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March 30, 2006
Behind the Scenes - Part 1
Spring is here and what better time to meet the team at Ghostship Studio. We work day in and day out to bring you Shipwreck Central, Live from the Dive and all of the animation and compositing for The Sea Hunters.
Today in our first installment you will meet me, Victoria. I am the Content Editor on Shipwreck Central and I am usually your first contact person. Thanks for watching and Enjoy!
A special thanks to our Editor, Todd, for putting these clips together.
Posted by victoria at 06:53 AM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2006
Second Chance to See Force Z
In case you missed the first airing History Television will be playing Force Z - Friday, March 31 at 2:00 & 8:00 PM EST (CC)
Watch a preview of Force Z Right Now!
Posted by victoria at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2006
Delgado Resigns From Maritime Museum
Congratulations to Jim from everyone at Shipwreck Central on the accomplishment of a lifetime and a dream come true!
JAMES DELGADO TO LEAVE MARITIME MUSEUM AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS:
LONGEST SERVING DIRECTOR IN MUSEUM’S HISTORY TO HEAD INTERNATIONAL
ORGANIZATION FOR UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY
VANCOUVER, BC – March 21, 2006: On March 15, James Delgado resigned as Executive Director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum Society and as Executive Director of the Museum. His last day at the Museum will be June 30. He will then join the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA). He describes his new position as “a life long dream come true, and an opportunity I could not turn down.” Founded in 1973, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) is the world’s leading organization dedicated to understanding humanity’s history of interaction with the sea, which it accomplishes through the science of nautical archaeology. A not-for-profit, it is headquartered at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas and at Bodrum, Turkey. INA is dedicated to meticulous fieldwork in the survey, excavation and analysis of shipwrecks in the tradition of its founder, Dr. George F. Bass.
INA’s projects, conducted by its professional staff and students, span the globe and thousands of years of history. INA provides support for the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M, publications, and other avenues of scholarly and public outreach throughout the world, including support of the Museum of Underwater Archaeology, which is operated by the Government of Turkey in Bodrum. As it approaches its thirty-fifth anniversary, INA is developing a new strategic direction and initiatives in response to evolving technologies, public needs, challenges and opportunities. As its executive director, Delgado will remain in British Columbia, but will travel extensively as he works to raise awareness, find new projects, and raise funds for INA.
Delgado comments that while the new position is an exciting opportunity to work globally and return to his professional roots as an archaeologist, the past fifteen years at the Vancouver Maritime Museum “have been a time in which I have experienced a number of wonderful opportunities, made a number of friends, and had a chance to make contributions to the Museum for which I shall always be grateful and remember with fondness.” During Delgado’s tenure, the Vancouver Maritime Museum was transformed from a quiet, local museum into an internationally renowned institution and a Greater Vancouver landmark with a reputation for a family-friendly approach and a commitment to the community. Delgado’s frequent media appearances, his regular columns in the Vancouver Sun, and his five years as host of National Geographic television’s “The Sea Hunters” gave the Museum a high profile and benefited its programs and fundraising.
The last three years have been challenging and also rewarding as the Museum worked through the various phases and studies to find a more sustainable model and reinvent the institution, which suffers from lack of public access, over-crowding and inability to showcase its many treasures and the stories surrounding those treasures. Those studies have resulted in the January-announced National Maritime Centre in North Vancouver.
Delgado announced his departure to staff and volunteers late last week, noting that it was his association with them that he would miss most. “At the end of the day, it is the people who make the difference, not just the building or the things we preserve and interpret,” he told them. For Delgado, the reasons he loved working at the Museum were “the smiling faces of children who visit and who stand enthralled in the tugboat in the Alcan Children’s Maritime Discovery Centre, the grandparents who bring their children and grandchildren, the scholars who slowly exhale in wonder as a rare document or photo is placed before them in the Chung Library, the tourists who gain a better sense of how and why this community is linked to the sea.”
The Vancouver Maritime Museum’s Board will be working to fill his position and to continue working toward the goal of a stronger Museum that has increased opportunities to better serve the community and preserve the maritime past. Delgado believes there is a bright future for the Vancouver Maritime Museum, and he noted that he is committed, within the limits of his new position, to assist the Vancouver Maritime Museum in achieving that goal.
The Vancouver Maritime Museum tells the stories of Canada's ties to the Pacific with an emphasis on Canada's gateway port communities in the greater Vancouver region. As a centre for life-long learning, the Museum interprets our ongoing interaction with the sea through exhibitions and programs for people of all ages.
Posted by victoria at 07:21 AM
March 16, 2006
History of the Waterways
Our very own Jim Delgado was recently featured in an article in The Record, New Westminster, British Columbia's, Hometown Newspaper.
Posted by victoria at 07:00 AM
March 15, 2006
All the Shipwreck - None of the Diving
Though most shipwrecks are found underwater it is not entirely uncommon to find some on the land. In the Sea Hunters episode The Search for "Tonquin", the team visits the Peter Iredale, whose wreck still visible at low tide. The almost skeletal remain of the old ship jets out from the wet sand and is a major tourist attraction for Fort Stevens State Park, Astoria.
This week in the news we hear of another such wreck, perfect for Shipwreck enthusiasts not so keen on diving. In Ocean Shores, Washington, about 170 km south of Astoria, the S.S. Catala has emerged from beneath the sand.
On New Year's Day, 1965, a storm with 113 km/ph winds and high seas tipped the Catala 30 degrees on its side in the sand and she could not be righted.
Over the next twenty years she was looted, set on fire, partied on and written on. No one seemed to be bothered by her place on the beach until a young woman injured her back and sued; a contractor was hired to cut the ship up for scrap. What couldn't be reached by cutting torches was covered with sand. And like that she was gone.
It was in the winter of 2002 that S.S. Catala once again saw the light of day. By early February 2003 high winds and seas that rearranged beaches at Damon Point State Park, and the ship that carried Northwest loggers and miners, housed visitors to the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and served as a charter fishing base emerged like a phoenix from the ashes.
A dramatic shift of the sand on the Protection Island spit uncovered about 100 feet of the hull maybe 4 or 5 feet deep. Hundreds of people have crunched through the sand since then to look at the shipwreck. The corroding rust is part of an evolving sculpture with sand, carved by wind and water.
The 229-foot Catala was launched in 1925 in Glasgow, Scotland, and carried coastal freight and passengers from Vancouver, British Columbia, to southeast Alaska.
It ended its career with the Union Steamship Co. in April 1958 and was to be turned into a fish-buying ship when developers refurbished it as a floating hotel on the Seattle waterfront for World's Fair visitors. Engines were removed to make room for a theater, she said.
The emerging Catala will never float again, but thanks to the Ocean Shores Interpretive Center she will never again be forgotten.
Watch the Sea Hunters as they visit the beached shipwreck Peter Iredale.
Posted by victoria at 01:12 PM
March 14, 2006
USS Mississinewa
Classic Sea Hunters
Human Torpedoes: The Wreck of USS Mississinewa- Sunday on History Television
On the Ulithi Atoll, South of Guam lays the wreckage of the USS Mississinewa, a fuel carrying cargo vessel. She was sunk on November 20, 1944 and carries the distinction of being the only vessel confirmed to have been sunk by a Japanese torpedo manned by a Kamikaze pilot who steered the torpedo, a “Kaiten” or “heaven Shaker” to its target and to his own death. Next to the wreckage of the Mississinewa lays a cylindrical object, which could only be the only “suicide torpedo” ever located in the field of battle. Sea Hunter James Delgado, one of the few scholars to study these unique craft, journeys to the Ulithi Atoll to determine just what lies on the bottom and what really happened to the “Mississinewa”.
Posted by victoria at 07:19 AM
March 08, 2006
Shipwreck Central Quiz 7
Finish the quiz and watch the entire episode Monday March 13th on History Television.
Posted by victoria at 07:49 AM
March 02, 2006
This Friday and Saturday on History Television
U215 & Alexander Macomb
The “Alexander Macomb” started life on February 18, 1942, as Hull number 0036 at the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore, Maryland. Six weeks later she slipped down the ways. She completed her sea trials on June 2nd and was named after an American General and hero of the War of 1812. Her new Captain was Carl Froisland a mariner with decades of experience plying the Atlantic. She was steamed to New York and was loaded with her war time cargo of Sherman Tanks, P-38 aircraft and other parts and supplies for the Allied war effort and then sent to Boston to muster in convoy to Halifax and on to Murmansk. On her maiden voyage across the Atlantic she had 41 crew and 25 U.S. Navy gunners on board, a compliment of 66 souls on board, just hours out of Boston she was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat, 10 of her crew were lost. Like nearly 600 of her sister convoy vessels she would end the war forgotten on the bottom of the cold Atlantic Ocean.
When the Liberty ships were first put into production, it was thought that if they made it to their destination they had paid their way, making it back would be a bonus. As it turned out, they became the workhorse of the American Merchant Marine. There was a time when you could find them in every sea of the world. They carried the cargo that made allied fighting men the best supplied in the history of warfare. In great convoys they fought their way to England, Russia, Africa, and the islands of the Pacific.
The first Liberty ship commissioned took 244 days to build. Henry J. Kaiser, whose shipyards built one-third of all America's ships in World War II, cut that to 72 days in May of 1942. By August of that year, construction time was down to 46 days. The Liberty ship was 442 feet long, and it could carry 10,000 tons of cargo at eleven knots--about 12 MPH. Almost three thousand Liberty ships were built during the war. Since she was the prime cargo carrier, she was also the ship that most of the wartime merchant seamen sailed on.
Ship losses were high in the first years of the war. In 1942, sinkings were equivalent to
39% of new ship construction. By 1945, the last year of the war, the rate had dropped to 4%. Even so, the toll was high. Almost six hundred ships of the American Merchant Marine were sunk during the war years, and nearly six thousand men of the merchant fleet died while serving aboard them.
Now join the “Sea Hunters” as they dive the remains of the “Alexander Macomb” search her extraordinary cargo of planes, tanks and military equipment and tell the story of Liberty Ships, “the boats that won the war”.
Posted by victoria at 07:50 AM
