Cruise Ship Stranded in Gulf of Mexico

Carnival Triumph Stranded in Gulf of Mexico

Unfortunately your browser does not support IFrames. The ship is being slowly towed to shore and is expected to dock in Mobile, Ala., on Thursday if weather permits. The vessel is without air conditioning, many working toilets and some restaurant service. Passengers, many who are sleeping in tents on deck, have told ABC News the smell on the ship is foul. The head of Carnival Cruise Lines said the British-U.S.-owned company was working hard to ensure the thousands of passengers stranded on the disabled ship were as comfortable as possible while the vessel was being towed to a port in Alabama. "I need to apologize to our guests and to our families that have been affected by a very difficult situation," Carnival Cruise Lines president and CEO Gerry Cahill said at a news conference Tuesday evening. It was the first time since a fire erupted in Triumph's engine room Sunday, knocking out its four engines, that a company representative had spoken publicly. The Triumph, with roughly 4,200 people on board, was left bobbing like a 100,000-ton cork for more than 24 hours. Giant sea-faring tugboats then hooked up to the ship and began towing the nearly 900-foot-long ship to land. The picture and the video are entirely from the ABC News , as well as are the news I … [Read more...]

A revolution in sailing – Hydroptere

the hydroptere, from the air

I thought to creating a new category for the blog, a News category, with miscellanea posts from the yachting world. I receive a lot of news by mail. I also receive a lot of propositions for event coverage which sometimes is not related to the marine world. Remember that I'm a ship engineer. I can and I like to read about an Auto Saloon in general, but it's not the purpose of this blog, except for certain SEO reasons. I'll be happy if the proposers would bother to explain me in a little bit more detail how they like to be represented on this blog, and I'm not talking of banners here, they have their price of course, and they have some limits. I'm talking about contextual linking, or articles. I don't lack subjects, and my subjects aren't quite covering racing events, I'm preoccupied more of the leisure aspect of owning a yacht, or the marine regulations, or the ownership exchanges, selling techniques, buying techniques, this sort of stuff. The News category will cover nautical world news, yachting and charter saloons, expos and events. Sometimes I'll review companies if they need this. Today I want to say a few words about a revolutionary vehicle on sea, if I can name it so, a "hydrofoil", named hydroptere by his creator. Hydroptere rhymes with helicopter, which means … [Read more...]

The Broker Who Went broke

Golf in Mediterranean Sea

Looking through some important yachting sites, related to brokerage, brokers, companies and almost everything related to yachts in general, I discovered with great sadness that the company of which co-founder I was, disappeared altogether from the market. It was expected, only I wouldn't ever thought it was going to happen so soon. A few months ago, still, the remaining guys were paying top dollar advertising around, thing I haven't advised at the time I was still in charge. It was hard to manage, and I'm gonna tell you why, on the next lines, here. I was in a zone with a tremendously beautiful climate. Mediterranean covered by low mountains, oranges with olive trees and a lot of other fruits considered exotic even a few hundred miles north, :). At the end of the seventies, last century, of course, beginning of the eighties, British owned and French owned yachts, along with some Dutch and German ones, discovered the savage golfs of the area. They threw anchor and started to trade with the locals, for fresh food. The locals started to organize themselves, so a lot of small restaurants were created, almost from scratch. The guys were barely alphabetized and the main revenue was coming from the almonds (free for them, the trees won't need even to be watered in the long days … [Read more...]

History of this blog

A cutter created by John Gale Alden in 1940

Editing through the first posts SEO section, one of the most difficult tasks I've done since the re-opening, or better said, the re-launching of this blog, I've seen how messy was the Google acquired Blogspot model. I hardly came to stabilize a font, any point changing, changed everything, and so on. When I transferred the XML file here, I have had the unpleasant surprise to see that what I thought were "tags" on blogspot, were actually instead of "categories", and that made the editing a little confusing at first. After that, I realized I'm on Wordpress, on the best framework ever invented, with my favorite theme (child theme, actually, but it matters only if you'll choose an offer from the blue tab on top of the page. A very useful plugin, which unfortunately you can't find anymore in this form. There are like it, on the market, there is The Hello Bar, or other, I'm not sure, but they're bounded somehow to a third part. This one is simple and totally dependent on you. Of course there are third parties helping you to customize it, to give it texture and colour, but they're related with browser addons,  I'm talking now of Mozilla Firefox, which is continuously evolving. Sometimes, this may become counterproductive. Not all the ultra useful addons, keep the upgrading speed. … [Read more...]