Got Internet, got News

1955-2011

Having free Panamanian supplied WiFi means I actually get to know a little about what’s going on in the world.
He was definitely a game changer and visionary. RIP
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Really interesting New York Times article on Somalia pirates and the taking of the British yacht Lynn Rival
Taken by Pirates

Navies from more than two dozen countries patrol Somalia’s coast, burning around a million dollars of fuel per day.
……

Paul figures it was costing Buggas nearly $20,000 a month to hold them hostage: with around $300 per day spent on khat; $100 a day on goats; maybe a couple hundred more for tea, sugar, powdered milk, fuel, ammunition and other supplies. Then there’s payroll— in the Chandlers’ case, cash for the pirate raiding party and their 30 henchmen who rotated as guards on shore. On top of this come the translators, who charge a hefty fee to interact with the hostages and negotiate a ransom.

After Somalia’s central government collapsed 20 years ago, the 1,900-mile coastline became an unpatrolled free-for-all, with foreign fishing trawlers descending to scoop up Somalia’s rich stocks of tuna, shark, whitefish, lobster and deep-water shrimp. With no authorities to fear, the fishing boats were especially unscrupulous and used heavy steel drag nets that wiped out the marine habitat for years. Somali piracy was born when disgruntled fishermen armed themselves and started attacking the foreign trawlers. They soon realized they could attack any ship and get a ransom for holding the crew hostage.

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You’ve heard the saying ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help you’. Well looks like Google has taken over that position: ‘Trust me, I’m from Google’
Google's "Trusted Stores"
Paul

Sunnyside Up makes her transit of the Canal

We were scheduled to pickup our advisor at 5:45am. The view above is looking up the Canal (north) toward the Bridge of the Americas as the rain comes in. Needless to say the advisor was rescheduled for 9am, not because of the weather – just because they wanted to get us up early. We drank coffee in the meantime.
And watched the weather get a little more rambunctious.
Freddie, our helpful advisor, showed up. Freddie’s day job is running a Canal dredge.

Freddie’s day job dredge

As soon as Freddie showed up we took off for the first pair of locks, Mira Flores. We were scheduled for a ‘special lock’, which basically means there are no big ships going through. In our case it was us and the high-tech Canal tug Changuinola. The Changuinola ran along near us in the Canal as we made our way to the first locks. He decided to give us some entertainment along the way.

Here’s the Changuinola doing 360’s in the Canal, just to play with us. These tugs can turn, at high speed, full 360’s. They run forward or backward equally as fast. You’ll probably have to click on the above pic to see the spins. This is what you do when you have a Joystick and 5,845 horsepower. She has 30,000 gallons of fuel and almost 2,000 gallons of fire suppressant foam.

  Here we are side tied to the tug - inspecting a little bit of a rough landing.

Coming into the channel just behind us was the USS Rentz (FFG-46) an Oliver Hazard Perry-class of guided missile frigate, homeport Naval Base Dan Diego.

The Rentz appears to be setting up for a boarding and subsequent attack on the Peace Boat. The Peace Boat is an international relief boat http://www.peaceboat.org/english/

Heading into the locks

When you center-lock in the locks there are 4 line handlers on the sidewalls that throw a tag line down with a big monkey fist on the end. You take the line and tie it to your heavy 125 foot dock lines and they pull them back up to the pier. The bull's-eye target and the high-bar is where the line handlers practice their marksmanship. Twice a year they have a contest.

Here’s a car carrier and his escort tug passing us along with a southbound sailboat in his wake.

This is the maintenance yard in Gamboa near the Continental Divide on the Canal. The floating crane is the Titan, one of the worlds largest. It was built in Germany during WWII and confiscated as war booty by the US. It worked in Long Beach for 50 years and then came to the Canal in 1999. It does an easy job of picking up the lock gates and moving them for maintenance.

We got to Lake Gatun in the center of Canal about 2:30pm, normally early enough to lock down to the Atlantic side. This day they were only locking ships up in the afternoon. So we side tied to this giant rubber mooring, went swimming in the lake and drank beer.
The calm of sunrise on Lake Gatun rudely interrupted by the screams of the howler monkeys.
It wasn’t till 3:00pm that we got our new pilot the next day. He was a young guy, relaxed in his shorts and ready to move. We ended up as the last lock down before they started only doing lock ups.
Passing the tug assisting the ship we will lock down with.
Raining pretty hard as we entered the last set of 3 locks.
Here’s a set of deck loaded power boats taking the easy way through the Canal southbound.
About 30 minutes after you pass through the last locks you enter the inner anchorage in Cristobal. Here’s a Texaco tanker getting some major welding done – you can see the cutting torch sparks in the blow up.
I’m crewing on Kokomo’s transit on Monday. Pretty soon I’ll have this down.
Paul

When having Nymphs on board is not a Good Thing

You’d think a young, engaging stud like myself, with the love of my life gone to the darkness of Africa for months on end, would be excited to have nymphs onboard. It turns out that this may be a bad thing.

Somewhere in the life cycle of a cockroach you find these little, immature roaches just waiting to take over the lead of the herd.  The COMBAT Source Kill MAX syringe is good stuff. The active ingredient is Fipronil. They say if you look close enough, it looks like this:
Once a roach moves through the gel and gets any on it or in it, they slide back through the crevices of the boat to their den of inequity. There, just the slightest amount of death gel can take out all of the coconspirators. Unfortunately the commercial spraying of the stuff onto crops may also be partially responsible for Bee colony collapse.  They use it in flee control products and against wasps and 250 various crop insects.
I did round one and didn’t see a single roach for 10 days. Then I’d see one nymph each night as I snuck up on their hangouts in the dark. Session two of COMBAT Max began. Nothing for another 10 days. Then just when I was going to declare victory, I tore apart the back of settee in the dark last night to find the tin-foil and I saw one, very young and tender nymph saunter off.  Session 3 of the COMABT wizard had begun.

Just so you don’t think that I spend all of my time fantasizing about six legged nymphs:
Jeorgia next to her own private island beach in the Las Perlas. Nobody around, ‘cept the whale, for miles.
Paul