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From top to bottom
 The Thomas Miller Americas’ office supports our Members with a wide range of maritime expertise and experience in commercial, technical and legal fields. Our colleagues in that office are continuing to update that expertise in a wide variety of areas as the following recent anecdotes demonstrate.
This week our New Jersey colleague, Brendan Kruse, was on board one of the more unusual ships of the world. Appropriately known as a FLIP (Flotation Instrument Platform) vessel it looks almost like a big spoon sticking out of the water. The image shown here is actually the bow of the ship when vertical. (Click here for pictures of the transition from horizontal to vertical deployment)
The FLIP is a research vessel used to study marine life and collect oceanographic data. The ship’s length overall is 355 feet with about 55 feet staying above water when vertically positioned. The submerged portion of the ship is flooded with 1,500 tons of water making her very stable. A thirty foot wave only causes three feet of vertical movement in the ship. More information can be found at the Scripps Insititution of Oceanography website via our Links page.
Brendan saw the whole operation as the ship was towed out a couple of hundred miles from the shore, anchored it to the seabed and then flipped into its vertical position.
Whilst Brendan was staring into the deep Markus McMillin from the San Francisco office was battling against the effects of oxygen deprivation to reach Base Camp on Mount Everest. Although Markus had climbed to 18,000 feet to reach this camp, there is still no escape from the world of P&I. Email bulletins were exchanged with his office swapping mountaineering anecdotes with updates from San Francisco on such topics as the recent ship collision with the Oakland Bay bridge.
Obituary of Mr J.C Kim of Hyopsung Shipping.
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