By Michael Carr - We were all beyond exhausted. Muscle memory and caffeine were keeping us going. And now I was certainly going to jail when all I had wanted to do was wash the sticky, smelly mud from the Gulf of Mexico off our tug’s deck. “Really?” I thought to myself. This guy wearing a uniform, with a badge, weapon, and big radio on his belt was going to arrest me. “OK, … [Read more...]
The Rescue: Maersk Montana Rescues Survivor of La Belle Vie
By Steve Miller, Third Officer, M/V Maersk Montana - “Let me know when he’s aboard!” came the voice through the handheld radio. It was the voice of the Captain, as everyone knew. “Stop the engine!” the Captain said again, this time shouting through the bridge door from the port wing. “Stop the engine!” I shouted back. It was fully dark now, the ship’s deck lighting … [Read more...]
Sailing Around the World, Alone…The Story of Captain Joshua Slocum
Solitude at Sea Three years, 30,000 miles The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum by Geoffrey Wolff - Reviewed by John Rousmaniere, edited by Gene Epstein, Barrons Anybody hoping for a happier second act in life will find inspiration—as well as caution—in the story of Captain Joshua Slocum (1844-1908). Praised by Theodore Roosevelt as the hero … [Read more...]
“By Guess or by God:” Catastrophe In The Heart of the Sea
by Colin D. Dewey In Nantucket, on Aug 5, 1819, the ship Essex: 87 feet at waterline, 238 tons, sailed. The Essex, an old, tired, ship, began what was planned as a routine two or three year whaling voyage: and the story began the way sea stories have always begun: like Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells it in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 'The ship was … [Read more...]
The Deep – Based on a True Story of One Man’s Survival
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2cXyRli7R4 Based on an astonishing true incident that took place on the frigid seas off Iceland in 1984, The Deep fashions a modern-day everyman myth about the sole survivor of a shipwreck, whose superhuman will to survive made him both an inexplicable scientific phenomenon and a genuine national hero. One of the most anticipated Nordic films … [Read more...]