Its the end of the line for the USNS Vandenberg…at least as a floating ship. It is getting ready to begin its new life as an artificial reef off Key West, FL. The ship was recently towed from Virginia to Florida in preparation for its sinking in the coming weeks. The ship has been laid up in the James River Naval Reserve Fleet known as the “Ghost Fleet”.

Several attacks by Somali pirates have been successfully thwarted in recent days by NATO and other foreign warships patrolling in the region, unfortunately the pirates in those attacks were left still roaming the high seas, albeit minus a few weapons.  Here is a brief listing of the attacks thwarted that I know of and their outcome. 18 [...]

For those keeping up with vessel tracking technology, Bryant’s Maritime Blog alerts us that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report on the review of vessel tracking systems used by the Coast Guard.  Specifically, the report focuses on the duplication of data that the two primary long range tracking methods provide which include [...]

Lloyd’s List is reporting that Japan is deploying at least 2 P3-C Orion Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) to be based out of Djibouti and used exclusively for anti-piracy patrols.   The P3-C Orion MPA is specifically designed to conduct long range maritime patrols, up to 14 hours in duration and at a range of 4,600 miles [...]

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or applications such asTweetie, Twitterrific, Twitterfon, TweetDeck and feedalizr. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.