Word: vessels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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North is north and south is south in this 19th century sea story that contended for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize last year and came out in a U.S. paperback edition last month. The novel follows the voyage of the Sincerity, a smuggling vessel that takes on a party of highbrow landlubbers bound for the island of Tasmania. One of them, the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, believes that the Garden of Eden is located on the island and seeks to prove this as part of a great effort to debunk modern scientific theories of geology and evolution. Also on board...
TONY KARON: The Navy says the civilians sitting at two of the three control stations aboard the USS Greeneville were not a factor in its collision with a Japanese vessel during an emergency surfacing routine. Is this issue something of a red herring...
...MARK THOMPSON: It's not a red herring, but it's not really significant either. It simply looks really bad. The civilians may have been sitting at the controls during the emergency blow, but they were not controlling the vessel. Nobody controls a submarine's course during such an exercise. It's like a cork floating to the surface - nobody's driving it; it's driven by its own buoyancy. The issue is who gave the order to begin the surfacing procedure, on the basis that there was no danger on the surface. That was the ship's command...
...During some aspect of the periscope sweep, they'd have been looking toward shore, which could have masked the Japanese vessel. The fact that a number of people could see the monitors doesn't mean much, because it's not like you or me watching TV. Being able to understand what's going on in the periscope image requires great skill. It's often videotaped, although not this time, so they won't have that evidence to settle the matter - not that anything should be read into the fact that it wasn't recorded. But the Navy can't absolve...
...batches of so-called "opinion leaders" on tours of their operations, to show off their various platforms. And an emergency blow is a neat time to be aboard a sub. Saying they were at the controls may be something of a misnomer, since there's no control over the vessel once it's surfacing. Its path is preordained. And, of course, there are officers on watch standing right behind the civilians, ready to take over in case anything goes wrong. But the issue here wasn't control over the vessel, it was the decision to surface at that particular time...