The lightship Swiftsure is retired at the Northwest Seaport in Seattle. She was launched in 1904 and worked on the west coast at various places as a lightship for 56 years and was retired from service in 1960.
During World War II she worked for the Coast Guard challenging vessels trying to enter San Francisco Bay.
She is looking good and is still afloat in her retirement and is a National Historic Landmark.
I saw a bunch of ships during my trip to New Orleans in April.
I saw a paddlewheeler.
And a ferry that I swear could be wider than it is long.
A pair of tugboats. It looked to me like they were pushing against the far shore. Perhaps they were trying to make the Mississippi wider? I don’t know, I’m a landlubber Okie. You tell me what they are doing.
A crewboat of some kind. Did I ever tell you about riding one of these (or something similar) on a long ride to an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Six hour boat ride, or a one hour helicopter ride. And that is why I live in Oklahoma now!
His and Her freighters of some sort. Weren’t they in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog?
I saw three ocean going cruise ships. Going the wrong way. Or at least I thought.
I saw some sleek no nonsense warships from several different nations.
What I liked best were the sailing ships from several nations in town to celebrate “Navy Week.”
Yep, sailing ships are the best. No thanks I’ll stay on the bank taking pics if you please.
I was in New Orleans this week at an energy business convention. While there the US Navy and friends showed up for a party. A party to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the war of 1812 and the writing of the Star Spangled Banner. New Orleans is the innaugral city of a three year fifteen city celebration. I mean if you are going to celebrate, you might as well start in New Orleans.
The USS Frank Mitscher, a Guided Missile Destroyer. The ship has a brand new skipper, in February this year Commander Monika Stoker assumed command of the ship. She is also the first African American woman to command an American warship.
The USS Dewert, an “Oliver Hazard Perry Class Frigate.” Reportedly in October 2011 this ship, along with a British vessel, rescued a an Italian Merchantmen from Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean.
The French Navy Germinal, a light monitoring frigate, showed up for the party also.
The USS Wasp, an Amphibious Assault Ship. It is a lot bigger than what it looks like in this photograph. This is as close as I could get.
It carries a whole bunch of Marines and their equipment. Reportedly, about 3000 sailors from the various ships had a pretty good time Tuesday night in the French Quarter.
The modern warships were great and a special to see but the big attraction was the Tall Ships that came in to celebrate also.
The Coast Guard’s WIX Eagle a training ship was there. She started out as the the German vessel, SSS Horst Wessel. Adolf Hilter attended her commissioning. The United States seized her after World War II.
The Indonesian’s sent their KRI Dewaruci, their navy’s training vessel. It also was built in Germany in the 1930’s. It
I loved the woodwork on this ship.
Ecuador sent their BAE Guayas, another training vessel. It was my favorite because of the condor below.
I just hope that all the sailors get back to their ships, the right ships.
What do you think of my new boat? You have to admit it is pretty nice. It is the HMS Laconia a former passenger liner turned armed merchantmen built in the early 1900’s.
It’s a little big to launch a lake for bass fishing and it probably doesn’t have a live well for the fish we’d catch anyway. HMS Laconia is a little pretentious for a fishing boat anyway.
It does have a Dining Saloon however. I don’t know if chicken fried steak is on the menu or not.
It doesn’t matter because it was sunk by the German submarine, U 50, pictured below six miles off Fastnet, which I think is an island just of the southern Irish coast on 25 February 1917.
Oh well, it would have been fun.
Why am I calling this boat mine? I found the coolest thing on the internet, second only to geocaching. It is called OldWeather.Org. It is a citizen science project to transcribe the old log books from all sorts of British Ships from the early part of the century and you can browse this site to know more about it. The books were written by hand in handwriting that is almost as bad as mine so they cannot just scan them into the computer. They need people to transcribe them.
It’s easy and fun and doesn’t cost anything. They give you templates and instructions on where to enter the date and the location of the ship as wells as water, air, and dew point temperatures, wind speed, and direction, and sea state. Plus you can read the log pages as your ship goes into and out of ports and loads and unloads stuff. It really is fascinating. When they started the project they had a total of 750,000 log pages they need transcribed. They also have other links involving citizen science if you want to do something else.
What is this data used for? It is for climate research to help calibrate and validate the weather models being developed today to help scientists determine just what affects are climate and how much. They didn’t have the network of weather stations back then with weather satellites. Plus Al Gore hadn’t been born yet and so they didn’t have the internet, that he built, to link all the data together. (Yeah I know, he never claimed that he built the internet.)
Go to OldWeather.Org to see how to get started.
Below is a video from their tutorial section to show how to get started.
Old Weather – Getting Started from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.
So what do you think? Give it a go. Don’t tell me you don’t have the time. You wouldn’t be reading this if you were busy.