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By Rosemary Parker - MLive
 

What happened to the two-masted schooner that caused it to sink off the shores of South Haven more than 100 years ago ?

Which vessel might it be, of the many that sunk during those dangerous times ?

Ken Fagerman, vice president of the Southwest Michigan Underwater Preserve, said those are among the questions his group hopes to answer over the coming months as it examines artifacts and remains of the 80-by-20-foot wooden ship found covered in the sands at the bottom of Lake Michigan approximately 5 miles out from South Haven in the protected waters of the preserve.

In 2011, the Michigan Underwater Divers club announced that an 1800’s vintage shipwreck had been located; the preserve has completed an initial inventory and surveyed the wreck site, Fagerman said.

Right now the investigation is focusing on two possibilities -- a vessel that went down in 1863 with seven crewmen lost, or another, earlier, wreck in which all on board were lost, he said.

SWMUP has partnered with the South Haven Maritime Museum in the effort to identify and preserve the wreck, he said.

"Preservation is part of our ethic," Fagerman said.

It's also the law. The Abandoned Shipwreck Act and the state's Aboriginal Records and Antiquities law make abandoned shipwrecks and artifacts the property of the State of Michigan and provide criminal penalties for the removal of artifacts.

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From gCaptain
 

Australian billionaire and political-hopeful Clive Palmer on Tuesday offered the first glimpse into his Blue Star Line’s Titanic II replica project and the design is so authentic that it even comes with space for steerage passengers and a special space for the correct amount of safety equipment.

The design, developed by Finish-based Deltamarin, comes fully equipped with nine decks reminicent of the original, included with the famous black hull, four smokestacks and, of course, the Grand Staircase.

Also included, is an added ‘Safety Deck’ to house the required number of lifeboats and other safety equipement otherwise missing on the first addition.

Sticking with the authentic theme, Blue Star Lines said from deck D upwards Deltamarin’s design has managed to keep the public rooms, passenger stairs, cabins and other features in similar locations as in the original ship.

So authentic, in fact, that the ships accommodations will even be separated into first, second and even third class digs.

“The Preliminary General Arrangement plans depict the original separation between first, second and third class, which will be kept in the ship’s final design,” Palmer said.

He added, “To ensure Titanic II is compliant with all current safety and construction regulations, a new ‘Safety Deck’ has been inserted between D and C decks and will feature proper lifeboats, safety chutes or slides as well as new common public rooms.

New escape stairs, service elevators, air conditioning room and similar functions have also been added and the inclusions of main fire zones have been designed so that they have minimum disturbance on public rooms.

G deck has also been re-designed to now feature crew accommodation, laundry, stores and machinery.”

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By Paul Conner - Daily Caller
 

With 34 Republican senators now opposing a United Nations effort to regulate international waters, the Law of the Sea treaty effectively has no way forward in the U.S. Senate.

Republican Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Rob Portman of Ohio, Mike Johanns of Nebraska and Johnny Isakson of Georgia joined 30 other GOP members in agreeing to vote against the U.N. treaty.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint helped lead the conservative effort on Capitol Hill to rally senators against the treaty, which has been pushed by chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry and notably backed by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.

Business groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as well as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also support the Law of the Sea treaty, which would give unprecedented taxing and permitting authority over activity on international waters to a U.N.-created agency.

“Proponents of the Law of the Sea treaty aspire to admirable goals, including codifying the U.S. Navy’s navigational rights and defining American economic interests in valuable offshore resources.

But the treaty’s terms reach well beyond those good intentions,” Ayotte and Portman wrote in a Monday letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
 

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By Kaitlin Mulhere - Sentinel Source

Underwater exploration generally draws up images of ocean floors, shipwrecks and lost treasures.

Yet the Granite State also has mysteries of the deep, or in this case, mysteries of 20 feet beneath the Connecticut River.

Local divers recently discovered pieces of a suspension bridge built in 1888 that connected Chesterfield and Brattleboro more than 100 years ago. The bridge was washed out during a flood in 1936, and has since lain untouched on the river bottom.

For decades, motorboats likely have sped over the remains of the New Hampshire side of the bridge; fishermen may have dropped their lines within yards of the spot where pieces of the bridge lie in the sediment below the surface.

But two months ago, the Brattleboro Fire Department’s Dive Rescue Team was training in the area when the dive boat’s sonar picked up a large mass underneath the water.

Robert D. Cornieller said they thought it was a sunken boat and planned to come back to the spot to check it out at another time.

When Cornieller and Matt B. Hubbard, both members of the dive team, did return, they weren’t sure exactly what they had found.

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By Bill Trotter - Bangor Daily News

Twice a day, 365 days a year for more than 60 years, the tide has come in and then drained out again, washing mud, brine and small aquatic life forms over its timbers.

Exactly how long the ship’s skeleton has been lying in the mud along this hidden section of MDI’s shoreline is unknown, but this past week a group of people have been making the short trek through the woods from the road each day to learn what they can about it.

Led by marine archaeologist Franklin Price, who grew up in the Tremont village of Bernard, about 20 people have been measuring and diagramming its decayed ribs and keel.

At the request of Acadia National Park, which has an easement along the shoreline where the wreck rests, its location is not being disclosed by the Bangor Daily News in order to help prevent people from tampering with the site.

On Saturday, seven people, including four young interns, were taking photographs and measurements of the timbers under the hot sun. As they drew and diagrammed the pieces protruding from the mud, they discussed how they likely were fastened together.

“I don’t know what happened here,” Price told Christa Shere, a College of the Atlantic student interning on the project. “I don’t know if these two pieces were actually in this side when this thing flipped over and broke and fell probably this way.”

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From gCaptain

Murphy’s Law was proven once again this weekend as the Noble Discoverer, a Shell-contracted drill ship destined to start drilling in arctic waters, encountered ground tackle issues of some sort last night and wound up dangerously close to the shore of Hog Island in Unalaska Bay near Dutch Harbor.

The state of Alaska has a number of different anchorages available in Unalaska Bay depending on the gross tonnage of a given vessel.  

Wide Bay or Broad Bay (directly to the south of Wide Bay) are two designated anchorages for vessels greater than 20,000 gross tons, however the anchorage between Hog Island and Amaknak Island is the likely place where the Noble Discoverer was anchored.  

This anchorage is rated for vessels between 10,000 and 19,999 GT which draw 30 feet or less.

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By Ian Holliday - The Westerly Sun

By Dr. Robert Ballard’s reckoning, the Exploration Vessel Nautilus, at the height of its annual expedition to the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean Sea, discovers a new ancient shipwreck roughly once every 11 hours.

“Over the last several years, we’ve discovered more ancient shipwrecks than anyone else on the planet,” Ballard said. “We’ve sort of figured it out.”

This summer, Ballard and the Nautilus team will return to the coasts of Turkey and Cyprus for another season of research and discovery, and as always, they’ll be bringing audiences at Mystic Aquarium and around the world with them through the Nautilus Live Theater.

Now in its third year, the 50-seat Nautilus Live Theater at the aquarium’s new Ocean Exploration Center hosts six shows a day, during which audiences at the aquarium connect live with the crew of the Nautilus to learn about the expedition’s latest discoveries.

From RT

The mysterious disc-shaped object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea could be a relic from a giant World War II device placed there by the Nazis to disrupt Soviet submarine navigation.

The object may be the concrete anchor of the device, which also had to be fitted with stainless steel mesh, Swedish naval officer and warfare history expert Anders Autellus told Swedish newspaper Expressen.

It would interfere with submarine radar signals and make them crash.

The mesh itself may well have eroded away over the decades, but the images of the object made by the Ocean X team exploring it show what appear to be holes, where it was attached to the foundation, he added.

Stefan Hogeborn, a member of the team, concurs, saying their find is located just under an important shipping route. German vessels carried many goods important for the war effort during the war, and Soviet submarines sneaking from the Gulf of Finland into the Baltic Sea targeted them.

If the theory is true, the trap may be an important historical find, but there is evidence against it too.

The 60-meter object studied by Ocean X is way larger than what Germans and some other warring nations deployed during the World War II. Peter Lindberg, another member of the team, says he still believes the object is a natural formation.

The “Baltic UFO” was discovered in May last year through sonar imaging technology.

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