I’m slowly catching up on reading the pile of mail that accumulated during my recent extended absence.
Today I was flipping idly through my complementary copy of the July/August edition of the FFJournal.
If you have to ask, the answer is convoluted and boring, (a little like this post).
The front page story was about the salvaging of the Costa Concordia and included words like parbuckle and sponson, words the spellchecker balks at as they have been seldom seen in print since the days of fighting sail.
http://www.ffjournal.net/item/11657-salvaging-a-shipwreck-webex.html
Quite a project, basically welding another ship to the outside of a 160,000 ton wreck and winching the result upright. The whole shebang will then be towed away and scrapped.
Even has it’s own website:
http://www.theparbucklingproject.com/
Well I enjoyed it, big kid’s toys writ large.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Can this really work, LW?
Hello Sheona: There will be plenty of red faces if it doesn’t, and $400 million down the tubes.
Does the insurance cover a case of culpable negligence?
Fascinating stuff LW, Thanks for the link, going to follow it with interest
Looks very enterprising. The technique has its risks I imagine but it will be fascinating to see how it progresses.
What amuses me is that we are all such creatures of habit. No sooner are you back from your own epic water adventure and instantly delve into more such watery diversions.
Needless to say I am no different, got back and have been manically harvesting ever since, cooking and preserving up a storm. Huge industrial quantities of food. Over there I looked in every field sedulously assessing future contents of the plate!
One way to keep off the streets I suppose!
Mrs O: Thank you. I do like “sedulously” especially in a comment to a post having the words “sponson” and parbuckle”
LW – I’m pretty sure ‘balk’ has a ‘u’ in it in English, just as ‘aluminium’ has two and an extra pronounceable ‘i’ thrown in for good measure. Perhaps you have been away too long? 🙂
OZ
Oz you’ve been in Portugal too long.
Surely balk is as a horse balking at a fence and baulk is the dividing wall in a ship?
I allow for the marginal possibility of error at this time in the morning! So I won’t put money on it!
OZ: I’m pretty unsure about Balk/Baulk they seem to be interchangeable both here and in the sceptered isle. If anything it seems the definitions are diverging with balk becoming a verb (refuse a fence) and baulk (a lump of wood) a noun.
As any schoolboy knows (familiar somehow?) that famous American Sir Humphry Davy coined Aluminum for the name of the metal before the aberrant spelling came along.