Sailing & Maritime Thread

Northbound at Kenner Bend on Lower Mississippi River​

Oct 7, 2025

8:33

After lunch, boat walk around on the Lower Mississippi River October 8, 2025​

7:33

Sister vessels on Mississippi River waiting at river closure September 22, 2025​

6:20

Free to read / page through.

Container Ship | Cabin Tour

Oct 22, 2025
Some of you asked to see my cabin on my most recent ship, so this is just a short tour.
Enjoy️

4:57

Lotta old pics here. Click on gallery. May take a few secs to load.

Departing Southbound From St. Louis Shortly 11/8/25​

10:09

searcher said:

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I think I touched on this a few weeks back, on another thread.

Nonetheless...the Fitz matters, but the way it matters is being ignored.

It shows the deceit of Officialdom; and of how frantically people - some vested into the Narrative, some not - how hard they cling to a pleasing, if untrue, picture.

IMHO, having read up on this for 50 years (a neighbor of ours went down on it; our families weren't close but it fueled my macabre fascination)...what I've learned and come to conclude, is this:

--Fitz was overloaded. Cleveland-Cliffs' oversight agency, whoever it was, waved a magic want and thereby increased the hull's capacity. No modification had been made.

--The ship was not derelict but a lot of maintenance had been deferred. The crew had made mention of it to families, individually.

--The navigation chart the ship was using had Six Fathom Shoal marked in the wrong location. This was learned later. I'm not sure if the officers were aware of the error.

--Sitting low, with the radar out, with a bad chart - AND bobbing around in the midst of gale-force winds - they are believed to have gone right over the shoal, and probably grounded hard. With all the other commotion going on, they may not have felt it.

--Shortly later, they began a list and the captain called in the ship was taking on water. He believed, over the cargo hatches.

--Same transmission, he reported he had "a railing down." That is not a trivial event. This happens when the hull is distorted, usually because of imminent failure. A railing breaking, means the ship is hogging. A railing going slack and coming down, means the ship is sagging. Both indicate keel failure and separation of the hull.

So, overloaded, swamping, listing, and with a keel damaged or broken, the nose of the ship went into one of those giant waves' troughs; and the forces combined, probably broke the ship apart. The stern section rolled over. The forward part did not; it probably jammed right into mud at the bottom before the stern completely separated.

I do not know what improvements have been made for safety on the Great Lakes. Surely, weathertight lifeboats. Probably, more durable radar equipment, as well as sounding apparatuses. Charts need not be carried; they almost-certainly can be seen in real time, with all updates, on Wi-Fi or satellite.

The Fitzgerald is but one of many, many Great Lakes shipwrecks - many occurring about the time of the close of season, in November. The public fascination with this one of course, is due only to Gordon Lightfoot's dirge.

If you're tired of Two-Chord Gord's braying, here's a bit more melodious of a folk-style tribute.

The Start of our Passage from the Balearics to Cartagena Spain​

Nov 18, 2025
We finally are doing the sailing I really enjoy! Only making 5kts, but completely chill.

8:39

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@svpaquita

Dead man and toilet in the wheelhouse​

Nov 19, 2025

5:02

Explaining Wheelhouse Stuff During Fog Delay​

Nov 18, 2025

17:35

searcher said:

Maurice and Maralyn Bailey - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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It's stuff like that that made me give up any fantasies of sailing across the ocean, any ocean, alone or with a small crew.

That's not the only story I've read like that. Long ago I read another, of a guy who was adrift forty days or so, in a life raft with no food but one floating seawater still. He survived on what crap he could hook with a screwdriver, string and a shirt.

Wish I could remember the name or the time. But, forty days waiting for almost-certain death...no, t'anks.

Sunday Dinner with a real British Pirate - Meet John the legend!​

Nov 24, 2025
This guy is a true legend! He has a past that could fill Hollywood with content for years (but I need him to tell you).

16:28

Sailing Alone to Where the Icebergs Are Born (Greenland)​

Sep 27, 2025 GREENLAND
I'm sailing solo into Disko Bay, one of the areas with the highest iceberg concentration in Western Greenland!
Coastal Marine Litter Observatory that we take part in:https://cmlo.scidrones.com/

37:17

Happy Thanksgiving to all maritime aficionados and ship spotters.

Thankful 11/27/25​

8:16

Day 7 on the Ship: Happy Thanksgiving ​

Nov 28, 2025

6:52

Adrift: Surviving a hurricane at sea​

20 days into the journey, they were caught in a Category 4 hurricane, bringing with it 15m waves and 150mph winds. Despite courageously battling the giant waves, the Hazana was pitchpoled (rolled end-over-end) when she slipped down into a trench between waves.

The last thing Tami remembers before being knocked unconscious for 27 hours is Richard shouting: ‘Oh my God!’ as a big wave crashed down on the boat.

Her account of the events that unfolded has been made into a book, Red Sky in Mourning, and now a movie, Adrift.

We sat down with Tami to learn more about her self-rescue.

Content warning: Some people may find some of the content of this article distressing.
Read the rest:

How We Actually Stay Fit on a Boat (Habits, Routines & Nutrition)​

Dec 10, 2025

31:43

^^^
One of James Michener's last books, Journey, a subplot he intended to be part of Alaska...he wrote of a group of English nobles traveling across Canada to the Yukon for the Gold Rush. To make the nephew's fortune - at a time when the peerage biz in London was a bit light in earnings.

They had planned to camp the first winter and had an elaborate physical-fitness plan. A track they ran every morning, no matter the weather - to keep muscle tone and prevent the constipation that came from a diet of salt pork. They were actually visited by Mounties, who discovered their isolated camp, assumed they were stuck (they were) and the Mounties were amazed at their good overall shape.

That was the first winter. The following summer, everything went wrong; they did NOT get a grubstake, they had to make another winter camp with supplies low. With morale down, food low, and one death, they didn't make an effort to exercise, and were in very rough shape the following spring - where (if I recall; it was a long time ago I read it) the viceroy, leader of the expedition, had to be helped back to the railhead at Calgary - having lost all interest in gold, and lost his nephew.

The moral is...it's hard to keep up with such a PT program unless you have a way of keeping morale high also.

Interesting read for anyone interested:

searcher said:

Interesting read for anyone interested:

How To Abandon Ship : Richards, Phil,Banigan, John J. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Contents IT CAN'T HAPPEN TO ME ix SIGNALS xii INTRODUCTION 3 1. PREPARE YOURSELF 9 2. ABANDON SHIP 19 3. BUOYANCY 29 4. SWINGING OUT 34 5. LOWERING 38 6....

archive.org

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It is an interesting read. I'm in the first fifteen pages - unfortunately I have to have a live connection to read it, unfortunate since I have things to do today. I'll deal with it.

Already the authors have prepped the reader with descriptions of chaos. As a Navy victim, I had never had that level of chaos - a fire in a space used as storage for flammable packing, was the closest I came - but, also, the only time we covered abandon-ship drills was in Boot Camp.

For two years I was on an LPD, an Austin-class. The ship with a drop-fantail and a well deck, that sinks itself to get the Marine component out. We had NO training in abandoning ship - even though, at normal underway height (well-deck not flooded) the damn thing was tippy as a Weeble.

I might have been assigned a lifeboat station, I don't recall. Our instructions were to muster at our Morning Muster location - except that on that ship I was a Damage-Control Central phone talker, and I was expected to be in DCC, deep in the ship, until the damn thing rolled over and sank.

Gonna read moar. Although I think it's probably Navy propaganda and most tips probably silly. Like having school kids hide under their desks in a Nuclear-Bomb drill.

Coastal Transportation Video Series

For the different series click on to Playlists or simply check out the different vids.

They knew that ship was doomed - right from the start.

"Environmental protections" are so onerous, they probably cannot formulate a salvage plan that's cost-effective that the insurance club (in City of London, like all of them) will agree to pay. So the ship will just sit and slowly rot away - like the SS America, later American Star, that was wrecked off the coast of the Canary Islands, while under a salvage tow.

You can see the hull is broken in half, here - but that was known from about the third day the ship was aground (loaded). It's why they never did refloat it; why they off-loaded the cargo where it sat, at great cost.

Interesting read about the tug strike of '88.

Tug Strike