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)

Spring Greetings from Mystic!!

Easter egg hunt at the seaport