Running aground was one of the major causes of shipwrecks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Entering New York Harbor, for example, required a sailing vessel to make a long funnel-like approach. According to Dr. Dennis Noble, writing in his book A LEGACY: THE UNITED…
Posts tagged as “Capt. Bob Cerullo”
New York harbor was teaming with tugs, barges, ferries, sightseeing boats, and the added excitement of the arrival of the SS United States. We were traveling south, headed for Brooklyn on our way home from a boating vacation on Lake Champlain. Moran tugs were getting…
When the topic of the Panama Canal comes up, the last name mentioned is probably Balboa. Yet in 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama and discovered it to be only a narrow strip of land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.…
A New York Boat Show ticket at the Javits Center costs $20. It is always a wonderful show. However, if your taste goes to the larger luxury yachts, you might want to take a quick flight to Port Hercule, Monaco, for the Monaco Yacht Show…
Here is a marine problem to tease the brain. How do you lift a 133,500-ton cruise ship that is nearly as long as the Eiffel Tower is high? This modern cruise ship is over 1000 feet long and 158 feet wide and needed to be…
If asked who the most successful pirate was, most people would say Black Beard. While Black Beard achieved great fame and fortune, Ching Shih is the name of the most successful pirate in history. What is even more incredible is that Ching Shih was a…
In all my years of boating, I never had too much to do with pontoon boats. There was one vacation several years ago on a lake in Virginia where we rented a pontoon boat. So, when a close friend of mine showed me a pontoon…
Humble men who made their living fishing the waters of a tiny lake in the Albion Hills near Rome had been telling tales of sunken ships lurking at the bottom of the lake for centuries. Lake Nemi is only .6 square miles and has no…
The passengers boarding the SS St Nicholas that warm evening at the Baltimore Wharf were relatively happy considering there was a civil war raging between the North and the South. Amidst the hustle and bustle of boarding some sixty passengers, there emerged an elegantly dressed…
The famed inventor Thomas Alva Edison was hard at work in his Menlo Park laboratory perfecting the incandescent light bulb when he was interrupted by a visitor named Henry Villard. Villard, an old friend of Edison had made a fortune in railroads and had visited…