Solar Panels on the Upper Deck of the Augira Leader
After four voyages the solar panels on the upper of the NYK car carrier Auriga Leader have performed better than was expected but have also demonstrated how far there is to go in harnessing solar power.
The ship has generated 32,300 KW hours of electricity, the equivalent of seven months of electricity by 17 households in Japan, which was 1.4 times greater than that generated during land-based tests. Nevertheless, the electricity was the equivalent of only 0.05% of the ship’s propulsion power and 1% of its onboard electricity consumption.
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I’ve always been struck by the tragedy that those most in need of ferry service are often also most at risk. We have seen recent ferry accidents in the Philippines with the sinking of the 
If you can’t get sailors to church, bring the church to the sailors. That was the strategy used in 1844 by the Protestant Church Missionary Society for Seamen, which was renamed the
Today there are 1.6 million or so residents on the island of Manhattan. How things have changed. Four hundred years ago on September 12th, 1609, when Henry Hudson first stepped onto the island, there were roughly 600 Lenape Indians living there. The natives called the island Manna-hata, as recorded in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Hudson’s ship, Half Moon. Manna-hata is translated from the Lenape to mean the “island of many hills.”
Last February, we posted about 
We recently posted about how 
In the aftermath of the fire in 1934 on the passenger liner Morro Castle, in which 135 passengers and crew died, there was considerable blame to be shared. The ship’s safety equipment was poorly maintained, the crew poorly trained and the ship’s officers made several questionable decisions which may have contributed to the rapid spread of the fire. How the fire started has never been determined. One man, George White Rogers, a radio officer, would be held up as hero. He stayed at his station transmitting “SOS” despite intense heat and smoke in the radio room.
Thanks to Dave Shirlaw on MARHST-L for pointing out a fascinating vessel for sale on E-Bay. The vessel is a steel tug, ST 893, built by JK Welding of Brooklyn, NY in 1945. The tug is said to have served in Normandy, the South Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam, and has been converted to a live-aboard yacht. As of this writing , there are no bids.
An interesting article from 
Which would you prefer to order from the menu – slimehead or orange roughy? Antarctic toothfish or Chilean sea bass? Slimehead and orange roughy are the same fish, just as the Chilean sea bass is the Antarctic toothfish with a new name. Orange roughy just sounds so much better on the menu or in the supermarket than slimehead. The same goes with Chilean sea bass, which doesn’t happen to be related to sea bass at all, but the name is appealing.