For sale over at Bring a Trailer is a lovely 1964 AmphiCar 770.

I first saw one of these as a kid and I was fascinated by the idea of being able to drive into a lake or the ocean. As an adult, I am horrified by the amount of preservation a vehicle like this must take.

Kudos on the current owner for keeping it so functional and not apparently rotted out!

The 770 model designation refers to the vehicle’s purported ability to travel at speeds of 7 knots in the water and 70 mph on land. Finished in Beach Sand White, this example retains factory trim including a marine-style horn, lights, and side bumpers. Twin nylon propellers can be seen below the bumper, and the exhaust exits high on the back panel above the water line.

When entering the water, the transmission is shifted into neutral and a lever is engaged to activate the propellers. The front wheels then become rudders. 13″ steel wheels wear Amphicar covers and Goodyear Vector whitewall tires. The white convertible top has a tear on the driver’s side as shown in the photo gallery below.

Read the rest

The New York Police Department released this video from their rescue of a kayaker who got stranded on a tiny island in the Jamaica Bay estuary off the western tip of Long Island, New York.

According to a tweet from NYPD Special Ops, the man, missing for 12 hours, "signaled for help by starting a fire & spelling out help using nearby sticks before being found."

A kayaker takes social distancing to the next level. #NYPD Aviation found the uninjured male stranded on a remote island in Jamaica Bay, Queens. Missing for over 12 hours the male signaled for help by starting a fire & spelling out help using nearby sticks before being found. pic.twitter.com/cqYqz8tLFG

— NYPD Special Ops (@NYPDSpecialops) April 17, 2020

Read the rest

Back in September, a Hyundai Glovis cargo ship capsized off the coast of Georgia. The 665-foot ship, called the Golden Ray, tipped over in St. Simons Sound, Georgia but fortunately every crew member was rescued. The ship was holding around 4,000 US-made automobiles that are now quite waterlogged. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources and other organizations are orchestrating environmental protection measures and disassembling the vessel to remove it in pieces via barge. This week, the St. Simons Sound Incident Response Unified Company will begin constructing an "environmental protection barrier" that includes "large floating containment barrier to help contain surface pollutants, as well as large netting to contain subsurface debris."

The Unified Command used LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology to create 3D images of inaccessible areas inside the vessel.

Follow the situation here: St. Simons Sound Response

image: Georgia Department of Natural Resources (photo release) Read the rest

On Wednesday, Panama's National Aeronaval Service seized this homemade semi-submersible vessel in territorial waters off Bocas del Toro. Authorities discovered 5 tons of drugs inside and nabbed four Colombian citizens.

According to CNN, "the ministry (of public security in Panama) did not specify what type of drugs were seized in the raid, but smugglers have previously been caught using similar vessels to transport cocaine into the United States and Europe."

Indeed, you may recall the intense video below from last summer showing US Coast Guard crew members boarding a similar narco-sub in the Pacific Ocean:

Read the rest

Two big sea lions kicked back aboard a small, empty anchored boat in Eld Inlet at the southern end of Washington's Puget Sound. Josh Phillips of Spawn Fly Fish captured this delightful moment two weeks ago. “It looked a little off and we got closer and closer and realized there were two massive animals on board,” Phillips told The Olympian.

Read the rest

In the Galapagos Islands, a shoreside crane toppled over while loading a shipping container onto a barge, capsizing the boat and causing a terrible oil spill of hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel. It was Charles Darwin's 1835 studies of the Galapagos Islands's biodiversity that sparked his theory of evolution by natural selection. From ABC News:

(The site of the spill,) San Cristobal Island is one of more than a dozen in the Galapagos, which is home to rare wildlife species and one of the world's most protected natural destinations. The remote islands are roughly 600 miles away from Ecuador, the country that owns them.

Ecuadorean President Lenín Moreno said he declared the state of emergency when the collision first occurred but said the situation was under control as of early Monday.

"Thanks to the timely intervention of several institutions, we have it under control. I am in permanent contact with @normanwray and the COE is activated to watch over the galapagueños," Moreno said in a tweet translated from Spanish. The COE is Ecuador's Emergency Operations Committee .

Read the rest

I am heartbroken. Every story I read about the loss of Truth Aquatic's Conception leaves me crying.

I've been diving with Truth Aquatics since I was certified in the late 90s. When I was young they were the Cadillac of California's Live-Aboard fleet. My dive buddy, Bill, and I used to sit around debating if we would schlep all the way to Santa Barbara for the luxury of a several day live-aboard or just get on one of the cheaper, less lovingly cared for and less excellently staffed dive boats out of San Pedro or Oxnard.

Later, having moved to Northern California and found a new dive buddy, Sean, he and a number of friends of ours would meet up annually on a Truth Aquatics boat. Usually the Vision but whenever scheduling didn't work out, the Conception was her near-identical twin with only a few differences to make it funky. The week-long trip from Santa Barabara to Catalina Island, once a year, was something I longed for.

I have made many very dear friends diving with Truth Aquatics. You read about Marcus' work with Extra Life Gaming every year. Dan helps me maintain my BMW and my sanity. Former Boing Boing contributing weirdo Joel Johnson used to join me on those trips. Lisa, Sean, Gary, Dave, Adam, Eileen, Ken, Jamie, Eddie, Sal, Peter, Paddy, Carol. Wonderful people. Incredibly important experiences.

Truth Aquatics has the very best people in the business working to make sure I had the safest and then most enjoyable time I possibly could. Read the rest

"Hey! Heeeey! HEY! Oh my God."

UPDATE: Charges and a lawsuit were filed against Marlin Lee Larsen, the skipper of the speeding boat. Larsen claimed it was "fake news".

Mr Larsen’s son-in-law, who also was on the boat, told investigators that he had warned his father-in-law to pay attention, that he sometimes saw him using his mobile phone while driving the boat and he had been off-and-on his phone the morning of the crash, according to the sheriff’s report. ... Mr Larsen told The Oregonian the accusation that he was using his phone at the time of the crash was “fake news.” He pleaded not guilty to charges of reckless endangerment and assault and said the lawsuit was unnecessary because no one was seriously hurt.

The charges were dropped upon Larsen's death at 75. Read the rest

The Costa Deliziosa is a 92,700 tonne cruise ship, and holidaymakers along Venice's Giardini della Bienna got an up-close look at all 294 meters of its length on a foggy, sodden weekend. Too close.

Newsweek reports:

The huge vessel was being pulled along the canal by other tug boats in order to straighten itself out, narrowly avoiding hitting the dock's edge and other smaller boats near it.

During the clip, the Costa Deliziosa's emergency siren can be heard blasting as it desperately swerves to avoid a collision.

Authorities have now launched an investigation into the incident.

Pino Musolino, president of the Port Authority System for the northern Adriatic Sea, said in a statement: "We reserve the right to start a timely check to see if the ship has received the necessary permits. We also intend to evaluate the adoption of any further measures to ensure that ship traffic takes place in complete safety for the city."

A Costa Deliziosa spokesperson blamed "violent gusts". One of those cruise ships, then. Read the rest

The Soviets built a bunch of nuclear icebreakers: overbearing, overpowered, faintly absurd, and completely awesome.

This video was shot in the Arctic Ocean in March 2018. For 7 days the film crew passed through the Barents Sea to Karsky around the Novaya Zemlya archipelago on the nuclear icebreaker Yamal - we saw the northern lights and polar bears, watched the ships stuck in the ice being towed and were very cold.

Directed by Andrew Efimov. Andrey Rodin piloted the drones. Ivan Golubkov and Yaroslav Kuryanovish worked the footage. Read the rest

In December last year, Jean-Jacques Savin, 71, floated away from the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa in an orange capsule he'd built. Last week, he landed at the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. Read the rest

What happens when a stoppable force hits an immovable object? The stoppable force stops. The Korea Herald reports:

The Korea Coast Guard (KCG) said the 5,998-ton Seagrand sailed into the side of the Gwangan Bridge at around 4:20 p.m. before turning back to head in the opposite direction. ... The KCG nabbed the vessel and questioned the crew aboard. It said the ship's Russian captain, whose identity is being withheld, had a blood alcohol content of 0.086 percent. The legal limit is 0.03 percent.

I feel there must be more to the story, as 0.08 isn't very drunk—it's the legal limit for driving in most U.S. states and basically the tare weight of a merchant sailor.

You may recognize the bridge, in Busan, from Black Panther. Read the rest

SeaTube [via Metafilter] is a YouTube channel dedicated to time-lapse videos of ports. Enjoy the view from the boats themselves, gliding past landmarks and other vessels, while listening to relaxing yet squeaky music. Read the rest

Boaters in Comox, British Columbia were surprised to find an orca that had been acting strangely in the harbor began pulling a boat around like it was a toy. Read the rest

MIT researchers designed and prototyped small, autonomous boats that they think could go a long way to improving urban mobility and reducing traffic in cities with waterways like Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Venice. The 3D-printed hulls are rectangular to enable them to more easily connect with each other. Each side features an independent thruster to increase its agility. From MIT News:

“Imagine shifting some of infrastructure services that usually take place during the day on the road — deliveries, garbage management, waste management — to the middle of the night, on the water, using a fleet of autonomous boats,” says (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) director Daniela Rus, co-author on a paper describing the technology that’s being presented at this week’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Moreover, the boats — rectangular 4-by-2-meter hulls equipped with sensors, microcontrollers, GPS modules, and other hardware — could be programmed to self-assemble into floating bridges, concert stages, platforms for food markets, and other structures in a matter of hours. “Again, some of the activities that are usually taking place on land, and that cause disturbance in how the city moves, can be done on a temporary basis on the water,” says Rus, who is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The boats could also be equipped with environmental sensors to monitor a city’s waters and gain insight into urban and human health.

Read the rest

Though hardly rekt compilation material, this footage of a feeder river turning into a roiling mess, due to a tanker going through St Lawrence seaway too fast, was good enough to get a captain in trouble and get authorities to enforce the speed limit.

This video was part of a series of videos studied and analyzed by the USCG to determine that the upriver vessels were traveling anywhere from 3 knots to 5 knots over the allowed 8 knot (land relative) upriver limit (10.4 knot water-relative limit) during the shipping season. Speed limits have now been re-enforced throughout the St Lawrence seaway, and the issues shown in this video have since subsided.

Read the rest

From JeffHK, 80,000 photos over 30 days:

Route was from Red Sea -- Gulf of Aden -- Indian Ocean -- Colombo -- Malacca Strait -- Singapore -- South East China Sea -- Hong Kong

Read the rest