LIVE TESTIMONY at the U.S. Coast Guard hearings into the loss of HMS Bounty is wrapping up this week. That and the recent publication of an excellent investigative story in Outside magazine at last make it possible to hazard some answers to the questions that have been nagging me about the tall ship's tragic demise...

I'M NOT TOO UNHAPPY about the fact that I'll be spending next week at the Miami International Boat Show (you can look for reports right here, of course), but if I wasn't, I'm thinking I might be in Portsmouth, Virginia, instead. I've been very interested in the many questions raised by the sinking of HMS...

AS I NOTED in my last post on the loss of HMS Bounty during Hurricane Sandy, one of the big unanswered questions is: why was the ship taking on so much water? That she was leaking enough to sink is especially puzzling in that just 11 days earlier she'd been relaunched at Boothbay Harbor Shipyard...

SAY WHAT??? Has my esteemed SAILfeed colleague, the mysterious Mariner, been spending too much time sniffing go-juice fumes? I eagerly dove into his post yesterday, in which he hailed and linked to "the first detailed journalistic account" of the loss of HMS Bounty, but was sorely disappointed by what I found. The account in question,...

Yesterday was the second anniversary of the sinking of the Canadian school ship Concordia, a tragedy I will always relate to the controversial sinking just over 50 years ago of Chris Sheldon's school ship Albatross. This is a story that ties into a strong tide that has long flowed through my mind. It in fact...

Canada's Transportation Safety Board has finally released its report on the loss of the school ship Concordia, the 188-foot square-rigger that capsized and sank off the coast of Brazil back in February of last year. I was more than a little surprised by its conclusions: a) there was no microburst, as was reported by the...

Some spectacular videos of the awful flooding in Brisbane, Australia, have been posted online in the last week. It's one thing to hear or read about these sorts of catastrophes in the news, but when you watch home videos of what's going on you get a much more personal view of things. As a cruising...

Those who followed the near-tragic loss of the Canadian school ship Concordia (on which I blogged back in February) will probably want to check out this 22-minute documentary that aired yesterday on CBC's Land & Sea program. To refresh some recollections: Concordia, a 188-foot square-rigger with 48 high-school students aboard, was sunk by a microburst...