We recently posted about Home Depot and Costco independently chartering containerships to address ship and port congestion problems. Now, Coca-Cola is taking another approach to fix its broken supply chains.
Splash247.com reports that Coca-Cola becomes the latest global mega-brand to decide to switch from regular liner choices for crucial deliveries, instead opting to move just over 60,000 tonnes of material on three handysize bulk carriers to keep its production lines running across the world.
Photo: Tom Stewart
The schooner Bowdoin turned 100 years old this year. She was designed by William H. Hand, Jr., and built in East Boothbay, Maine, at the Hodgdon Brothers Shipyard. The only American schooner built specifically for Arctic exploration, she was designed under the direction of explorer Donald B. MacMillan. She has made 29 trips above the Arctic Circle in her life, including three since she was acquired by the Maine Maritime Academy in 1988. She is currently owned by the Maine Maritime Academy, located in Castine, Maine, and is used for their sail training curriculum.
To celebrate the schooner’s centennial, Downeast Magazine has featured a trove of stunning photos, some never published, by Maine photographer Tom Stewart, who accompanied Maine’s official state vessel on its momentous return voyages to the far north in the early 1990s. Click on the link below to see more:
The 100-Year-Old Schooner Bowdoin as It Was Meant to Be Seen — In the Arctic
In February we posted about an announcement by A.P. Moller-Maersk, the largest container ship operator in the world, that it would launch the world’s first carbon-neutral cargo liner vessel in 2023 – seven years ahead of its initial 2030 target. Maersk’s first carbon-neutral ship will be a 2,000 TEU feeder vessel fueled by methanol, operating on one of its intra-regional networks.
A little over a month ago, A.P. Moller-Maersk doubled down on its strategy by ordering 8 large ocean-going container vessels capable of being operated on carbon-neutral methanol. The vessels will be built by Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) for delivery around 2024, and have a nominal capacity of approximately 16,000 TEU. The agreement with HHI includes an option for 4 additional vessels in 2025.
Saildrone Inc. and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have released the first video footage gathered by an uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) from inside a major hurricane barreling across the Atlantic Ocean.
From the Saidrone announcement:
The Saildrone Explorer SD 1045 was directed into the midst of Hurricane Sam, which is currently on a path that fortunately will miss the US East Coast. SD 1045 is battling 50-foot waves and winds of over 120 mph to collect critical scientific data and, in the process, is giving us a completely new view of one of Earth’s most destructive forces.
Equipped with a specially designed “hurricane wing” enabling it to operate in extreme wind conditions, SD 1045 is braving Hurricane Sam in the open ocean, collecting real-time observations for numerical hurricane prediction models, which are expected to yield new insights into how large and destructive tropical cyclones grow and intensify.
Interesting news from France24.com:
A French sports group on Saturday announced plans to launch a sailing race in the thawing Canadian Arctic to raise awareness of global warming.
Due to kick-off in 2023, the North Pole Race will be run from Quebec to Vancouver along the Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Arctic Ocean along North America’s northern course.
Crews will sail on special aluminum boats designed for polar waters, according to Herve Favre, president of the French group OC Sport.
Last week Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) committed to a plan called Offshore Wind NYC that will invest more than $191 million to make New York City a hub for the offshore wind industry in the region.
New York City has committed to 100-percent clean electricity by 2040 and carbon neutrality by 2050. This requires a shift to renewable energy from many sources—from rooftop solar and utility-scale renewables to energy storage. Offshore wind (OSW) has an important role to play in the decarbonization of NYC’s electric grid.
The BBC reports that former Royal Marine Dave ‘Dinger’ Bell has successfully completed a 119-day, 3,118-mile, solo row the “wrong way” across the North Atlantic. He arrived in Newlyn in Cornwall at about 13:00 BST on Sunday.
His team believes he is one of the first people to successfully row solo, unsupported from New York to continental Europe. Along the way, he was stung by a jellyfish, hit by huge storms, and revealed he has a fear of open water.
We recently posted about the record congestion in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach where over 60 container ships wait at anchor or simply drift offshore awaiting berth space. The port congestion has spread to the East Coast where more than two dozen ships are waiting for dock space off the coast near New York.
The pandemic is largely blamed for the breakdown of the shipping supply chain. Pandemic-related pent-up demand for goods has created a huge trade imbalance with Asia, while labor shortages among longshoremen, truck drivers and other support and logistics staff have slowed cargo moving through the ports and transport hubs. In addition to delays in cargo deliveries, container shipping rates have also skyrocketed. Market rates for a 40′ container have risen from an average of around $1,500 in June 2020 to a record price of over $20,000 in August 2021.
Several major shippers have taken matters into their own hands. Continue reading
We recently posted A Look at Venetian Gondolas — Designs New and Old. Here is a post about a very different watercraft that graced Venetian waters last weekend. Named Noah’s Violin, it is a 12-meter electric-powered giant floating violin, the work of Venetian artist and sculptor Livio De Marchi. It featured a string quartet performing an arrangement of Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ from The Four Seasons as it sailed down the Grand Canal, escorted by a small fleet of gondolas, water taxis, and sandoli. The musicians played barefoot for better traction on the curved violin’s deck.
The world’s largest offshore floating wind farm has begun operation off Kincardine, approximately 15 kilometers off the southeast coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, at water depths ranging between 60 and 80 meters. The five floating turbines are expected to generate up to 218GWh of clean electricity per year, an output that will be enough to power approximately 55,000 households.
The project was developed by Kincardine Offshore Wind, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pilot Offshore Renewables (POR). Cobra Wind, a subsidiary of ACS Group, is responsible for the engineering, design, supply, construction, and commissioning of the Kincardine floating wind farm.
A.P. Moller – Maersk has announced that Maersk Growth, its venture capital arm, has made a leading investment in Prometheus Fuels, a Silicon Valley-based startup with a promising direct air capture technology to enable cost-efficient, carbon-neutral e-fuels for shipping.
From the announcement: The minority investment in Prometheus Fuels will support A.P. Moller – Maersk’s work to execute on the strategy to decarbonize marine operations.
The Ocean Cleanup‘s latest attempt to clean plastic from the Northern Pacific has proven to be unimpressive. After two offshore supply vessels, donated by Maersk, towed a 520-meter wide boom for 120 hours, they succeeded in collecting around 8 tonnes of floating plastic, or roughly the equivalent to a single load of a standard garbage truck.
Around 2014, the media became enthralled with a story of a 19-year-old Dutch engineer named Boyan Slat, who claimed to have designed a boom system that would clean up half the plastic in the Great Pacific garbage patch within a decade. Many engineers and oceanographers doubted that the scheme would work, but the media and several large corporate sponsors bought into the grand vision. The title of an article in the magazine Fast Money from 2017, Boy Genius Boyan Slat’s Giant Ocean Cleanup Machine Is Real, reflects the enthusiasm for the project.
Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) has ordered more than 30 hull air lubrication systems from UK firm Silverstream Technologies to be installed on current orders of newbuild large container ships. The vessels applying the air lubrication systems are expected to be delivered from shipyards in Asia in 2022-2024.
Silverstream’s technology has been demonstrated to save 5-10% of fuel and emissions by generating a rigid carpet of air bubbles that reduce friction between the hull and the water.
“Over the vessels’ lifecycles, a carbon emissions reduction of 1.6m tonnes – equivalent to the annual emissions of 350,000 cars – could be achieved as a direct impact of having the system onboard,” Silverstream claimed in a release yesterday. Over the same period, MSC will see an estimated fuel saving of $300m.
Starck’s Dream of Winter Gondola
This is a post about contrasts – new and old, fanciful and time-tested, inspiration and tradition. This is also a post about Venetian gondolas.
The gondola, the iconic Venetian rowing boat, has been around since at least the 11th century. It is estimated that there were eight to ten thousand gondolas on the Venetian canals during the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, there are only around four hundred in active service today, with virtually all of them used for hire by tourists. The gondolas’ future is uncertain at best.
Recently, Dezeen Magazine has reported that the famous French designer, Philippe Starck, has envisioned a futuristic gondola as a “symbol for the future of Venice.”
The inhabitants of the Faroe Islands, a windswept archipelago in the North Atlantic roughly halfway between Norway and Iceland, have been hunting long-finned pilot whales and white-sided dolphins for food for almost a thousand years. The summer hunt is known as the Grindadráp, often called the Grind, and typically slaughters around 600 whales. The whale meat is considered a key part of Faroese culture and is shared among the community. The grind has been the target of international protests for years.
This year was more brutal than ever before. Faroese hunters corralled an extremely large pod of white-sided dolphins in a fjord and butchered a record 1,428 dolphins in a single day.
For only the second time, a “megapod” of humpbacks whales, estimated to be between 100 and 150 animals, was sighted off the south coast of Australia’s New South Wales feasting on baitfish in what was described as a feeding frenzy. A megapod was seen feeding in the same location last year.
We recently posted about the NTSB determination that the car carrier Golden Ray capsized due to an error in a stability calculation prior to sailing. Now as the salvage operation is wrapping up and the costs are being tallied, the error might be referred to as a billion dollar blunder.
According to the NTSB, when the car carrier lost stability and rolled on its side two years ago in St. Simons Sound near the Port of Brunswick in Georgia, it lacked adequate stability due to the chief officer’s error in entering ballast quantities into the stability calculation program.
How much did this error cost? Continue reading
The UK startup, Oceanways, has been awarded funding to develop an autonomous hydrogen/battery-powered submarine in a UK government competition to tackle emissions from shipping.
The firm has been given £380,000 ($525,000 ) to develop the sub to deliver parcels without a captain or crew. The submarine will follow shipping routes but 50 metres below the surface. When not under the waves, the sub will also be able to deliver goods in shallow waters where container ships can’t operate.
AP reports that President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday a new U.S. security alliance with Australia and Britain that will provide Australia with the technology and capability to deploy nuclear-powered submarines.
The agreement would make Australia the first country without nuclear weapons to obtain nuclear-powered submarines. The United States has previously only shared the technology with Britain in 1958. The submarines will be nuclear-powered but not armed with nuclear weapons.
Current plans are to build at least eight nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy in Adelaide, Australia.
The final report issued yesterday by the National Transportation Safety Board Office (NTSB) summarizes what happened on Sept. 8, 2019, when the roll-on/roll-off vehicle carrier Golden Ray capsized as it transited outbound through St. Simons Sound near Brunswick, Georgia.
Less than 40 minutes after leaving port, the 656-foot-long Golden Ray began to heel rapidly to port during a 68-degree turn to starboard. Despite attempts by the pilot and crew to counter the heel, the rate of turn to starboard increased, and the vessel reached a heel of 60 degrees to port in under a minute before it grounded outside of the channel.
The NTSB determined the probable cause of the capsizing of the Golden Ray was the chief officer’s error entering ballast quantities into the stability calculation program, which led to his incorrect determination of the vessel’s stability and resulted in the Golden Ray having an insufficient righting arm to counteract the forces developed during a turn while transiting outbound from the Port of Brunswick through St. Simons Sound. …