Maritime Law
This is a short video on Maritime Law. The video is a short overview of Maritime Law for non-lawyers. It covers things like what country is a baby born a citizen of, short hint, in some cases the baby is a citizen of the country the ship they on is registered in!
Why the South China Sea is so confusing and difficult to fathom is also covered.
Life-Jackets Float, You don’t
Last Saturday as we were putting out the fenders at the end of the sail, I heard a splash followed by a couple of expletive deleted words, a quick look around the boat indicated we were short one crew member.
One of the crew had dropped a fender overboard and dove in after it, well actually made a lunge for the dropped fender and slid out under the lifelines about mid-ship and into the water.
French Lighthouse in a Storm
An amazing Four and a Half minute video showing the power and terror of the ocean and the lighthouses that stand to protect mariners.
The Lighthouses in the video are identified as being in the Iroise Sea in Brittany on the West coast of France. Wikipedia describes this area as one of the most dangerous seas in Europe. Looking at the video I can understand why the area got it’s reputation for rough and dangerous.
Several years ago I traveled through the area on a 62 foot former Swedish Coast Guard Auxiliary Icebreaker Patrol boat (see Not a Sailing Trip ), I am quite glad that the weather was nicer and the seas much better than in the video.
Seattle Harbor Patrol – A patrol boat from the early years
The Seattle Harbor Patrol traces it’s ancestory back to 1877 when the Harbor Department was established. It was ran by the Port Warden an elected official.
In 1912 they had one boat.
This is a nice video tracing the history of the Harbor Patrol from 1877 to the present, it is just over eight minutes and is a nice watch.
Thanks GaRRy for the link.
View from the Bridge Operator Tower on the Fremont Bridge as the Duck Dodge herd head toward the first evening opening
Recently I had a chance to visit the Bridge Operator Tower on the Fremont Bridge and talk with some operators about the challenges they face daily balancing the needs of vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists and vessels (both recreational and commercial). I was also able to observe the Fremont Bridge in operation and see first hand some of the many daily challenges faced by the Bridge Operators.
The Fremont Bridge is almost 100 years old having opened on June 17, 1917. The Fremont Bridge is one of five bridges between the entrance to Shilshole Bay and Lake Washington. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and is a Seattle city Landmark.
This a big leap forward in helping to improve chart accuracy, Some charting software vendors will be adding the ability for boaters to enable the saving of GPS and depth information into a database – the data is anonymous with no boat specific identification information. But the data will be used to help find areas where the charted depth is not the same as what boaters are seeing, NOAA can then send a survey party out to survey the area and correct the chart.
By Lt. Adam Reed, Integrated Oceans and Coastal Mapping (IOCM) Assistant Coordinator
The United States has about 3,400,000 square nautical miles of water within our coastal and Great Lakes jurisdiction. Coast Survey, who is responsible for charting that vast area, averages about 3,000 square nautical miles of hydrographic surveying each year. The data collected by those surveys update over a thousand NOAA charts. However, hydrographic surveys are expensive and laborious, and so Coast Survey directs them toward the highest priority sites, which leaves many coastal areas without updates for many years.
Coast Survey may soon get new sources of information, provided voluntarily by mariners, which will alert cartographers to areas where shoaling and other changes to the seafloor have made the chart inaccurate.
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Launch Like A Boss, The quick and cool way to get your sailboat into the water.
This has to be one of the best how to launch a sailboat videos around, no big errors just the coolest quickest and smoothest launch ever.
This video was made for AV-OG-TIL, a Norwegian NGO, working to reduce the harmful effects of alcohol. The aim is to raise awareness around the dangers of intoxication while operating a boat.
Launching is an art form best practiced sober.
Mariner Fatigue by Lou Vest (Click Here to read the story behind the photo)
Tired, lack of sleep and environmental stress factors (sun, heat, cold, vessel movement) are often overlooked by recreational boaters as well as professional mariners and this can contribute to accidents on the water.
A person who has been awake for 17 hours faces the same risk of a crash as a person who has a BAC reading of 0.05 g/100ml and those who are awake for 24 hours will have a driving performance similar to a person who has a BAC of 0.1 g/100ml. – Adelaide Centre for Sleep Research
If being tired is equivalent to being drunk – why does shipping culture equate working hard with not resting?
With all of the studies that have been done on fatigue in the past 80 years, it would make sense to have a consensus about how much rest is necessary to avoid it being a contributory factor in accidents. The only result that is seen time and time again is that fatigue can be catastrophic.
