Seattle – SEONG UG SIN, a citizen of Korea, and captain of the STX Daisy was sentenced today in U.S. District Court in Tacoma to 14 days in prison, and 6 months of supervised release, during which time he is not allowed to sail in United States waters. SIN was arrested April 14, 2010, after a Coast Guard inspection crew found him drunk while in command of the 590 foot vessel in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. At trial earlier this month, the evidence revealed that SIN’s blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit. U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Richard Creatura imposed the sentence.

According to testimony at trial, the Coast Guard inspection team had difficulty boarding the STX Daisy in the early morning hours of April 14, 2010, as Captain Sin failed repeatedly to follow their instructions. The ten member inspection crew needed to board the 20 ton freighter from a small inflatable boat during three foot swells. Once on board, Captain Sin continued to have difficulty providing the records required, and a review determined he had no usable charts of Puget Sound. The ship was ordered to Port Angeles. SIN was given a breath test, which revealed his blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit for being in command of a vessel. A search of the ship determined that significant quantities of Korean whiskey had been consumed by SIN and one other officer.

In asking for a significant sentence, the government noted the potential for disaster with a drunk captain aboard a 20 ton freighter. “The consequences of an accident that may have occurred due to the defendants intoxication could have been catastrophic. The defendant’s intended journey through the Straits of Juan de Fuca and down the Puget Sound to Olympia covered over 205 miles through areas characterized by narrow channels and strong currents. More importantly, the defendant’s intended track crossed no less than six Washington State Ferry routes, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and many areas of high commercial shipping and recreational boating activity. The defendant’s ship, carrying large quantities of fuel oil posed further risk to the marine environment. In the interest of public safety, a strong sentence is warranted to deter future mariners from following in this defendant’s wake,” the Assistant U.S. Attorneys wrote in their sentencing memo.

via Coast Guard News

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.

To say the least, this year has been a wild roller coaster ride, similar to most everyone else in the world. We have seen our share of ups and downs, but have been able to remain positive, ride the good and take the bad with a grain of salt. As some of you may know, we have been able to start running gCaptain.com full time from beautiful San Luis Obispo, CA, which has been a blessing. We even hired our first employee, Mike Schuler, bringing the gCaptain team to a whopping 3 full time employees. If anyone is interested in marketing their product or service online, Mike is an expert and can be contacted at +1-805-720-6268. We are excited to welcome him aboard!

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Most Popular Blog Posts of 2008

5. 5 Most Ambitious Bridge Designs of Today

4. The Ten Largest Container Shipping Companies Visualized

3. Disaster At Sea – Photos of Maritime Destruction

2. Exclusive – Shellbacked iPod Touch Video

1. The Emma Maersk’ s Wartsila-Sulzer Super Engine

Special mention goes out to Fred Fry of Maritime Monday fame. Through his hard work this featured segment has become a must read for mariners and shipping industry executives each and every week. Many readers have commented that they wouldn’t know how to start the week off without it. You can also find Fred online HERE.
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Most Discussed Forum Topics

5. Favorite Maritime Movie?

4. Songs About the Sea and Sailors

3. Animal Planet Whale Wars

2. MSC Commercial Cruise

1. Best Captain’s Quotes

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Top Videos Of The Year

5. M/V Fedra Beached Near Gibraltar

4. Wartsila-Sulzer Super Engine – The Emma Maersk’ s Power Plant

3. Golden Shellback – The Boxed Set

2. 2007′s Top 10 Rescue at Sea Videos (2008 Post HERE)

1. Windoc Incident – Story Behind YouTube’s Most Chilling Video

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Top Maritime Technology Stories

5. US Coast Guard Embraces Social Media

4. Fuel Cells For Ships

3. Google Plans Floating Server Farm

2. How One Ship Crashed The Internet For 75 Million People

1. Fixed Rate Broadband Nearing Global Coverage

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Top News Items Of The Year

5. Mariner Shortage and regulator’s persistent efforts to further the problem

(Booby Prizes go to… USCG, S Korea, Ship Owners – Twice, among others)

4. Cosco Busan Fall Out

3. Financial Crisis Hits Shipping

2. Piracy

1. Record Year For Ship Causalities (The list speaks for itself)

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Things to look for in 2009

The gCaptain team does not always see eye to eye but one thing we are all in agreement with is that 2009 is going to be a very big year with new features being launched in the coming weeks.

New Forum Platform
Yvon Chouinard, owner and founder of Patagonia, has always said that if you want to increase your business improve your product. With this in mind we are in the process of converting the entire gCaptain forum onto a new platform known as vBulletin. This platform is widely used around the web and will add a number of new features to the forum that should make our 1000 users quite happy. If that’s not enough to convince you, consider this… with the forum recieving over 2500 pageviews daily it recently surpassed the blog as our most popular section. Many thanks to our community of supporters!

New Job Board
After years of using the current online maritime job boards we have had enough! In early 2009 gCaptain will be publicly launching our new cutting edge job board. Like all of our other gCaptain.com features, our Job Board will be 100% free. Free to post jobs and free to find jobs. If you are interested in becoming a bate tester for the new gCaptain Job Board please contact us.

Another Redesign
We are sure your asking… Wasn’t this blog just redesigned a few months ago? Yes and thanks for noticing but usability, design and search engine optimization are critically important to us. We even launched a new business unit this year to provide these services to clients. We think all the information provided on this site should be easily accessible to new and veteran readers alike.

Stay tuned!

Finally…

In a short 18 months of operation this website has grown beyond our hopes and dreams. We have you to thank so if we can repay the favor please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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….

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“

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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 »