gCaptain.com

Introducing gCaptain’s Google Toolbar buttons.

How do you get them?

• Click on one of the images then…
• if you already have Google’s Toolbar installed then a small anchor button will be added to it.
• if you don’t have the Toolbar then you will be allowed to add it to your browser.

Once installed, how do they work?

• Clicking on the anchor will bring you to our Maritime Industry Custom Search Engine (CSE) or our google powered site search (depending on which you install).
• Clicking on the arrow next to it will display the tiles of our latest blog post OR the latest Maritime News from Discoverer.

Our suggestion:

• Try out the Google CSE button first. If you like it then return and install the gCaptain site search button.

Our Maritime News Discoverer is really taking off. Our google page views have almost doubled and feedback is excellent. Our one problem… we need you to vote on stories. It’s the key to the discoverer system.

So visit Maritime News Discoverer and if you like a story click vote. You should then see the story’s ranking number increase by one. Votes are how the good stories find their way to Discoverer’s homepage and bad stories get lost in-time.

So consider it your civil duty as a mariner and vote.

Want to help even more? Then submit your story to Discoverer.

While we have been preoccupied with the Bay Bridge Allision readers of our Maritime News Discoverer know of this troubling news from the pacific;

When the U.S. Navy deploys a battle fleet on exercises, it takes the security of its aircraft carriers very seriously indeed.
At least a dozen warships provide a physical guard while the technical wizardry of the world’s only military superpower offers an invisible shield to detect and deter any intruders.

That is the theory. Or, rather, was the theory.

American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk - a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board.

By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier.

According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy.

Continue Reading….

For those curious how the editors at gCaptain research maritime incidents like the Cosco Busan’s allision with San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, here are some of the websites that provide excellent reference material.

Maritime Industry Custom Search Engine

Our first stop in researching any maritime related topic is our own Maritime Industry CSE. It’s a powerful resource since it provides search results with the aid of google’s powerful search database and algarithims. Actually the only difference between it and google.com is the fact that our tool narrows the results down and only displays sites that pertain to large ships.

*Tip: Try the “incidents” refinement to narrow down the results even further.

The Maritime Incident Casebook

If you are looking for trusted information on incidents as they happen then MAC should be your first stop. Be sure to visit their podcast section as well as their links page which contains a list of the best maritime resources for incident prevention.

Searates.com Container Shipping References

For those looking for data that specifically pertains to Container Ships, head over to Searates’ Container Ship Reference Book. Not only is it full of Web 2.0 eye candy, it also has some great hard data.

*Tip: Its shipping lines section has links to both Cosco and Hanjin. By visiting Cosco’s site you will quickly learn they have removed their official “Cosco Busan” statement from Nov 11th.

gCaptain’s Maritime News Mash-up

For breaking news your first stop should be our Maritime News Discoverer but a close second is our Maritime News Mash-up which is automatically updated with the industry’s most trusted news sources.

*Tip - Also take a look at our gCaptain News and Maritime Blog Mash-ups

The Council of American Master Mariners

For those looking for expert opinion from Ship Captain’s we hope you contact us… but your next stop should be CAMM. Contact them directly for contacts from the Maritime Expert Database.

Maritime Executive Magazine

Traditional media is know for making small errors when reporting maritime incidents. To obviate this problem subscribe to MAREX’s FREE weekly newsletter. It is published every Thursday and is written by professional journalists with maritime backgrounds. For past articles click HERE.

*Tip: If you are more interested in weekly blog postings check out Fred Fry’s Maritime Monday

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If you have a reference site of interest please submit it to our Maritime News Discoverer under the category “Links“

UPDATE: BoatingSF has a new animation that can be found here: COSCO BUSAN’S TRACK - UPDATED

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Our friend John of VesselTrax.com submitted this link to our Maritime News Discoverer. Click on the picture below and watch as the Cosco Busan leaves the dock and embarks on its fateful voyage.

From BoatingSF.com:

Path of the Cosco Busan Hitting the Bay Bridge

The animation below shows the Cosco Busan as it leaves the Port of Oakland on November 7, 2007, and hits the Bay Bridge at 8:30 am on its way to the Golden Gate.

The Cosco Busan is the bright red arrow. (Hover over a ship to see its information.)

You can see that the ship was traveling at an acute angle to the bridge and then turned sharply, directly into the center tower of the bridge. (The towers are highlighted with red dots to make them more visible.)

No cleanup ships show up in our AIS records. It is not clear whether they arrived later, did not have their AIS transponders on, or if for some reason our receiver did not detect their signals. (Coast Guard ships generally do not turn on their AIS transponders, so they do not show up.)

Click here for FULL ANIMATION

Stay Tuned as our licensed ship captain John Konrad is preparing a play-by-play video of this AIS data. In the meantime CLICK HERE for the SFGate’s excellent coverage of the incident.

UPDATE 2:

You can find a complete article on how this animation was made HERE.

Here are gCaptain editor’s Top 10 upcoming picks of the week from gCaptain’s Maritime News Discoverer. Please Vote on the ones you like to have them published.

More Than 400 Fall Ill On Hawaii Cruise Ship
Norwegian Cruise Line said about a sixth of the 2,500 passengers onboard its Pride Of Hawaii cruise ship became sick this week.
The passengers fell read more »

Intoxicated Captain Sees Jail Time After Collision with Platform
An allision on August 3, 2007 with an unmanned gas platform in the North Sea led to the sinking of the MV Jork,a 1922 gross tonne coaster and registe read more »

Hostile Shores: Greece Casting off Asylum Seekers
According to recent reports, the Greek coast guard has not only been rejecting but torturing asylum seekers that are arriving in ever greater numbers read more »

ConocoPhillips oil spill case will make the state’s waters safer
The smoking gun. Whistle-blower Jim Legg’s surreptitious documentation of rule-breaking by ConocoPhillips resulted in the oil company’s agreement to read more »

Navy Cancels General Dynamics Ship Contract
The U.S. Navy yesterday canceled a General Dynamics Corp. ship contract worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, in a blow to the defense c read more »

The bleedin’ obvious at Tims Times
Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle dumber proceeded to the deck and looked through the near opaque glass inspection hatch, the beam of their flashlight glaring read more »

Container ship hits Bay Bridge tower - fuel spills, but span undamaged
There was an allision this morning between the German-flagged, 810-foot vessel Cosco Busan and the San Francisco Bay Bridge, in heavy fog. While the read more »

Hostile Shores: Greece Casting off Asylum Seekers
According to recent reports, the Greek coast guard has not only been rejecting but torturing asylum seekers that are arriving in ever greater numbers read more »

Straits of Malacca Shortcut…Tenth Degree Canal Project
A 1500 nautical mile detour of the pirate infested Malacca Straits route is possible with a canal cut across the Isthmus of Kra between the Gulf of T read more »

The good news;

We have competently overhauled the tools landing page to provide direct links to our most popular features.

We have launched a new feature that you may find very useful… gCaptain’s news and jobs mashup. Ok, we know the average mariner has no idea what a mashup or its underlaying technology (RSS feed scrapers) is but we hope you can figure it all out. Basically we take headlines from the leading maritime news organizations (and job boards!) around the web and display them on a single easy to navigate and searchable page.

You can find the mashups via our new tools landing page (click on “tools” in the upper right corner of the site) but here are the direct links;

News

• gCaptain News
• Maritime News
• Offshore News
• Maritime Blogs

Jobs

• Maritime Jobs
• Offshore Job (Coming Soon)

Bad News,

We are working out a bug in our Maritime News Discoverer page and expect that area of the site to be down for a few days(our database team was able to get it back up and running… many thanks Mark).

Here are gCaptain editor’s Top 10 upcoming picks of the week from gCaptain’s Maritime News Discoverer. Please Vote on the ones you like to have them published.

Hawaii Superferry Back on Course
It looks like the embattled Hawaii Super Ferry may have a new lease on life. The Hawaii Legislature voted overwhelmingly to override the HI Supreme read more »

Russia launches three GLONASS navigation satellites
It’s a bit behind schedule, but Russia’s GPS-challenging GLONASS satellite navigation looks to have just taken a fairly big step forward, with three read more »

Panama Canal Rate Hikes
The Panama Canal will probably resist calls from shipping lines to spread out proposed toll increases, threatening profits for companies such as A.P. read more »

U.S. Navy helps crew of hijacked North Korean ship
The U.S. Navy said Tuesday it provided medical assistance and other support to the North Korean crew of a vessel hijacked by pirates off the East Afr read more

Coast Guard Test its Arctic Wings
As global warming opens new shipping lanes in the Arctic Ocean, the United States Coast Guard(USCG), conducts aerial reconnaissance of a Europe-Asia read more »

Coast Guard trains Navy in ship-boarding tactics
Boarding a ship is a risky operation. A lot can go wrong quickly, and Navy ship-boarding teams have to be ready for anything, from armed pirates to t read more »

We rarely reproduce press releases… but it’s Sunday and not your usual release. Seaways, the Nautical Institute’s monthly magazine, has a story this month on ideas to prevent oil discharges aboard ships. They point some fingers and expose some truths while, in some mariner’s opinions, over analyzing others. Here’s the summary;

The NI has identified a number of potential pitfalls in ensuring compliance, and these include poor equipment and maintenance, procedural problems and out dated practices, through to ill equipped port facilities.

In addition, owners need to convince those onboard that they are truly serious about tackling pollution. Companies cannot simply pay lip service to the rules, and tangible action is needed to guard against complacency, to mitigate the risks of mistakes, and to guard against errors of judgment. With the risk of enormous financial penalties and with jail time a real possibility, owners who simply relax and assume all is in order can get a real shock when things go wrong.

However, not all the problems stem from equipment or procedures, and the NI regretfully recognizes the age-old “can do” attitude of many seafarers can be damaging. In too many instances there appears the problems of falsified records, and of a continued willingness to do what is thought best by an individual, even when that flies in the face of the Safety Management System (SMS).

According to Captain Gale, “Environmental crimes are sadly tarnishing the image of shipping. It is vital to remember that responsibility always rests with the owner, and it is not simply enough to put systems onto the ship – these need to be supported and made to work, to ensure the actions of those onboard are always the right actions”.

Download the article –> Pollution Prevention; The Role Of Shipmasters

We are so excited by the capability of our Maritime News & Links Discoverer to bring you the best maritime related content that we have a HUGE announcement to make. Actually it’s tiny, very tiny, it’s an Apple iPhone!

That’s right the GRAND PRIZE for our Discoverer Maritime News & Links Contest is a brand new Apple iPhone!

Prizes will be given to the user who submits the maritime related Discoverer link that gets the most votes.

Grand Prize:
Apple iPhone OR iPod Touch (Your Choice)
& misc gCaptain Schwag

1st & 2nd Place:
iPod Shuffle
& misc gCaptain Schwag

3nd Place:
Mystery Prize from gCaptain’s Test Lab
& misc gCaptain Schwag

Runners Up:
Selected Runner’s up will each receive a $10 Starbucks cards & misc gCaptain Schwag . Why Starbucks? Ask our last contest winner Capt. Richard Rodriguez.

Bonus Prize:
Write an article for gCaptain’s and e-mail it to tips(AT)gcaptain.com. If it’s accepted and published to our blog you will be automatically entered into our Bonus Contest and the article submitted to Discoverer. The one with the most votes gets a brand new The new iPod nano.
.

Get Started Now: Submit a Link
Not sure how to submit links? Watch our video!

Contest Details: [Continue Reading →]