PS
re: mast removal.

Yes, mast removal today would use a crane on modern ships for several reasons.
- they're designed to be moved via powered crane. Masts on modern ships tend to be radio masts or cranes (a "geared" ship is one with an onboard crane for self-loading on small docks).
- modern ships don't have nearly the number of crew that the tall ships (even merchant ones) did.
- a powered crane can probably do it much faster
- even the tall ships used cranes, improvised from other masts, and powered by lots of men. After all, they were in use well before powered cranes were possible.

Square rigging requires more crew to handle than the various fore-and-aft rigs. They also can't sail quite as close to the wind. However on certain tacks they give the ship more speed. Which is why they tended to be used on navy ships.

Merchant vessels tended to use more fore-and-aft rigs because they could use fewer crew, which had to be fed and allowed for more cargo. They also tended to use fewer courses (levels) of sails since each course had to be manipulated.

The tradeoff works on a military vessel which is generally vastly over-crewed for damage control, battle attrition and the need to crew the guns.

These heuristics did change somewhat as powered winches and artificial sail fabrics were introduced. Which is why the Cutty Sark, a merchant ship, is rigged a lot like a military ship from a century earlier. It was built for speed, hence lots of square rigging.

PS: Good evening, Mr. Alarmist!

𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑈𝑆𝑧𝑎 𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑖𝑒, 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑒𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐸𝑈...

Indeed. From what I can see (most of?) Europe is in even worse shape than the U.S. when measured on my communism meter stick. Unfortunately, just because some places have fallen further and harder does not mean that the U.S. has not also fallen to this pernicious, destructive ideology. One day this international system of communism masquerading as something else (democracy?, capitalism?) will fail under the weight of its own bullshit and un-sustainability. Interesting times ahead.

Happy Monday evening, Mr. Alarmist.
I hope you have a wonderful evening! ☮️

PS

They can climb over walls, but they cannot sail under bridges.

¡Ay caramba! I guess that class of cadets fails.

If you think the USza is already gone commie, you ought to see the EU.

🕉

PS: Good morning, everyone!

It is my understanding that you will need a crane when removing a mast from a sailboat...

https://i.ibb.co/xqzCDRvh/Suez.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHubEn13i_o
(There are many more mast removal videos on youtube but at a glance they all appear very similar.)


𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑐 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑝𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒, 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑢𝑛𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑤𝑒 𝑔𝑜 𝑡𝑜 𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑚, 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑛𝑜 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒, 𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑦, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑜𝑙𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑖𝑑𝑖𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑢𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑝𝑖𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑦...

It is my contention that the U.S. has already (mostly) fallen to communism and that the forms of utter stupidity that we have witnessed over the last century+ (the fifth plank was enacted with the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, for example) are caused by communism. Before the U.S. was taken over by communists in the last century the American people enjoyed more freedom and more prosperity. Communism is the root cause of (most of) our current woes.

Seriously. When you go through the ten planks you can see that the U.S. practices most of them in some form. Many of the planks are practiced in their entirety. (Abolition of private property, a progressive or graduated income tax, confiscation of the property of rebels, central banking, centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state and free government school are practiced pretty completely. The other planks a little less so.)

But don't tell Americans that they are practicing communists.
It just pisses them off.

Happy Monday! ☮️

PS
Possibly this particular ship has fixed masts, but the usual arrangement for a tall ship mast assembly was to have multiple vertical masts in a vertical offset stack. Each mast is secured via fittings on the lower one, and the lowermost one is fitted into a socket that goes through the decks, and I think into the keel.
Among other reasons for this arrangement it really wasn't possible to get a single tree trunk that tall. And for navy ships you would have to be able to remove and repair them.

It is possible to slide the upper masts down. Of course you have to furl the sails (possibly untie and stow them) and lower the yards to the deck first so it's not something you do much.
Although it would be a good exercise in seamanship and cooperation.

I'm basing this on a model of the Cutty Sark I have, which is a tea clipper built near the end of the tall ships era. It's now a museum in Greenwich. There are photos on the internet. The skysail mast (the topmost in the mainmast stack) reaches 44.5 meters above the deck (146 feet).

PS: Yeah, I got it all wrong, SafeNow. That's what I get for just reading a headline and watching a video. (I did figure they'd still have electrical back-up power had the engine(s) quit, but yeah...).

PS

The local tide variation would be about five feet.

The alleged loss of power seems unlikely because the masts were well draped with celebratory lights. They were on when collision occurred. For the lights to have remained on during a power loss would require that they be hooked-up to batteries rather than the ship’s engine. There were a lot of lights and they were bright and that would have required very large batteries. Possible, but doubtful.,

PS: "If that's the case, then overuse of "delve" could be caused by overuse of it on the internet." That could be.

PS: "Bing actually describes Asymptotic Stupidity. There's no dicussion of a peak and possible reversal... "Hallucination," or did I stop reading too soon?"

My take, Alarmist (don't know about bing's) is that the financial stupidity will get us, or the world, into a situation in which things get real, and we leave lots of other stupidity behind. That is, unless we go Communist, and then there's no end to the stupidity there.

Let me paste in this part:

"What does all this have to do with the general stupidity level again? Well, when these economic and political changes take place, there will be very rough times for most of the populace, and unless we go to Communism, there will be no time, money, and tolerance to support the ridiculous forms of utter stupidity that we have seen in this century."

PS: Would there be much elevation change of the East River at that spot, SafeNow? It's possible. I'd read that the ship lost power, and it didn't intend to go under the bridge. This losing power thing seems to be, errr, trending.

I'm glad the Brooklyn Bridge didn't get hurt. Iron Bridge v Wooden Sailing ship.

Also, the news kept saying something about putting the sails down. WTH? The masts are the masts. They aren't going down... until that stupid Brooklyn Bridge. Anyone want to buy it now?

PS
AI is supposedly trained on large portions of the text on the internet, with reins on its output to (try to) minimize political incorrectness and other things that might upset a human client.

If that's the case, then overuse of "delve" could be caused by overuse of it on the internet.

I haven't noticed that, but maybe its training corpus isn't what I normally read.

PS

Bing actually describes Asymptotic Stupidity. There's no dicussion of a peak and possible reversal... "Hallucination," or did I stop reading too soon?

PS

O/T. News item. A Mexican “tall ship” just bunked into the Brooklyn Bridge because its masts were 12 feet too high to clear the bridge. I guess they are not sending their best captains.

Seriously, Condolences to the families of the two dead.

This is telling if, as I suspect, it evinces a “macho attitude” problem. Near a harbor, large ships hire a “pilot” to temporarily come aboard. He is an expert in the local conditions (including state of tide) and safety risks. My guess is that the Mexicans decided: We don’t need no stinkin’ pilots. 200+ cadets aboard. I hope they took a lesson from this.

PS
Good song. Thanks for highlighting it. I remember it. Back in the day, the two interpretations for “ride” were to take a road trip, and/or, undertake a spiritual journey. These days, with the liberation of women, a listener might interpret “ride” to mean the man is inviting the woman to positionally “ride” - - the terms “ride,” and “cowgirl” style, a friend once told me this is called.

Okay okay I’ll stop with that… this is not that kind of blog. But it does get me thinking.. I suspect many of my interpretations of the lyrics of old songs are subject to asterisking, given the new highways and byways of today’s sensibilities.