a historic sailing ship, ocean currents, and a message in a bottle

[asakiyume]

My this-week's message-in-a-bottle story took me to some interesting places--first, to the story of the STS Sedov, a famous sailing ship.
STS Sedov, image from Wikimedia Commons


It started its days as the German Magdalene Vinnen II, built in 1921 as a cargo ship. According to Wikipedia, she carried all sorts of cargo:

apart from coal, she took timber from Finland, wheat from Australia, pyrite from Italy and unit load from Belgium.

She changed her name to Kommodore Johnsen when she was bought by a different company, and after World War II, she became property of the Soviet Navy and was renamed after the Arctic explorer Georgy Sedov.

Her 90th anniversary was in 2011, and in 2012 she began a voyage around the world--and it was on that voyage that three sailors (Dutch, Finnish, and Russian) tossed a message in a bottle from the ship when it reached Cape Horn, at the extremity of South America. That message then traveled 17,000 kilometers on circumpolar currents and arrived at Macquarie Island, a chilly place between Tasmania and Antarctica, where it was retrieved by wildlife rangers, cleaning rubbish. Here is the story from Australian news.

Circumpolar currents--the red arrow is Cape Horn; the blue arrow is (more or less) Macquarie Island. The message traveled east


Macquarie Island
Source: ECOS Magazine

Comments

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Macquarie Island looks like a place where I would like to take walks, some solitary and some not, and just be; it looks like a place where one could think and be cleansed and refreshed.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Absolutely! You would meet up with lots of penguins and seals (evident in other photos I found when I searched).

[xjenavivex.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much. I appreciate my Friday adventure.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yay--so glad to provide some adventure!

[bondo-ba.livejournal.com]

Great stuff, and the second message in a bottle story I read this week (one in the blak sea was hundreds of years old).

As always, these posts are a much-appreciated look into a more lyrical life that is out there if we only open our eyes (read the shark post, too!).

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

There are *so many* good message-in-a-bottle stories. I'm collecting them here (http://penpalnovel.virb.com/messages-in-bottles). I don't save every story I come across, just the ones I like for one reason or another.

And I'm glad you're enjoying the posts :-)

[yamamanama.livejournal.com]

I wonder if people tried to send messages in bottles when the world was still largely unexplored and people were largely isolated from one another.

I wonder what civilization will find Voyager.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I bet they've been sending them for as long as they've had bottles to put them in. Under Queen Elizabeth I, only official uncorkers of bottles were allowed to open them--it was a crime punishable by death if someone else did.

I wonder, too.

[sovay]

STS Sedov

Prrrrrrrrt.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Sailing ships for the win!

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Awesome! I'm a fan of historical sailing ships, and I didn't even know this one existed.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What I like is that this one is an actual working one from the 20th century--I somehow had the impression that ships like this stopped being used as the 19th century gave way to the 20th.

[frigg.livejournal.com]

That is a gorgeous ship! :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Gotta love all those sails!

[scallywag195.livejournal.com]

I love the picture of the ship, so blue and the white contrast of sails...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I love the way the sun is shining on them, making them glow.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

What a beautiful ship! (And that's a long trip for a bottle.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That bottle took the long way around :D

[snakypoet]

It still seems kinda romantic, even if not very old. Who hasn't fantasised about doing this? What child living by the ocean hasn't at some point done it? (But when I was a kid, bottles were glass, so my adult self feels a little less guilty about throwing debris into the sea.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone should feel guilty about tossing messages in the ocean. It's true that there's a huge problem with ocean rubbish, but messages in bottles constitute a **minuscule** proportion of rubbish. It's like worrying about the pollution generated by lighting a candle.

[snakypoet]

Aha, good point. :)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Wow, it certainly took the long way round. And I guess it could have just kept going and going until at last it hit an island.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It's amazingly lucky, at that latitude, that it happened to hit land at a spot where someone would, in fact, find it.