A sailing holiday company has offered to cheer up England’s players after Iceland beat them on Monday by taking them on a free whale-watching day-trip.
North Sailing’s manager Gudbjartur Jonsson, posing with 23 free tickets for the England squad dated Tuesday 28 July, said: “It is only polite and a part of the Icelandic hospitality culture to offer the free tickets.
The Guardian – “The poor English players will anyways not be able to return immediately to England after the match on Monday, as 60 million English football fans will be furious when losing to a small island state with only 300,000 inhabitants. “Therefore we offer a peaceful day with whale-watching in a small town in Northern Iceland with beautiful nature and nice people. That should be the perfect compensation.” >
El muchacho llama a este prototipo “Boomy McBoomface”
MarEx – The Ocean Cleanup, the Dutch foundation developing technologies to rid the oceans of plastic, has unveiled its North Sea prototype. The prototype will become the first ocean cleanup system ever tested at sea.
The prototype will be installed in the North Sea, 12 nautical miles off the Dutch coast, where it will remain for one year. The objective is to test how The Ocean Cleanup’s floating barrier fares in extreme weather at sea – the kind of conditions the system will eventually face when deployed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. >>
Maureen Ahrens, of Groton, stands behind her gold submarine sculpture inspired by Henna designs. On the 4th of July, the city of Groton will unveil a new public art project, of a series of 21 submarines made by various local artists, to celebrate the region’s maritime history. (Lauren Schneiderman)
In honor of the 100-year anniversary of Submarine Base New London, the U.S. Navy’s first submarine base, artists are unveiling the CT Sub Trail, a collection of 21 artist-decorated submarines.
The submarines will make their debut at the Groton 4th of July parade. Afterward, they will be installed in locations in Groton, New London, Mystic, Mashantucket, Uncasville, Niantic, Montville and Waterford from July 5 through October.
The artists all started with identical, 5-foot-long white fiberglass-polyresin submarines and decorated them in a wide variety of styles, using acrylic paint or collage. All were then covered with an automotive-grade clear-coating. Dive Dive!
Summer of ’16
O’Brien Is Tryin’ To Learn To Talk Hawaiian; Words by Al Dubin – Music by Rennie Cormack, Published 1916 – click image for more
“Down Hawaii way, where I chanced to stray / On an evening I heard a Hula maiden play,” crooned vaudeville duo Van and Schenck. “Yaaka hula hickey dula, Yaaka hula hickey du.”
These songs—and hundreds of others like them, from “Dear Old Dreamy Honolulu Town” to “O’Brien is Tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian”—were the strange product of an early phase of cultural appropriation, born in San Francisco and accelerated by the songwriters of New York City’s Tin Pan Alley. People couldn’t get enough of them, and even though you (probably) won’t be hearing them at a barbecue anytime soon, their legacy affects how Americans view the Aloha State to this day. keep reading
Daily Mail – Frenzy: This shark, seen on its back measuring 10ft and weighing 300lbs was caught off New York’s Long Island six days after a great white believed responsible for four fatalities was captured in Raritan Bay
Old Salt – One hundred years ago today, Americans learned to be afraid of sharks. On the evening of July 1, 1916, Charles Vansant, 25, of Philadelphia was on vacation with his family at the beach-side resort town of Beach Haven on the New Jersey Shore. He decided to go for a swim before dinner. Shortly after he dove into the surf, he was attacked by a large shark and died of loss of blood. Worse was yet to come. keep reading
Whit Perry is director of Maritime Preservation and Operations at Plimoth Plantation. Under his direction and working in collaboration with Mystic Seaport’s Henry B. DuPont Preservation Shipyard, Mayflower II has been undergoing a multi-year, multi-million dollar restoration effort to ensure her future seaworthiness and ready her for Plymouth’s 2020 commemoration. keep reading
The historic ship Mayflower II arrived at Mystic Seaport where she will undergo the first phase of a multi-year restoration in the Museum’s Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard.
Frigatebirds, seagoing fliers with a 6-foot wingspan, can stay aloft for weeks at a time, a new study has found. The results paint an astonishing picture of the bird’s life, much of which is spent soaring inside the clouds. take flight
The bar-tailed godwit flies non-stop for longer than any other bird species. From Alaska to New Zealand, it is about 12,000 kilometres and it takes the birds between eight and nine days.
Keeper Richard Etheridge (left) and all black Pea Island LS crew, circa 1896 – click to see full size
Pea Island Life-Saving Station was a life-saving station on Pea Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was the first life-saving station in the country to have an all-black crew, and it was the first in the nation to have a black man, Richard Etheridge, as commanding officer.
In 1879, the commander of the Pea Island station was a white man and he had a crew of both white and black men. A rescue effort in November 1879 was bungled; the keeper and some of the crew were held responsible. The Revenue Cutter Service investigated the situation, fired the white keeper, and appointed Etheridge, one of the best surfmen on the North Carolina coast, to serve as keeper in his place. Five months after his ascension, local arsonists burned the station to the ground. Etheridge went on to serve as keeper at Pea Island for the next twenty years.
“In uselessness and absurdity it will stand without an equal” – The Tug of Peace by Raven Hill, Punch 15 Dec. 1915 – click image to see full size
Henry Ford and the Peace Ark
In early 1915, Henry Ford began to publicly express pacifist sentiment and denounce the ongoing war in Europe. Ford chartered the Scandinavian America Line ocean liner Oscar II and invited prominent peace activists to join him. The Oscar II set sail from Hoboken, New Jersey, on 4 December 1915, amid an atmosphere that the press later derided as “circus-like”.
He hoped to create enough publicity to prompt the belligerent nations to convene a peace conference and mediate an end to World War I, but the mission was widely mocked by the press, which referred to the Oscar II as the “Ship of Fools” as well as the “Peace Ship”.
Peace Ship Oscar II with Capt. G. W. Hempel and Henry Ford click image to see full size
Infighting between the activists, mockery by the press contingent aboard, and an outbreak of influenza marred the voyage. On 23 December; four days after Oscar II arrived in Norway, a beleaguered and physically ill Ford abandoned the mission and boarded a ship back to the United States.
Despite Ford’s abandonment of the endeavor, the Peace Ship continued its journey around Europe. Ford continued to pay for the ship’s expenses until early 1917. In total, the Peace Ship expedition ultimately cost Ford approximately half a million dollars. more
Popular Science – One area where unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) and unmanned surface vehicles (USV) would make a splash is in Chinese anti-submarine warfare (ASW) efforts.
The Chinese Navy, the PLAN, appears to be following in the footsteps of its sister service, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, in making growing investments in unmanned surface and underwater systems, aka “drones.” A new Chinese exhibit shows the scale of the potential future.
A 45-foot tall abstract sculpture of the legendary Lyman M. Davis, which was the fastest and last commercial schooner on the Great Lakes on the traffic circle near Shoreline Inn on Monday, June 20, 2016 in Muskegon, Mich. The site is near where the Lyman M. Davis was built in 1872, one of very few ships ever built in Muskegon. (Joel Bissell | MLive.com)
A large abstract sculpture paying homage to Muskegon’s maritime history and one of the city’s most famous schooners has been erected near downtown Muskegon.
The metal sculpture of sails and rigging has risen in the center of the traffic circle between the Shoreline Inn/Lake House and the new Terrace Pointe subdivision on Muskegon Lake.
It’s sculptor Steve Anderson’s vision of the Lyman M. Davis, the fastest and last commercial sailing ship on the Great Lakes that met a tragic end in a fiery spectacle not fitting such a noble vessel.
The sculpture has been the years-long dream of John Hermanson, whose grandfather was a captain of the Davis.
Attempts to halt the spectacle were in vain. In mid-summer 1934, workers stuffed the deck and holds with crates of dry wood and straw, firework experts lined every surface with “bombs and rockets,” and eight barrels of incendiary coal-oil was poured through the ship. 250,000 people lined the shore on the big night, the Davis was towed to its final destination and then they lit the fuse.
Built in Michigan in 1873; it was sacrificed for the entertainment of the masses when it was set afire and left to sink just off Sunnyside Park in Toronto, in 1934. +
The ship erupted in flame, sending an orange light dancing across the faces of the gathered of onlookers. Fireworks mounted to the rigging shot hundreds of metres into the air.ST Portwey @ River Thames 24-6-16 – photo by A Christy
Dock, Lock, and River – The ST Portwey is a regular sight both in West India Dock where she is based and during the summer months out on the river Thames. As she was heading down to Gravesend I decided to take a trip to see first hand this historic vessel and also to see some of the lower reaches of the Thames. >>
Stadium High School students will help re-assemble the 23-foot-long skeleton come fall Foss Waterway Seaport will hang completed skeleton from its historic trusses
“I don’t know how much ‘goo’ you’re going to find,” marine biology and oceanography instructor Rus Higley told the group before it started.
Fortunately for the diggers, most of the bones were bare. Only the flippers were covered in a soupy mixture of decomposition, eliciting scrunched-up faces and prompting people to walk away.
The bones belonged to a whale that washed up on state-owned tidelands about a mile north of the opening to Gig Harbor just before Christmas last year. Researchers towed the carcass to the Thea Foss Waterway where it was loaded on a truck to make the trip back across the Tacoma Narrows. It has spent the last six months at a Gig Harbor farm where it was buried to allow for decomposition.
Along the “Bloomin’ Adur” in Shoreham (a seaside town and port in West Sussex, England) is a unique bridge between land and sea of cobbled treasures made from other people’s trash. The obscure houseboat art collective has been growing since the end of World War II, when decommissioned military ships were retired to Shoreham’s tidal mud flats. Today there are some 50 to 60 boats to be found at the site and, since the structures are waterborne, few building regulations apply. Meaning owners can unleash their greatest structural, architectural, and artistic fancies… keep reading
Upcycled Nato-Minesweeper; now the home of Fred and Polly Cole (The Mirror)
NPR – A massive bloom of blue-green algae has hit four southern Florida counties, blanketing beaches in foul-smelling muck and raising health and environmental concerns. The bloom is caused by discharge from the polluted Lake Okeechobee, some 35 miles away.
The green goo along Florida’s “Treasure Coast” prompted Gov. Rick Scott to declare a state of emergency in Martin, St. Lucie, Lee, and Palm Beach counties earlier this week.
Nonstop Flight: How The Frigatebird Can Soar For Weeks Without Stopping
Kitty Hawk Life Saving Station:
Survival School: How To Eat Your Hiking (or Sailing) Partner
