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From RT

The four major Russian Navy fleets will hold a joint exercise in late January in the Mediterranean and Black seas. It will be the biggest such event in decades.

Commands for the Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific fleets have been preparing for the exercises since December of last year, the Russian Defense Ministry has announced.

Warships detached for the event are currently sailing to those regions.

“The primary goal of the exercise is to train issues regarding formation of a battle group consisting of troops of different branches outside of the Russian Federation, planning of its deployment and managing a coordinated action of a joint Navy group in accordance with a common plan,” the ministry’s information department explained.

The exercise will include several scenarios, including the loading of amphibious troops from an unprepared coast in the Northern Caucasus onto transport vessels.

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From Hydro International

JW Fishers, USA, has added a new high-frequency side scan system to their line.

The 1200kHz sonar produces detailed images of even small and soft targets such as old wooden wrecks, areas of scattered debris, or a drowning victim.

The new sonar is available as a single-frequency system or a dual-frequency side scan with two sets of transducers in one towfish.

Putting two sets in one fish provides versatility allowing the operator to switch between frequencies at any time during operation. The lower frequency is capable of scanning long ranges, but with less resolution.

When the 1200kHz was towed over a bicycle that had been disposed of in a waterway (inset), the bike’s frame and wheels were clearly visible, as well as the seat and other features.

The two frequencies available for coupling with the 1200kHz in a dual-frequency system are the 600kHz and the 100kHz.

The 600kHz provides a combination of range and resolution with a maximum scan of 200 feet per side (400 foot swath), yet with the capability of detecting small targets.

The 100kHz has the longest range, up to 2,000 feet per side (4,000 foot swath), making it ideal for scanning large areas when searching for big targets such as downed aircraft or sunken ships.

By Kimberly Blair - PNJ

An avid snorkeler all of his life, Robert Turpin dreamed of discovering one of the many shipwrecks sprinkled on the bottom of local bays and the Gulf of Mexico — the legacies of Pensacola’s rich maritime past.

“Our waters are filled with shipwrecks, most of them unknown or undiscovered,” said Turpin, Escambia County’s marine resources division manager.

“The possibility of discovering one is there anytime you go into the water, particularly after a storm.

Still, that possibility is rare for recreational snorkelers.

But thanks to $7,000 from the county and help from the Florida Public Archeology Network and University of West Florida’s marine archeology program, snorkelers will at the very least get to explore a replica of an ancient shipwreck.

Turpin is overseeing the installation of the replica at a snorkeling reef in Santa Rosa Sound off Park West at Pensacola Beach.

On Friday, Turpin and county contractors began constructing the replica to provide an opportunity for the public to see what it feels like to snorkel or scuba dive the remnants of a centuries-old sunken galleon.

The goal, beyond tugging at one’s imagination about finding pirate treasure, is to spark interest and appreciation in Pensacola’s rich nautical heritage and drum up eco-tourism, Turpin said.

From RT

Super-modern, powerful and almost noiseless Russian nuclear submarine Vladimir Monomakh has been put in water to become the third ship of the Borei project.

The cruiser is about to begin sea trials and mooring to become fully operational in 2013.

Vladimir Monomakh was laid down at Russia’s largest shipbuilding complex Sevmash, located on the shores of the White Sea in the town of Severodvinsk in northern Russia on March 19, 2006 – the 100th anniversary of the Russian submarine fleet.

It belongs to a class of missile strategic submarine cruisers with a new generation of nuclear reactor, which allows the submarine to dive to a depth of 480 meters.

It can spend up to three months in autonomous navigation and, thanks to the latest achievements in the reduction of noise, it is almost silent compared to previous generations of submarines.

The submarine is armed with the new missile system, which has from 16 to 20 solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles Bulava (SS-NX-30 by NATO classification).

The rocket is able to overcome any prospective missile defense system.

On August 27, 2011, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on a successful test of Bulava to investigate its maximum range.

The missile was launched from the White Sea, flew 9,300km in just 33 minutes, and then fell in the specified area in the Pacific Ocean.

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Photo James Delgado

By Kaimi Rose Lum - Province Town

For a tantalizing few hours, on a minus tide around the time of November’s new moon, the sandbars off Head of the Meadow Beach opened up to reveal a rusty secret. Maybe only a few seagulls were in on it.

Then Nancy Bloom came along.

A photographer, Bloom often looks to the water for subjects to shoot.

On this bright fall afternoon, as she and her husband were pulling into the Head of the Meadow parking lot, her gaze went straight to the metal hulk that was jutting out of the shallows — a ragged heap of iron, slimy with seaweed, 25 feet wide and about 20 feet from shore.

“I’ve been going to that beach for over 20 years and have never seen anything like it before,” said Bloom.

The ruin was the wreck of the Frances, a German ship that ran aground on the Truro shore 140 years ago.

On her way to Boston from the Far East, laden with tin and sugar, the 199-foot, three-masted bark sailed into a winter storm as she was rounding the Cape and sank on Dec. 27, 1872.

Her crew was rescued by the men from the newly established Highland Life-Saving Station. Salvagers removed as much of the cargo as they could and left the vessel to rot in the sand.

In the century and a half since then, the iron-hulled Frances has surfaced from time to time, exposed by a dead low tide or the scouring of a storm. Winds and tides cooperated in the wreck’s November unveiling.

“It was a [new] moon that night, it was a minus tide, and we had just had the two storms — Sandy and the nor’easter after that,” said Bloom, who discovered the shipwreck on Nov. 12, a clear day with hardly a ripple of a breeze to trouble the waters around it.

She photographed it that Monday and returned to the site on Tuesday, only to find the view of the wreck impaired by rain and wind.

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From The Daily Record

More than 20 of the country’s sunken relics of the sea have been mapped by a diver then turned into undersea landscapes by an artist.

Rod Macdonald, one of the country’s best known divers, says the sea is revealing more details of the sunken ships as they erode.

He has surveyed and researched 25 lying in Scottish waters for his new book, Great British Shipwrecks.

Rod provides a dramatic account of the ships’ time afloat and their eventual sinking, with each wreck being illustrated by marine artist Robert Ward, of Muchalls, Aberdeenshire.

His journey starts with the famous shipwrecks at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands – where the German fleet was scuttled in 1919.

Also included is the legendary WWI British cruiser HMS Hampshire, on which War Secretary Lord Kitchener perished on a voyage to Russia in 1916.

It rests in over 200 feet of water off Marwick Head to the north west of Orkney.

The famous West Coast shipwrecks ,such as the steamships Thesis, Hispania and Shuna, and cargo ship Rondo in the Sound of Mull are featured.

There are the renowned wrecks of the Dutch steamship SS Breda, lost near Oban in 1940, and the WWII minelayer HMS Port Napier off Skye.

Rod also reveals the haunting remains of HMS Pathfinder, the first Royal Navy warship to be sunk by a U-boat torpedo during WWI. It lies in the Forth.

Rod, 53 said: “The authorities at first attempted to cover up the true cause of the sinking.

“They feared the affect that knowledge of the loss of such a ship to a U-boat torpedo would have because it revealed just how vulnerable to torpedo attack British warships were.

“Pathfinder was thus reported, at first, to have been mined. The Admiralty came to an agreement with the Press Bureau, which allowed for the censoring of all reports.

But other newspapers soon published an eyewitness account from an Eyemouth fisherman who helped in the rescue and confirmed rumours a submarine had been responsible, rather than a mine.

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By Christine Davis - Palm Beach Daily News

When the American-owned slave ship named the Peter Mowell ran ashore and ripped apart on July 25, 1860, the 129-ton, 88-foot schooner left behind its fragments in the silent gullies and craggy rocks at Lynyard Cay in the Abacos.

Of the 400 people aboard, 387 — many quite young — clambered safely ashore. And thanks to fate, the 96 men, 37 women, and 256 children were not to be sold as slaves.

Saved by early salvager Ridley Pinder and other wreckers from Cherokee Sound, they were some of the last of the 37,000 African-born immigrants rescued in the Bahamas. Their descendants most likely make their homes there today.

But what was left of the ship intrigued archaeologist Michael Pateman of the Nassau-based Antiquities, Monuments & Museums Corp. of the Bahamas and archaeologist Corey Malcom from the Key West-based Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society.

They also wondered what happened to its human cargo, crew and wreckers ? Where are their descendants, and what stories do they have to tell ?

On the 152nd anniversary of the wreck, Pateman and Malcom partnered with William Mathers of Lake Worth-based Atlantic Sea Resources and set out to see for themselves.

Using coordinates recorded in a letter from the Bahamian governor of the time, Charles Bayley, they returned to the site and spotted piles of ballast stones scattered along the shoreline, as well as encrusted copper nails and spikes that over time had become concretized together.

The rest of the Peter Mowell was gone. Reusable objects and materials had been salvaged by Pinder and the other wreckers, but the ship had broken apart and washed away.

From the Associated Press

From sunken steamboats to a millennium-old map engraved in rock, the drought-drained rivers of the nation's midsection are offering a rare and fleeting glimpse into years gone by.

Lack of rain has left many rivers at low levels unseen for decades, creating problems for river commerce and recreation and raising concerns about water supplies and hydropower if the drought persists into next year, as many fear.

But for the curious, the receding water is offering an occasional treasure trove of history.

An old steamboat is now visible on the Missouri River near St. Charles, Mo., and other old boats nestled on river bottoms are showing up elsewhere.

A World War II minesweeper, once moored along the Mississippi River as a museum at St. Louis before it was torn away by floodwaters two decades ago, has become visible -- rusted but intact.

Perhaps most interesting, a rock containing what is believed to be an ancient map has emerged in the Mississippi River in southeast Missouri.

The rock contains etchings believed to be up to 1,200 years old.

It was not in the river a millennium ago, but the changing course of the waterway now normally puts it under water -- exposed only in periods of extreme drought.

Experts are wary of giving a specific location out of fear that looters will take a chunk of the rock or scribble graffiti on it.

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