In True BOOJUM! Style Let's Define What An Anchor Is
"Anchor: a device attached by a cable to a vessel and dropped overboard so as to grip the bottom and restrict movement." Derived from the Old English "Ancor", from the Greek "Ankura". Art!
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| Ah. Yes. |
It could have been worse. It might have been Angkor Wat, which is a whole Intro by itself.
Okay, so that definition was from my "Collins Concise Dictionary". Let us now take up the "Brewer's" and see what they have to say.
"In Christian symbolism, the anchor is the sign of hope. It also symbolises security. In art it is an attribute of Saint Clement, who was said to have been martyred by being tied to an anchor and cast into the sea." Art!
Heavy duty punishment if you ask me.
ANYWAY we are now going to go over the latest vlog put out by Sal Mercogliano, which is to do with events now transpiring in the Baltic Sea, on his excellent channel "What Is Going On With Shipping". I would thoroughly recommend a visit, as he imparts knowledge to do with marine traffic, which is kind of the underpinning that keeps our world turning, if we did but stop and think about it. Art!
That is the 'Turva', a Finnish Coastguard vessel, guarding the 'Eagle S', a Ruffian 'shadow fleet' tanker that is alleged to have cut the undersea power cable between Finland and Estonia. I say 'alleged' when the evidence is pretttttty damning. Art!
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| What is wrong with this picture? |
Yessss there ought to be an anchor chain dangling from that bow on the port side, with an anchor at the end of it. Sal, with his background in the merchant marine, explained that losing an anchor is 1) Very unusual and 2) A major event. Glad we got that sorted out. Art!
This is the Finnish Police and Coastguard carrying out a fast-rappel descent onto the 'Eagle S', which seems to have been carried out in a very professional style. They were thus able to seize control of the vessel before anything could be hidden, deleted or destroyed. They don't seem to have done this before, so it's a measure of how angry the Finnish government was with the Ruffian tanker. Art!
This is the data that Sal obtained about the tanker. It fits the profile of a Ruffian 'shadow fleet' tanker, being over 15 years old, registered in a sketchy skeevy country (the Cook Islands in this instance), with nil transparency about either ownership or insurance.
Next is about the Finns right to board and commandeer this 74,000 ton tanker carrying fuel to India. Well, sorry to inform Dimya but the Finns, under the <deep breath> "United Nations Convention on the Law Of the Seas" have every right to tackle a vessel that has breached the 'innocent passage' part of UCLOS. Art!
Here you are seeing a map of the seabed in the Baltic, with the dotted lines being pipelines and the solid lines being cables. Ships carry maps like this to avoid what Sal called a 'Tonga incident', when that island's sole internet cable was accidentally cut by a ship dropping anchor right on top of it.
Then comes an illustration of an anchor station, which was educational for Conrad and ought to be for you, too. Art!
There are 3 systems here that operate to prevent an anchor being accidentally released. The 'Stopper' at upper port is a clamp that physically restrains the chain. There is a clutch mechanism that has to be engaged to drop or hoist the anchor, and there is a wheel - Art!
- which can be turned to physically brake the chain. Also, dropping an anchor is INCREDIBLY NOISY and there is 0% way the crew would not have noticed this happening.
Then, too, anchors are intended to be used when a ship is stationary, because they have 0% chance of stopping a 74,000 ton vessel moving at 6 knots. It's an open question as to whether their anchor chain broke under the strain, or it was cut loose - after severing the cable. The Eagle S did not stop or slow down or communicate what had happened to anyone else, possibly hoping to be out of Finnish territorial waters before anyone realised what they'd done.
I do have more on this topic, as Sal then went into legal details about marine traffic that only a person like himself would have any idea about, but we're already halfway to the Count, so I shall save this for another day.
Onnea siihen! Which is Finnish for "Good luck with that"
More Of Staff Work
You may recall that Conrad re-posted a picture taken by "AfricanStalingrad" on his Twitter feed, of the 'March Table' for the 26th Armoured Brigade in Tunisia, for the first week in April 1943. It was an insight into the administrative work that takes place for large formations to move across considerable distances. A Brigade of this size mustered nearly 600 vehicles and up to 5,000 men. Art!
At full-size, an infantry battalion like this would muster about 1,000 men in peacetime. On active service overseas, perhaps 800 tops, and more likely 600, thanks to casualties, training, leave and sickness. The DLI were a famously effective and efficient regiment, which meant they got a lot of the hard and dirty work when it needed to be done.
Ol Afriy thinks that 'FSMO' means 'Full Scale Marching Order' and if you want to quibble with this, take it up with the man himself.
The 'Steel Helmet' was the Brodie-pattern British helmet that other nations laughed at as the 'soup bowl'. Laugh away, it protected the neck and shoulders that other helmets didn't . Art!
The 'Respirator' is a variety of gas-mask, issued but never used in anger, a facet of the Second Unpleasantness that thankfully does not mirror the First. Art!
This may be an 'Angola shirt'. Neither Ol' Affy nor I know what one is.
The 'Field Dressing' was nothing to do with salads, it was a piece of first-aid kit that would be used by the carrier to dress another person's wounds. Art!
I don't think there was a follow-up post, but it would probably have had the scale of equipment carried on the battalion's first and second-line transport. Stuff that was too heavy or awkward for individual soldiers to carry, such as mortar bombs, greatcoats, picks and shovels and so on.
Enough enough of martial stuff! No "The War Illustrated" on this blog.
Hot Wheels
Ah, that title takes me back. "Hot Wheels" you see were a make of miniature cars that could be raced on plastic tracks, at relatively high speeds thanks to their suspension. Art!
The adverts made them out to be far more fascinating than they actually were, because - sending them around a racetrack for the 147th time does pall.
ANYWAY I came across a Youtube channel that was portraying the monster mobile kit needed to keep a steel mill functional, and - Art!
Courtesy Aaron Witt
This is a Kress Slab Carrier, which can carry 200 tons of steel from one part of a mill to another. Yes, TWO HUNDRED TONS. Just so you know it's not a typo. Art!
That's a lot of moolah. Wheeling-up a single Kress would take $120,000. Art!
Different vehicle, same expense. The tyres are smooth, with no tread, because to operate they have to be clad in steel chain overlays, as you see above.
I Have Detected A Plot Hole
Whilst walking into Lesser Sodom yesteryon, I was busy thinking about Nevil Shute's novel "On The Beach", and yes I am a very sad man.
HOWEVER what I wanted to address is that the novel takes place a good three years after global nuclear war has destroyed the Northern Hemisphere. The surviving pockets of civilisation in the Southern Hemisphere are now waiting to be wiped out by the impinging fallout. Art!
That's an illustration from Fritz Leiber's "A Pail Of Air" where the entire planet Earth has been blasted out of orbit. Do the surviving inhabitants give up? No they do not! They don't exactly prosper but they do survive.
With a lead time of years, would Shute's surviving populations just ignore their fate, shrug their collective shoulders and scoff down suicide pills? I rather think not. In "The Purple Cloud", one of the earliest of all post-apocalyptic novels, there is an example - unsuccessful I grant you - of people desperately trying to battle and overcome the apocalypse.
Finally -
We have the technology, and so do I. We will be hearing more of "Tunis cake".
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