The Maritime Blog and the Professional Mariner are pointing to two Marine Safety Alerts issued by the Coast Guard today which may suggest that the fixed CO2 system on the Carnival Splendor failed.
The Safety Alerts do not identify the ship by name but note:
A machinery space fire onboard a relatively new vessel was effectively responded to and extinguished by the vessel’s quick response team firefighters using portable extinguishing equipment. However, before it was declared completely extinguished and approximately five hours after the fire started, the master of the vessel made the decision to release CO2 from the vessel’s fixed firefighting system. It failed to operate as designed. Subsequently, crew members were unable to activate it manually and CO2 was never directed into the machinery space.
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Fifteen-year-old Dutch sailor, Laura Dekker, arrived in St. Maarten after a 2,200 nautical-mile voyage from the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa. She sailed from Gibraltar on August 21 and spent two months in the Canary Islands waiting for the hurricane season to pass. She left the Cape Verde Islands on December 2nd. She is attempting to become the youngest person to sail around the world alone.
Sailors in the western hemisphere will see the first lunar eclipse to fall on the solstice in the last 456 years. According to NASA, the last time the two celestial events happened at the same time was in AD 1554.
Perhaps foreshadowing our own information age, World War II’s “
The 
Earlier this week we posted about
Carnival Cruise Line posted the following today on their 
On December 11, 1710, the English ship Nottingham Galley came ashore on Boon Island, off Cape Neddick, Maine, stranding its 14 man crew, of whom four would subsequently die. It became one of the best known shipwrecks in New England history. The 
Our belated congratulations to Inger Klein Olsen, who took command of Cunard Line’s 