The Pacific Collector, a US military missile defense tracking ship, will head outbound from Portland Wednesday around 9 am, passing Astoria around 3. She’s one of a pair of ships with a similar mission: to gather data about missile defense testing. She’s unusual looking in that she has large radar arrays on deck that look like huge golf balls.
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Sixteen sailboats left Les Sables D’Olonne, France, over the weekend to compete in a unique race called the Golden Globe.
Participants sail solo in boats equipped only with technology available when the race was first run in 1968. That means no GPS, no satellite connectivity, no cell or sat phones. Sextant and compass to navigate, radio for communication, and a willingness to spend 8 months or more alone at sea. They’ll sail to the bottom of the world using the “Clipper Route” and if all goes well, pass south of all the fearsome capes of the world, including infamous Cape Horn. Then they’ll said up the Atlantic and end the race in France where they started.
As in 2022, only one entrant is a woman. Last time, Kirsten Neuschafer of South Africa won the race, becoming only the second woman to enter and the first ever to win. This year, Norwegian Helga Marie (Mara) Løvenskiold Kveseth is now the third.
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While I’ve talked about the need to understand and work with current on the river, it seems that some vessels go out there any old time and do well. Let’s talk today about why that’s the case. It has to do with vessel design, physics, friction and horsepower.
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We’re having our first fall storm of the season today, and that brings the potential for interruptions to ship traffic as sea height increase. Even if that’s not what happens today, most assuredly sometime soon it will.
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It’s September 1st and that means the end of meteorological summer and the beginning of meteorological fall. A slightly different designation than standard fall later in the month, it’s used by weather scientists to keep track of weather patterns. And right on time, our weather is obliging with wind and rain, and cooling temperatures.
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Another kind of ship we see fairly often here on the river is the research vessel. Its cargo is live people: scientists whose mission is the study the oceanographic environment. As it turns out, the Columbia River is an ideal option for ships who are in our region of the Pacific and need to make landfall for various routine reasons.
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