Too stingy to buy a trailer?

What are you sinking about?

Love Love from julien berthier on Vimeo.

The Love Love boat was built to look as if it is sinking.

French artist Julien Berthier has designed a fully functional boat to look as if it is sinking. The 6.5m (21ft) yacht was cut in half with a new keel and motor added so it remains in the sinking position while being fully functional. He describes it as "the permanent and mobile image of a wrecked ship that has become a functional and safe leisure object."

Berthier has taken the boat (or should I say half-a-boat) across the English Channel to London and has toured it around Europe, getting plenty of offers of assistance from unwitting Good Samaritans, who would presumably be either very annoyed or rather bemused by the contraption.

The ship that never sank

    

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Part 8    Part 9    Part 10    Part 11    Part 12    Part 14
Part 15    Part 16    Part 17


I've just discovered Robin Gardiner's book The Great TITANIC Conspiracy in which he unearthes a wealth of new evidence for his theory that the sinking of the TITANIC was a vast conspiracy, and that the ship that went down on 14th April 1912 was in fact OLYMPIC, TITANIC's sister-ship, and the sinking was planned as one of the world's greatest insurance frauds.

To the present day the most common maritime insurance fraud involves changing identities of ships. But tragically the planned staging of the sinking of Titanic, whereby other ships from the company would be on hand to rescue all the passengers and crew, went disastrously wrong and 1500 souls perished on the supposedly unsinkable ship's maiden voyage.

This book concentrates on the conspiracy, with evidence of why the White Star company intended to defraud the insurance company by swapping the identity of Titanic and the recently damaged Olympic in a collision with HMS Hawke, with new conclusive photographic and documentary evidence of the swap. The story starts with financier J P Morgan's takeover of White Star and the Royal Navy's investment in the company's new liners as potential troop carriers.

Following the Agadir crisis in 1911 Morgan began to ship gold and other treasures back to the safe haven of the US. The pressure on White Star to make up the cost of the damage to Olympic, which the insurance company would not cover, through swapping the identities of Olympic and Titanic, was also the opportunity for Morgan with the collusion of the British government, to quietly ship GBP8 million of gold to the US.

But unbeknown to the government, the gold was spirited away. The subsequent staged collision with the iceberg went horribly wrong as those in charge of Titanic completely underestimated the scale of the panic and the ensuing disaster as the ship quickly sank and the rescue boats failed to arrive became a disaster that would reverberate around the world.

This gripping account recounts the author's theory on the whole build up to the disaster and its aftermath in which all parties were involved in collusion, conspiracy and cover-up on an unprecedented scale. Is it true or is it fiction? Only the reader can decide.

Need a survey?

This looks rigged!

What a ship!

The Emma Maersk, owned by the Danish Maersk Line, is the world's largest container vessel ever built.

This monster transports goods across the Pacific in just 5 days!! This is one of three ships presently in service, with another two ships commissioned to be completed in 2012.

These ships were commissioned by Wal-Mart to get all their goods and stuff from China . They hold an incredible 15,000 containers and have a 207 foot deck beam!! The full crew is just 13 people on a ship longer than a US Aircraft Carrier (which has a crew of 5,000).

With its 207' beam it is too big to fit through the Panama or Suez Canals. It is strictly transpacific. Cruise speed: 31 knots. The goods arrive 4 days before the typical container ship (18-20 knots) on a China-to-California run. 91% of Walmart products are made in China. So this behemoth is hugely competitive even when carrying perishable goods.

The ship was built in five sections. The sections were floated together and then welded. The command bridge is higher than a 10-storey building and the ship has 11 cargo crane rigs that can operate simultaneously, unloading the entire ship in less than two hours.

Additional info:

Country of origin - Denmark
Length - 1,302 ft
Width - 207 ft
Net cargo - 123,200 tons
Engine - 14 cylinders in-line diesel engine (110,000 BHP)
Cruise Speed - 31 knots
Cargo capacity - 15,000 TEU (1 TEU = 20 cubic feet)
Crew - 13 people !
First Trip - Sept. 08, 2006
Construction cost - US$145,000,000

A documentary on the History Channel noted that all of those containers are shipped back to China EMPTY! Yep, that's right - EMPTY!

We send nothing back on these ships. What does that tell you about the current financial state of the Western world? Just keep buying those imported goods (mostly gadgets) until you run out of money. Then you may start to wonder what the cause of all the unemployment might be!

Living on (bread and) water

So you're thinking of living permanently on your boat? Think again! You may need a larger boat just to store all the rules and regulations that govern such an innocent pursuit:

The appropriate laws are contained in the "Management of Waters and Waterside Lands Regulations—N.S.W."

The maximum amount of time you can live on board is 21 days in every 6 months. Beyond this, your vessel becomes a "moored houseboat," and there are requirements.

Firstly, you need special permission from NSW Maritime, or from the Crown.

Before it even comes down to a NSW Maritime decision, you must have two things:

1. Written permission from the landowner who owns the land you will use to access your vessel, that they approve of the use of the land for that purpose;

2.Written approval from the council of the nearest adjoining land, that they do not dissapprove of you living on board the vessel, and the standard of living therein.