May 20/2025: Early assessments of the apparently botched departure of the Mexican Navy tall-ship Cuauhtémoc from a Manhattan pier, leading to a fateful collision with the Brooklyn Bridge this past Saturday evening, had it as just a dope-slap nav problem. As in: those dopes should have waited until the tide and current were in their...
In what has been described as one of the biggest, most complex rescue efforts ever undertaken on the Irish coast, two Irish Coastguard helicopters, three RNLI lifeboats, and a flotilla of various other craft saved all 30 crew and trainees, most of them teenagers, off the Dutch sail-training vessel Astrid after she went up on...
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...
I'm surprised this doesn't happen all the time. I've never been aloft underway on a yacht, much less on a square-rigger. But I've watched square-rigger crews swarm aloft in harbor and, even with the ship firmly tied to a dock, my testicles have instantly shriveled at the thought of climbing out to the end of...
