More tall ships fom July 20

Canada's own Caledonia didn't look bad either. The ex trawler and research vessel, built in 1947 along corvette lines, may look a bit peculair to purists, but she certainly can sail.

Cost overruns may have bankrupted her owers, but she is still operating and does cruises on the east coast and Caribbean.

Tall Ships 2009

The weather co-operated, the sun shone, the wind blew and the tall ships turned out for a Parade of Sail.

The USCG Eagle didn't win the prize for biggest national flag - that is a toss up between Uruguay and Brazil, but she was the best looking ship in the fleet.

New bunkering tanker for Halifax

Algoma Tankers will apparently place a new tanker in service in Halifax about August 1. The ship is the Samistal Due, ex Clipper Bardolino-08, a 2999 gross tons ship, built in Turkey in 2007. She arrived at pier 25 on Tuesday July 14.
The ship will deliver bunkers to ships and other customers within the confines of Halifax harbour. She is to be renamed Algoma Dartmouth. Although she will fly the Canadian flag and carry a Canadian crew, she will not be "duty paid", and thus will have to receive permission from the Canadian Transport Agency to work in Canadian waters. She will also have to satisfy the government that no other suitable Canadian tanker is available for the work. We can assume from this that Algoma have chartered the ship for a year and not purchased it outright. The bunkering tanker NT Dartmouth, the former Imperial Dartmouth, built in Collingwood in 1970 and now operated by Northern Transportation will presumably be put out of work as a result of this development.

Westward sails

It's always been hard to get a picture of Westward - she never stays in one place for long. Built in 1961 by Abeking and Rasmussen in Lemwerder, Germany, as a yacht, but later converted to a research vessel and since 2003 as a Oceanclassroom training ship, she is one of the true beauties of the Tall Ships. The 125 footer (overall, 94 feet on deck) carries 6550 square feet of canvas.

The first of the Tall Ships to leave port, she did leave under sail, in windy and cloudy conditions.

What have we learned?

The wreck of MSC Napoli on the Devon coast of England will soon be history, and probably forgotten by most. The January 2007 event, in which a huge container ship was intentionally beached in Lyme Bay to prevent a major environmental catastrophe, should have taught governments around the world a valuable lesson.
Was any one paying attention?
The United Kingdom has a SOSREP - one person, reresenting the secretary of state, who is wholly responsible for dealing with shipwrecks and potential shipwrecks. This person has total authority over all governement agencies and resources. It is laregly because the SOSREP at the time exercised good judgement and allowed the ship to be beached, that there was minimal environmental damage from MSC Napoli. The ship had started to break up in bad weather, and was sure to be lost, but she weas beached, and her cargo salved or retrieved. Now her wreck has been removed.
Other countries have been slow to listen to the lesson of this incident, including Canada, which still has too many people who think they are in charge.
Read more on this in Piet Sink's newsletter.

Goodbye Mister Joe and Beaver Kay

After working all winter on the extension of the boardwalk at the foot of Salter Street, the crane barge Beaver Kay is leaving port in tow of Mister Joe (Capt. Cecil Watkins) with the small tug Beaver Delta II in company.

The new boardwalk will be the host to several Tall Ships this week, and has been fitted with temporary water and electrical lines (as has the entire waterfront) especially for the Tall Ships event.

TALL SHIPS AHOY!

They're heading back. Tall Ships 2009 is gearing up for the first official arrivals over the next few days. The Tall Ships website has a list of vessels, which may or may not be up to date, but it looks like about 40 total, but with only about half a dozen class A (i.e. big) boats.

One that won't be here is the Sherman Zwicker, seen in this photo in the Parade of Sail 2007.