Donovan was sentenced to life imprisonment after pleading guilty to murdering a senior officer on board the HMS Astute last April. Submariner’s grudge turned proud day into tragedy
British tourist Judith Tebbutt, kidnapped last week from an exclusive Kenyan resort, is believed to be being held in central Somalia, by a pirate gang. Her husband, David Tebbutt, was killed in the pirate attack last week. British Tourist, Kidnapped in Kenya, May Be in Central Somalia
The containership MSC Luciana which ran aground on Monday on a sand bar in the Westerschelde was towed off the sand bank at high tide that evening with the assistance of around nine tugs, and proceeded to Zeebrugge for underwater hull inspection.
Thanks to Dirk Bal and Alaric Bond for providing updates.
For something so relatively new, we take the internet very much for granted. The first graphical web browser is less than 20 years old. Nevertheless, the internet seems ubiquitous in most of our lives. But on a world that is over 70% ocean, how do we communicate from one continent to another? Primarily, by sub-sea cable. TeleGeography has put together a map of the submarine cables that link us together on-line.
Fifteen years ago, a group of sea shanty enthusiasts got together for an old fashioned shanty sing. Their first meeting was, fittingly enough on the windjammer Peking at South Street Seaport. For many years they met monthly at the Seaman’s Church Institute near South Street, until the church sold the building and moved out of Manhattan. Since May the group has been hosted by the Noble Maritime Collection at Snug Harbor in Staten Island. Snug Harbor was once a destitute sailor’s retirement home. The shanty sessions are dedicated to the memory of William Main Doerflinger who “collected” many of the old shanties from retired sailors at Snug Harbor. Last Sunday the shanty singers got together again. Here is a short video I shot of the session.
The William Main Doerflinger Memorial Sea Shanty Session – September 18th, 2011
The folks at Jack Tar Magazine are sponsoring a writing contest, “The New Conrads” Storytelling Challenge, with some serious prize money attached. Whether you enter or not, it is an interesting exercise to consider what the world of shipping would look like in a post petroleum world.
I have really enjoyed Linda Collison‘s two books in her Patricia MacPherson nautical adventure series. (See our reviews of Star-Crossed and Surgeon’s Mate.) She is also an excellent interviewer. Here she interviews another favorite nautical writer and frequent contributor to this blog, Alaric Bond. (See also Linda’s interview of Margaret Muir.) From her blog, linda collison’s Sea of Words:
I’m pleased to be under the same publishing house (or in this case, aboard the same publishing vessel – Fireship Press) as historical naval fiction author Alaric Bond, a man with a wry and dry sense of humour who likes to sail, plays the trombone, lives in a 14th century Wealden Hall house in Eat Sussex and has a penchant for many things historic, including old SAAB convertibles.
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Last Wednesday, we posted Not Your Father’s America’s Cup – Plymouth Capsize Club. This video is about “your father’s America’s Cup.” The yacht is Stars and Stripes/ US34, captained by Dennis Connor in the America’s Cup. The contrast between the current AC45 catamarans and the old 12 meters and the IACC boats could not be more stark.
If you think that you are having a bad Monday morning, consider the plight of the master of the container ship MSC Luciana. The ship was bound from Antwerp to Felixstowe when it ran aground on a sand bar in the Westerschelde, the sea-channel that connects the port of Antwerp with the North Sea, about 140 kilometres (87 miles) southwest of Amsterdam. The MSC Luciana is one of the larger container ships in the world at 1,200 feet long and a container capacity of 11,600 TEU. The ship reportedly ran aground at high tide. Zeeland Region Safety’s Aart Oosten is quoted as commenting, “She is well and truly stuck and we are also going into low tide, causing further difficulties. At the moment, we have several groups including the Dutch maritime authorities in a meeting to see how we will proceed,” Oosten said, adding the Panamanian-registered ship posed no immediate danger to the environment. “There is no danger and her crew remains on board,” he said.”
Container ship stuck on Dutch sandbank
Thanks to Dirk Bal for passing the story along.
There aren’t many publishers with a special interest in nautical fiction. Tom Grundner, the owner of Fireship Press, who died suddenly on September 11th, was one. I never had the chance to meet him in person, but I genuinely liked the man I knew only through emails and over the internet. In addition to serving as Senior Editor of Fireship, he was also the author of the Sir Sidney Smith Nautical Adventure Series. (See our review of his book, The Temple.) Prior to entering publishing, he had an impressive and varied career in academia and business. For a complete obituary of this remarkable man, see David Haye’s Obituary: Tom Grundner (1945-2011). See also An Interview with Tom Grundner.
MATTHEOS I , Photo: J Dohrn, MarineTraffic.com
Earlier this week the 45,000 DWT tanker, Mattheos I, with a crew of 23, was hijacked off Benin in the Gulf of Guinea. According to the IMB Piracy Center, this year there have been 19 pirate attacks on ships in the Gulf of Guinea as compared to zero last year.
Armed Pirates Hijack a Fuel Tanker Off Benin and Take 23 Crew Members Hostage
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Today is “International Talk Like A Pirate Day.” Many use it as an excuse to dress up in bad costumes and shout “Aaargh, Matie” and “Shiver me Timbers,” in some sort of odd homage to Johnny Depp and the Disney version of piracy. All we can say is “please don’t.” The pirates of the 17th century that are the basis for this nonsense were a brutal lot, and why some consider it cute to dress themselves and often their kids as murderous thieves is not immediately obvious.
Piracy today is a huge problem. Thousands of mariners have been taken hostage by pirates, held in captivity for long periods under horrible conditions. Modern piracy costs the world between $10 and 20 billion per year. Pretending to be a Disney pirate may be an amiable amusement but otherwise only distracts from the real problem of modern day piracy. To learn more about modern piracy go to “SaveOurSeafarers.”
An article in the Guardian from last June does something extremely unusual. It allows a real victim of Somali piracy a voice.
Experience: I was kidnapped by Somali pirates
‘They kept us in a state of terror. Even when I could not see the torturing, I could hear the screams’
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Photo: http://www.brigantines.com
Talk about match racing! This Sunday off Newport Beach, CA, two identical brigantines, the Irving Johnson and the Exy Johnson, will race. They will be manned by crews from rival local clubs, the Bahia Corinthian and Balboa Yacht clubs, under the supervision of the brigantine’s permanent captains and crews. The Irving Johnson and the Exy Johnson are two identical 90′ brigantines launched in 2002, named in honor of the the husband and wife team who sailed the brigantine Yankee four times around the world over eleven years. The two brigantines are part of the Los Angeles Maritime Institute’s “TopSail Youth Program,” a sail training “education and adventure” program.
Here comes the 2011 Great Brigantine Race
Thanks to Tom Russell in the Traditional Sail Professionals Linked-In Group and Irwin Bryan for passing the word along.
Today the Google “doodle,” the image that appears above the Google search box, was an orange. Why an orange? If you clicked on the doodle it took you to a search for Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Hungarian physiologist who is credited with discovering vitamin C in 1930 and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937 for his research. It is his birth day today. An article in CNN commented, “ if you don’t have scurvy (and we’re going to go ahead and assume you do not), you should probably take a moment to say thanks.” What? Without taking anything away from Dr. Szent-Györgyi, scurvy was not cured in 1930 in Hungary. The cure for scury was discovered and then, too often forgotten, many times between when it was documented by Hippocrates and the 19th century.
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