Marine Pictures and Videos.

BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
A picture taken in Wellington, New Zealand dated 1889. One reason I like this pix is because it shows that drawn out rollover from sail to steam.

Sail, sail and steam, steam. (These days most Merchant ships are diesel powered.)

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BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
X boats or midget submarines at Gosport Submarine Museum, all part of the Portsmouth Naval Museum. They have one of these split into three, so you can look inside it .. (I couldn't stand up straight inside to give you an idea.) I can only say the crews who manned these things had guts in armfuls. Those bulges you see on the side were all high explosive, and these subs would get under their target, and drop the charges and get the hell out (hopefully.)
In the summer of 1943 three of these attacked the Battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord. The mission cost was very high, but they managed to put considerable damage on the German ship which knocked her out of the war for nearly a year.
When I took these pix I half expected to see John Mills sitting inside them ...

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The engine room, such as it is:
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Not for the claustrophobic:
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BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
Albatrosses will follow a ship for days, even weeks on end, Hitching a ride on the air currents generated by the moving vessel. They glide with barely a flap of the wing, I think the best flyers in the animal kingdom. Sometimes however, especially after a prolonged period of bad weather, they will end up on the ship as shown here on some unknown sailing ship.
I've actually experienced a similar situation on a large bulk carrier going from Gladstone to Buenos Aires via Cape Horn. The South Pacific is very remote ocean down that way. After several days of bad weather two following albatrosses ended up on the main deck, somehow having got between the hatches, which had pipes on either side. We put food out for them, but they seemed completely disinterested. The Old Man was a bit superstitious, and wanted them off the the ship, so a few of us went down with broom handles and after a bit of tricky manoeuvring were able to lift them over the pipes at the side of the spaces between the hatches with a stick under each wing (they have enormous wing spans.) One simply hopped to the side of the ship and jumped into the sea, presumably he/she could take off from there, while the other raced off down the deck and got airborne, just clearing the handrails.
We were all pretty chuffed about that.

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BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
HMS Venturer. Not just another RN World War Two submarine, but a ship with a unique history. Her story reads like an Alistair MacLean novel such as 'Where Eagles Dare' or 'The Guns of Navarone' wherein a small group of people are given a seemingly impossible mission, except this actually happened. She did something that had never been done before, and has never been done since. I'm stunned this hasn't led to a movie.

On 9 February 1945 under the command of Lt Jimmy Launders, HMS/m Venturer was the first, and to date, the only submarine to sink another submarine while both were submerged.

This was quite a feat considering he had to work out a 3-dimensional fire control solution to attack a zig-zagging submerged target, using his passive hydrophones as his prime sensor! After following U-864 for several hours hoping for the German boat to surface, he eventually fired all 4 bow torpedoes at his Target 17.5 seconds apart with different depth settings, the fourth Torpedo hit U-864 midships and she imploded and went to the bottom, sadly taking all hands with her.

The actual target for her mission was to was find and sink U-864 - who was on her way to Japan with Jet engine designs & parts, missile guidance systems (from the V2) and tonnes of Mercury in flasks as part of Germany's Operation Caesar. U-864s approximate position in the North Sea, west of Bergen had been identified by Enigma interceptions of her signals at Bletchley Park. Signalled by Submarine Command, Venturer homed in on the ‘datum’ - Launders then detected her using Hydrophones and latterly confirmed her as the target using his periscope.

Launders tactical genius and the application of his mathematical flair to the huge problems he faced of getting a workable firing solution on a passive target with a variable course, speed and depth that could only be tracked using sound (like a 3-D game of chess with your eyes closed!) all without the aid of a computer. It's hard to believe that Venturer was only his second boat, having left general service (HMS Repulse) in 1941!

Venturer had a successful war, sinking 13 German ships and another U-boat - U771 during her previous 10 patrols - earning him a DSO, he got a bar to that DSO for sinking U-864 and her invaluable cargo.

After the war - Venturer would serve under the Norwegian ensign as HNoMS Utstein until she was scrapped in 1964, Launders served in the RN until he retired as a Captain in 1974, he died in 1988.

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BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
It's the sheer quality of this pix that astounds me, considering when and where it was taken.
This is the 'Terra Nova,' Robert Scott's mission vessel to Antarctica taken more than 100 years ago during his ill fated expedition to the South Pole. Just the thought of going to the most inhospitable place on Earth in such a small vessel gets me putting on another jumper.

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BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
On a ROA jolly three years ago we visited the Bletchley Park Museum (and the accompanying Computer Museum) and I took this pix of the rear of a code breaking 'Bombe' machine designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. You normally see pix of one of these machines from the other side of that left hand panel with all the rotors grinding relentlessly around looking for possible rotor settings on the intercepted Enigma machine messages. I wanted to see all the 'gubbins' that lay behind that, a true view of electro-mechanical engineering at its best.
The nautical connection ? Well the U Boats were reliant on radio in order to position themselves to advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic. Admiral Karl Dönitz, ever suspicious of code breaking successes, eventually made his U Boat Enigma's have four rotors, thus increasing the number of combinations for the code breakers to tackle. It took them some time, but they did it.
Hard to estimate how many seafarer's lives were saved by these machines, grinding away day and night at Bletchley Park, but it probably numbers in the thousands and contributed to the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic, a battle that if lost, also lost the war.

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BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
The result of one of the worst of maritime collisions off the coast of Nantucket in 1956 in bad visibility. This is the bow of the cargo liner 'Stockholm' that literally 'T Boned' the Italian liner Andrea Doria. The Andrea Doria eventually sank with 46 killed although 1660 passengers and crew were saved.

As a result of the impact of the collision and the Stockholm subsequently pulling apart, a 14 year old young woman, Linda Morgan, was somehow plucked from the wreckage of her cabin on the Andrea Doria and later found alive on the bow of the Stockholm. Sadly her parents were among those lost. Looking at the scale of the damage that seems little short of miraculous.

This is often described as a 'radar assisted collision' although I've always felt uneasy about that description from a personal point of view.

The reasons for the collision remain controversial to this day.

Stockholm.jpg
 

BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
When I left school I worked for the Met Office for a few months. During my time at sea I sent literally thousands of weather OBS messages and took thousands more forecasts. So when I saw this I was able to stroll onto the bridge and give a highly technical meteorological forecast that proved to be incredibly accurate.

"Shit weather ahead Captain ...." :P

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