BP Blocking Media Access?

Of course....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fMTp9hCgWI&

Living With The Spill On Grand Isle

http://www.livingwiththespill.blogspot.com/

"We are members of the Williams-Mystic community who are deeply concerned about the environmental and human impacts of this oil spill.Please visit our website to learn more about what you can do to help: www.newenglandersforthegulf.com"

Endnotes

Thanks for reading my blog this semester, I hope you enjoyed it. Although the term is over, I'll continue to post about maritime related issues and stories from my time in Mystic this summer.
Take care,
Gabrielle

Flash Protest at BP station, NYC

Gulf Oil Spill Inspires Protest At NYC Gas Station

Oil is getting thicker near Grand Isle

Chris Hernandez (pictured above with Williams-Mystic in March) on Fox News talking about the devastation the oil has caused...worse for Grand Isle than any hurricane has been.

http://www.fox8live.com/news/local/story/Oil-is-getting-thicker-near-Grand-Isle/BGt75PuWkk2dkKMow2Ur0Q.cspx

To my favorite blue-haired dog...

Come back and visit soon, we miss you!

(even Elizabeth)
(and Tusk...even though he is getting a lot more hugs these days)

Flags of Convenience, Maritime Commerce

From the International Transport Workers' Federation:

"A flag of convenience ship is one that flies the flag of a country other than the country of ownership.

Cheap registration fees, low or no taxes and freedom to employ cheap labour are the motivating factors behind a shipowner's decision to 'flag out'."

What do FOC's mean to seafarers?

Seafarers who are employed on FOC ships are often denied their basic human and trade union rights since FOC registers do not enforce minimum social standards. This is what makes the flag so attractive to shipowners. The home countries of the crew can do little to protect them because the rules that apply on board are often those of the country of registration. As a result, most FOC seafarers are not members of a trade union. For those who are, the union is often powerless to influence what happens on board.

Unsafe
Many FOC vessels are older than the average age of the rest of the world fleet. Tens of thousands of seafarers endure miserable, life-threatening conditions on sub-standard vessels. Many of the detentions by Port State Control authorities involve ageing and badly maintained FOC vessels that should never have sailed. Many of these ships have been referred to as "floating coffins".

Casualties are higher among FOC vessels. In 2001, 63 per cent of all losses in absolute tonnage terms were accounted for by just 13 FOC registers. The top five registers in terms of numbers of ships lost were all FOCs: Panama, Cyprus, St Vincent, Cambodia and Malta.

Unprotected
Poor safety practices and unsafe ships make seafaring one of the most dangerous of all occupations - it is estimated that there are over 2,000 deaths a year at sea. Accidents are frequent, but for many shipowners the delivery of cargoes and the costs of any delay are their only concerns.

Seafarers on their own have little chance of winning compensation. A severed hand can ruin a life, end a seafaring career and rob a large extended family of a regular income. The ITF pursues these cases through the courts but often they must unravel complex company structures before they can work out who has responsibility for the ship and its crew.

Unpaid
The ITF hears daily of crews owed large sums of money. Some crews simply aren't paid. Those that are sometimes find that companies delay, or fail to make, payments to their families when they want to send money home. In many cases months go by without any sign of money promised to seafarers. With no pay they cannot even afford to escape and make their own way home.

More information: http://www.itfglobal.org/flags-convenience/flags-convenien-184.cfm

New Setback in Attempt to Contain Gulf Oil Spill

NY Times

How Much Oil Has Leaked Into the Gulf of Mexico?

Gulf Coast Towns Brace as Huge Oil Slick Nears Marshes

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/us/02spill.html?ref=us

LUMCON...Grande Isle...Cocodrie...

This article also features a video from the same marshes we canoed in (even with shots of LUMCON in the background!)...

S'10 at LUMCON in March

This will be on the exam...

Photo courtesy of Megan Holmes

Last marine ecology class, and Jim covers the board with all the main concepts we've learned while connecting them with "the threads that bind."

Wind farm is approved...but the oil is still leaking...

Estimate of Oil Leaking Into Gulf of Mexico Grows

US Coast Guard sets fire to oil leaking in Gulf

Big Wind Farm Off Cape Cod Gets Approval

BOSTON — After nine years of regulatory review, the federal government gave the green light on Wednesday to the nation’s first offshore wind farm, a fiercely contested project off the coast of Cape Cod.

Schooner Amistad to be repaired at Mystic Seaport

The Amistad on a blustery morning at Mystic Seaport.
(Sorry for the low quality phone picture)

Replica of U.S. Slave Ship Sails Into Havana

Moby in the Meeting House

Moby-Dick...our version...

Call me Ishmael...

Spouter Inn

Elijah

Ahab

Bonus DVD feature: Adventures of Rosco the Salty Dog

Whales, sailors, algae, and oysters...oh my!

Mocha Dick at the Williams College Museum of Art

Let's see...just about a month left of the program...wow, four weeks...that's really no time at all. I'm looking forward to living in Mystic this summer and having more free time to explore the area. On the menu for the next *gasp* 28 days are 4 independent projects due before final exams sprinkled with some blacksmith projects, performance of Moby Dick, trip to New Bedford, Friends and Family Days, and a couple more weeks of class. Needless to say, I can't spend too much time on this entry but here's a brief list of what I'm working on:

Marine Policy: Controversy surrounding the proposed plans by the FDA to ban the sale of raw Gulf Coast oysters during the summer months without sufficient treatment (PHP). Is the FDA just trying to look tough in the face of criticism? Is the opposing Oyster Industry just looking out for themselves? Should the federal government have this much power?

Marine Ecology: A survey of algae along the Mystic River estuary to create a baseline for future studies (perhaps looking at the effects of climate change).

Maritime History: A look at the iconography and tradition of sailor tattoos and what the practice tells us about life at sea.

Literature of the Sea: A study of the wrack line in sea literature and how it reflects on the genre as a whole. Works to include: Searoad, Green Hills of Africa, Cape Cod, Under the Sea-Wind, and They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing.

From The Quarter-Deck

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.

-Melville (with illustration by Barry Moser)

Loomings

"Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

"This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

~Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville (1851)

U.S. Leads New Bid to Phase Out Whale Hunting

The carcasses of a whale and its calf on a Japanese ship, according to the Australian government.
By JOHN M. BRODER, Published: April 14, 2010

"A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research"

"The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there....


"One of the reasons we gave ourselves for this trip--and when we used this reason, we called the trip an expedition--was to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and to record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced. The plan was simple, straight-forward, and only a part of the truth.

But we did tell the truth to ourselves. We were curious.

Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny. We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities.

But knowing this, we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. If it exists at all, it is only available in pickled tatters or in distorted flashes...


"Let us go," we said, "into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, be we shall leave something too."

And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance...

"Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world. And six thousand miles away the great bombs are falling on London and the stars are not moved nearby. None of it is important or all of it is...

Introduction to: Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts (1941)