Northwest Passage 2012 dot com: Icebreakers: Proof the US lacks big thinkers and Arctic vision

Polar Star - UUSCG icebreaker drydocked since 2006 due to budget cuts.
It was the first ship to cross the Arctic Sea over the North Pole.

Northwest Passage 2012 dot com: Icebreakers: Proof the US lacks big thinkers and Arctic vision: "Our country lacks big thinkers championing our interests in polar regions. Big thinkers like President Thomas Jefferson who defied critics by dispatching Lewis and Clark into the “wastelands,” big thinkers like President John F. Kennedy who met emerging Soviet threats by leading this nation into space exploration."

But we do have Jim DeMint and Michelle Bachmann. - GWC

Skywalkers - Ironworkers at the WTC - NY Times

Credit: Damon Winter/NY Times

The Times Magazine today has a great photoessay about the ironworkers who are erecting the new tower at the World Trade Center site.  The photos are reminiscent of the famous Lewis Hine shots of the Empire State Building.  Slideshow HERE.  Text HERE.  Video HERE.

A ‘Canoe Family,’ if Only for a Few Weeks - Slide Show - NYTimes.com

A ‘Canoe Family,’ if Only for a Few Weeks - Slide Show - NYTimes.com: "Canoes from tribes throughout the coastal Northwest converged on the Swinomish reservation, the host for an annual week of traditional dancing, singing and celebration. For some, the journey involved weeks of paddling."

'via Blog this'

Margaretville flood

Hurricane Irene: Storm Warnings : The New Yorker

Jim Cantore, of the Weather Channel, in Battery Park.
Photograph: The Weather Channel/Getty Images.

Weather channel syndrome - its meaning for our time.
Global warnings: a taste of things to come? - GWC

by Adam Gopnik - the New Yorker

News Desk: Hurricane Irene: Storm Warnings : The New Yorker: 

"We happened to be seeing out the summer on Cape Cod last week, thinking we’d come home Sunday, when news that the hurricane was on its way first got around. We blessedly don’t have the Internet or a television in the house we rent up there; you get your news by biking down to the local grocery store for the paper or just by hearing what’s up on the beach—or, when the satellite decides to pass over in a good mood, from the occasional snatch of info you can grab from your iPhone. Talking round with friends, it sounded like Sunday would be mighty rainy and windy and that it would be prudent to come home sooner. Since traffic is always horrific coming home from the Cape on Saturday, we decided to drive back Friday night."

'via Blog this'

Eagle Island light

Islands are places of dreams, where, we imagine, we are free to build lives of our own choice, free to be alone, and free to leave to join the rest of the world. Eagle Island in the east Penobscot Bay is a place that elicits such dreams.

Pescadotes: Herreshoff New York 30

The New York 30 - designed as a club boat for the New York Yacht Club (which has a sidewalk in New York and a dock in Newport) is one of Nat Herreshoff's masterpieces. Nice job here by Joe Warren to capture boat and summer sky.  In the old style `30' refers to waterline length, not length overall.

Pescadotes: herreshoff ny 30

Irene-damaged wharf - City Island Yacht Club

Francine Alheid's flickr photostream is HERE

We built a Lumber Yard Skiff!

At the WoodenBoat School, Brooklin, Maine, August 22-26, 2011 we (Dave, Casey, Walter Baron  and me) built a 16 foot Lumber Yard Skiff!
Walter is the designer and boat builder.  See his work at Old Wharf Dory Co.  My slide show is embedded below.
Casey's excellent slides are HERE

And here's a video of the LYSS making its way up the rapids below a dam:

Issuma: 105' West -- Cambridge Bay, Nunavut

Go due North from Boulder Colorado for a thousand miles.  You'll find Issuma there.  But three cruise ships got there first to Cambridge Bay, the Victoria Islands, Nunavut, Canada.
As Yann, the boat's builder and first captain commented "What do you have to do to get away?