DIY sailor launches homemade boat after 30 years

Via: Metro

Zeal to pursue the coveted goal doesn’t faint, no matter how long it takes to achieve it.

Owen Warboys – a man from Hordle, Hampshire proved it when launched his DIY boat that took over three decades building it in his mum’s garden. Christened as "Wight Dolphin", the work on this 40ft long sloop weighing over 18 tonne yacht started in 1982 at his mother Edith’s house. After completion Owen Warboys’ home-made boat has made it to the sea.

"Wight Dolphin" was built by Owen from the scratch with sheets of steel and pieces of wood and the construction was marked with hours and hours of welding and grinding. As the project neared completion, Owen worked virtually every weekend for three years to finish the job. It took Owen a decade to build the hull alone. However, the hard work and patience finally paid and the boat has a galley, bedrooms, showers and toilets and a diesel engine that was brand new when it was fitted – 12 years ago.

The 66-year-old started work on the 12m (40-ft) sloop in his mother’s back garden in 1982. He told her it would take only five years but, after suffering ‘a few problems’, and that was before he had to work out how to get it out of the back garden, his project spiralled into a mammoth project spanning nearly three decades.

When he finished, a year after his mother, Edith, died last year aged 102 (he had to delay selling her house), he was left with the head-scratching task of getting the 18-tonne yacht out of the garden. So Owen Warboys nervously looked on as a crane lifted 40ft in the air with a huge crane over his late mother’s detached house on to a lorry to transport it to a marina on the Solent, where, to Owen’s delight, it floated and didn’t show any signs of leakage when it was tested.
Now he and his long-suffering wife, Anne, 65, plan to go on a cruise in the Mediterranean.
He added: “Once the mast and sails are fitted we’re heading to warmer climes.”

Thirty years are too long a time to hunt only one goal and one would have lost the patience in the middle.
The retired marine engineer from Hordle, near Lymington, Hants, said:
"I am so relieved it’s finished," he said. "There were times when I thought it would never end but I’m the sort of person who likes to finish something once I’ve started."

Benjamin Franklin's quotation : “Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
Hats off and kudos to Owen’s perseverance!

Links :

• Telegraph UK
• similar story : a 1/8 scale model of the Majesty of the Seas (mini) was built in Morsbach, by François Zanella a retired French mine worker and was launched in 2005 after 11 years of work
  

Scientists uncover deep ocean current near Antarctica

Antarctic route highlights new ocean-climate links :

The Southern Ocean provides a critical link in the overturning ocean circulation that controls global climate

(courtesy of Reuters, originally editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Scientists have discovered a fast-moving deep ocean current with the volume of 40 Amazon Rivers near Antarctica that will help researchers monitor the impacts of climate change on the world's oceans.

A team of Australian and Japanese scientists, in a study published in Sunday's issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, found that the current is a key part of a global ocean circulation pattern that helps control the planet's climate.

Scientists had previously detected evidence of the current but had no data on it.

"We didn't know if it was a significant part of the circulation or not and this shows clearly that it is," one of the authors, Steve Rintoul (CSIRO, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), told Reuters.

Rintoul, of the ACE-CRC (Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center) in Hobart, said it proved to be the fastest deep ocean current yet found, with an average speed of 20 cm (7.9 inches) a second. It was also found to carry more than 12 million cubic meters a second of very cold, salty water from Antarctica.

"At these depths, below three kilometers (two miles) from the surface, these are the strongest recorded speeds we've seen so far, which was really a surprise to us."

He said the current carries dense, oxygen-rich water that sinks near Antarctica to the deep ocean basins further north around the Kerguelen Plateau in the southern Indian Ocean and then branches out.

Global conveyor belt :

The current forms part of a much larger network that spans the world's oceans, acting like a giant conveyor belt to distribute heat around the globe.

Oceans are also a major store of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that is emitted naturally and by mankind, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

For example, the Gulf Stream brings warm water to the North Atlantic, giving northern Europe a relatively mild climate. Failure of the current, which has occurred in the past, would plunge parts of Europe into a deep freeze, scientists say.

"The deep current along the Kerguelen Plateau is part of a global system of ocean currents called the overturning circulation, which determines how much heat and carbon the ocean can soak up," Rintoul said.

A key part of the circulation is the creation of large volumes of the very cold, salty water in several areas along coastal Antarctica that then sinks to the bottom and flows to other ocean basins.

The team deployed measuring devices anchored to the sea floor at depths of up to 4.5 km (3 miles) and recorded current speed, temperature and salinity for a two-year period. "The continuous measurements provided by the moorings allow us, for the first time, to determine how much water the deep current carries to the north," Rintoul said.

He said a key issue for predicting climate was whether the overturning circulation was going to stay at its present strength or whether it was sensitive to changes as climate changes. That meant further improving measurements of the speed and volume of the cold, salty water that is created around Antarctica.

Links :

• Huge ocean current found circling Antarctica (The Australian)
• Southern ocean seals dive deep for climate data (ScienceDaily)

WAAS geo satellite going down

Real-time WAAS satellite status / video

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that one of the two WAAS GEO satellites will drift out of usable orbit within two to four weeks.

Earlier on April 8th, Intelsat announced it had lost control of its Galaxy 15 satellite that hosts the WAAS SBAS transponder used by the FAA.

The FAA says it is monitoring the satellite, but that failure is imminent (by mid-May 2010).
When G-15 is out of usuable orbit, WAAS will be disrupted for users in northwest Alaska.
The rest of the WAAS service area — U.S., Canada, Mexico — will operate normally but will be reduced to a single point of failure with only one WAAS broadcasting Anik F1R satellite remaining (PRN #138/NMEA#51).

So it seems recommending that all users should be locked onto PRN 138.
For those users that have GPS receivers with the ability to track either one of the above PRNs, it would be best to remove PRN#135 (NMEA#48) as an option.
For the short term, 138 will be the only option. Longer term, there will have other options (PRN#133 today in test mode until the end of the year).
Note : there are two numerical designations for each WAAS satellite. PRN numbers identify the code transmitted by the satellite while the NMEA SV ID designation which is a proprietary format is simply the PRN minus 87. Garmin for example uses the NMEA number.

The impending failure of this satellite—which only affects WAAS signals—comes at a time when there are questions about the regular GPS constellation. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has said that many of the older satellites currently in use could reach the end of their operational life faster than they can be replenished, resulting in a drop below the number of satellites needed to meet some GPS users’ needs, as early as this year.

For more information, see the FAA’s “WAAS Intelsat GEO Outage Impacts” presentation.
AVweb raised the issue of satellite redundancy with AOPA President Craig Fuller (podcast)

Links :

• Garmin : what is WAAS ?
• GPS Information.net FAQ
  
• FAA Satellite Based Augmentation System (WAAS) / FAQ
  
• FAA Navigation Services, WAAS news
• GPSWorld Failure imminent WAAS geo satellite (updated news)
  

Bungling sailor used a road map to circumnavigate the UK... and ended up sailing round Isle of Sheppey for 36 hours

From Daily Mail reporter

A would-be sailor bought a motor cruiser on the internet then set off on a round-Britain trip armed with nothing more than a road map and a radio he didn't know how to use.
Little wonder then, that the bungling mariner took a wrong turn shortly after setting out from Gillingham and ended up circling the Isle of Sheppey.

The 45-year-old man, who has not been named, had to be rescued after running out of fuel have gone round the eight-mile wide island for a day-and-a-half.
Rescuer Tom Ware said: "Because he had no chart, his general principle was to keep the land on his right, except he didn't realise Sheppey was an Island."

"It took him a day-and-a-half to get from Gillingham to where he ran out of fuel."
The boat only had a 20-litre fuel tank and a 20 horse power engine - not designed for sea use.
The sailor thought that because he could drive in his car to Southampton using a single tank of fuel, he only needed one tank of fuel for the vessel.
He also made the mistake of taking a VHF radio, but did not know how to use it and he had no provisions onboard.

Coastguards, who met the man at Queenborough, advised him that engine sizes and therefore fuel consumption differs and the coast route was longer than the road distance in any case.
Coastguard Ian Goodwin said: "We passed on relevant safety advice and advised him that the best way to Southampton would be by train."
"However, he said he would get some fuel and get under way but asked us if he went left or right when he came out of the Swale."
It is not known whether the man made it to Southampton...

Link :

• BBC News

Image of oil spill off US Gulf Coast

NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image of the Gulf of Mexico on April 25, 2010 using its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument.

With the Mississippi Delta on the left, the silvery swirling oil slick from the April 20 explosion and subsequent sinking of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling platform is highly visible.
The rig was located roughly 50 miles southeast of the coast of Louisiana (NOAA map)

The dramatic oil rig explosion and fire aboard the platform rig 50 miles off the Louisiana coast illustrates the growing risk for oil companies as they drill ever deeper into the earth's crust to satisfy domestic and international demand for fuel.


As the US moves to open up more deep water areas for oil exploration and companies prepare to open up deep reserves off the coast of Brazil and Angola, the possible explosion and fire aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, owned by Houston-based Transocean and leased by BP, is a reminder of how the task of supplying the world's oil amid dwindling reserves is becoming ever-more complex – and dangerous – despite technological advancements.

"Deep water drilling is already a high-stakes casino and as geologic risk, capital risk, market risk and engineering risk all come together, they are becoming extraordinarily difficult to quantify," says Robert Bryce, an energy expert at the Manhattan Institute and author of the upcoming book "Power Hungry: The myths of 'green' energy and the real fuels of the future"

-> more on : Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion shows new risks

Links :

• Transocean drilling 'incident'
• NOAA Office of Response and Restoration
• Trajectory map of spill (04-27) / Terrasar-X image / ESA Envisat
  
• The Guardian (04-21 / 04-26)
• The Huffington Post (04-21 / 04-24)
• MODIS images (Optical Oceanography Laboratory, USF)
  
• Coast Guard considers burning Gulf oil slick to save coastline (CNN)