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Spearing whales...the new fad

Thread Status: Hello , There was no answer in this thread for more than 60 days.
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Holy Moly! How that actually happens puzzles me... :S I mean, how can the boat be going so fast to actually spear a whale! oh well, looks like whale meat will be on the menu for quite a while! :naughty
 
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Maybe it was already dead and therefore floating soft and mushy?

I think finback whales are the second largest whale group after blue whales by the way...
 
Ship Configuration...

Actually, the poor whale was not "speared" in the sense that there were metal things piercing its body. The whale managed to get "stuck" between the bullnose (the round bulbous part of the bow that projects from the front of the ship - usually 2-4 meters depending on the size of the vessel) and the part of the hull where the bullnose is attached. The pressure from the water streaming past the bow probably held the carcass in place.

Ships are designed that way to lower the drag through the water. You could make a comparison between the bullnose of a ship and the front air-dam of a racing car. The bullnose is designed to push the water up and out from the actual bow. It creates a negative pressure (aka vacuum) effect that allows the rest of the ship to glide more easily through the sea. The waves that you see emenating from the bow of a ship are actually caused by the bullnose rather than the actual "bow." The photo I saw today clearly showed the bullnose protruding from the front of the vessel, probably about 3 meters in front of the actual hull where the carcass was stuck.

I would agree that the thing may have already been dead and kind of squishy when it was struck....

Now you have had your daily lesson in fluid dynamics and ship hull building! ;)
 
The question is.............


How in the world do you NOT notice a 60 foot whale carcass hanging off the front of you ship? A dolphin...sure....orca....i can see that.

But the whale was 20 meters long? How do you miss that (or the smell for that matter???)
 
Originally posted by SThompson
The question is.............
But the whale was 20 meters long? How do you miss that (or the smell for that matter???)

You wouldn't smell a thing since the carcass was mostly covered by the bow wave of the boat and, well, the whale was 20 meters and the ship was probably at least 200 meters. The whale weighed 5, maybe 10 tons and the ship displaces 200 tons or more when fully loaded. Sorry to all the animal lovers out there for the analogy (I have 2 big dogs and a cat myself) but it would be similar to having a beagle stuck to the front of a Hummer (HumVee). No one driving the Hummer would even notice unless they saw it.....
 
Just a SWAG

Originally posted by DeepThought
200 meters? try more in the sorts of thousands of tons. Not kidding.

I managed to drop a zero in there somewhere..... or two... :eek:

The smaller cruise boats aren't as heavy as one might think since they are thin-skin aluminum hulls. Of course the "cruise boat" I was on displaced 200,000 tones, was 987 feet long, 32 feet across the beam, and was 200 feet from the water line to the highest point of the ship. She also drafted between 32 and 38 feet depending on the situation. Of course, she was also a HIDEOUS gray color, spat out projectiles that were 6' 2" long and weighed between 1900-2700 lbs, didn't have a swimming pool, and there were no women on board.:( That is the Navy for ya..... :hmm

I was assigned to the USS IOWA (BB-61) from '84 - '87 We never speared a whale but we did fry a seagull or two while doing gunfire exercises. They didn't understand what the countdown meant or why that thing that looked like a VERY excited ;) R2D2 kept pointing its "excitement" in their direction...... :duh After the second time it happened, they realized that they were going to have to turn the sensitivity of the radar down just a bit. 6000 rounds per minute of 20mm Armor-piercing ammo... well, there wasn't enough left to be "not very pretty."
 
Cruise Ships....

Originally posted by DeepThought
What? they made that boat as big as IOWA itself? is it a carrier?

"Cruise ships"? Well, in case you didn't get to see my favorite "cruise ship": http://forums.deeperblue.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=52814 ;)

Uhhhhh, well, so much for subtlety :D No, it WAS the IOWA! I don't know how big the cruise boat that smacked the whale was..... The only carrier that was that form was the USS CORAL SEA (It was built on the last IOWA Class hull that was made).

Nice photos!
 
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Hmm:hmm, I meant as IOWA STATE, not the navy ship...
You calling the USS IOWA a "cruise ship" was well interpreted...
That hideous grey color you mentioned reminded me of that "cruise ship" that I like so much, which was also a navy vessel...

Hows that for misinterpreted subtlety? :D
 
Originally posted by DeepThought
Hmm:hmm, I meant as IOWA STATE, not the navy ship...
You calling the USS IOWA a "cruise ship" was well interpreted...
That hideous grey color you mentioned reminded me of that "cruise ship" that I like so much, which was also a navy vessel...

Hows that for misinterpreted subtlety? :D

:head DOH! :head

That is what you get when you try to come up with a snappy funny answer while poring over 32 pages of undocumented 'C' code :duh trying to understand what someone was trying to do.....
 
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