Welcome To My Tug Boat Trivia Quiz

Answer: Golden Hind

Queen Elizabeth I of England commissioned Drake to pass through the Strait of Magellan and investigate the lands west of South America. When he left port he was in the Pelican. He changed the name mid-voyage to Golden Hind in honor of his patron, a Sir Christopher Hatton, whose crest bore a golden hind.

Drake and his five ships engaged in a little piracy along the way. Upon his return he presented Queen Elizabeth with enough money to pay off the entire foreign debt with money left over. Of the five ships that set sail in the expedition, the Golden Hind was the only one to return.

The Golden Hind eventually fell apart. Purportedly the table in the Middle Temple Hall in London is made from wood from the ship.
As for Captain Poopdeck, you'll have to excuse his behavior. He's a little dinghy.

Answer: Antarctica

Shackleton had in mind to make the first land crossing of the continent of Antarctica. Instead the Endurance ran into thicker and thicker ice in the Weddell Sea until, about one day's journey from her destination, she became stuck fast. The wind blew for six days until the ice was jammed around the Endurance on all sides. From that point, further efforts to sail were useless and she drifted northward with the ice. Eventually Shackleton and his men abandoned her to camp out on the ice. By then she had been stuck 281 days and had drifted 1,186 miles. She sank on November 21, 1915, impaled by ice.
Shackleton and his crew made their way via life boats to Elephant Island. Eventually Shackleton and a few men headed to South Georgia Island, some 800 miles away. Amazingly, they made it in their 22' lifeboat. After several failed tries he finally made it back to rescue the rest of his men from Elephant Island on August 30, 1916.

Rather than renaming the ship "Endurance", Shackleton may have been better advised to rename her "Swift Voyage" or "Success".

Answer: She was the presidential yacht

The Sequoia became a US Navy ship in 1933. As such it was the presidential yacht for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It had previously been used by the US Commerce Department for prohibition patrol. Even though it was replaced as the presidential yacht in 1936 by the Potomac, several Presidents, including Hoover, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon, along with the Secretary of the Navy continued to use it. During the economic crisis of 1977 President Carter had it sold as a symbolic gesture.

I just made up glendathecatamaran. To think that there really is such a thing is rudder nonsense.

Answer: She was hijacked

Terrorists belonging to the Palestine Liberation Front hijacked the Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt in October 1985. Their aim was to get Israel to release 50 Palestinians from prison. The hijackers eventually gave up the ship in exchange for safe passage to Tunisia. The aircraft carrying them to Tunisia was intercepted by US Navy fighters and forced to land in Sicily where four of the five were arrested. For some reason the man purported to be the leader was allowed to continue on to Tunisia.

The Achille Lauro probably should have been retired long before 1985. In 1953 she ran into one of her sister ships while the two liners passed in the Red Sea. She had an onboard fire in 1972, collided with and sunk a cargo ship in 1975 and had another onboard fire in 1981. She sank in 1994 after yet another fire, this one off Somalia.

With the terrorists in control you could say the Achille Lauro was a thug-boat.

Answer: Floating hotel

The Queen Mary sailed for the Cunard Line between England and the US from 1936 to 1967. In late 1939 the Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and the Normandie were held in New York harbor due to the state of war in Europe. The decision was eventually made to convert all three to troopships and that is how she spent the war years. On one trip the Queen Mary was loaded with over 16,000 troops--a record for the most passengers ever carried by a ship.

After the war she went back to being an ocean liner until retirement in 1967.

In Long Beach the Queen Mary was maintained first as a museum, and then from 1972 as a hotel. Although the Queen Mary Hotel does have iPod docking stations, in room coffee makers and TV sets, the room light switches, air vents and bathtubs are all original to the ship as are the paneling in the hallways. Visitors are free to take a walking tour through several different levels and stations of the ship which are maintained as they appeared when the ship was in service. There is one vegetable that sailors consider unlucky and was never served on the Queen Mary--the leek.

Answer: She was discovered abandoned at sea

The Mary Celeste was discovered sailing in the Atlantic Ocean in December 1872 with no one on board. The weather was fine. The ship was in good condition. There were plenty of provisions onboard. To this date no one knows what happened to the crew. People have speculated that it was the work of scurvy pirates, or an earthquake at sea somehow started a fire in the sails, or she was swamped by a tidal wave, or she sailed into a waterspout that carried everyone off, or the crew mutinied, or ergot poisoning from bad flour caused the crew to have hallucinations, or the whole thing was an insurance scam by the owners, or that another ship murdered everyone onboard and fabricated a story about finding it unmanned to claim the contents of the Mary Celeste as salvage.

Personally, I believe it was scurvy pirates. Everyone knows they have weapons of mast destruction.

Answer: Kon-Tiki

Kon-Tiki is one name of the Inca sun god. The crew and their raft made from balsa wood sailed 93 days before sighting land--the Puka Puka atoll in the Disappointment Islands. The ship made landfall on August 7, 1947 when it beached on Raroia in French Polynesia. Their trip encompassed 3,770 miles at an average speed of 1 1/2 knots, which is incidentally how fast my mother-in-law drives.

Upon making landfall at Raroia the crew noted that the sand was a deep red as were the trees and all the birds. A crewmember named Squishmael cried out: "Oh noes! We're marooned!"

Answer: Holds the record for fastest crossing of the Atlantic

The SS United States was built specifically to break the record for crossing the Atlantic Ocean. She won the Blue Riband, an unofficial accolade, in 1952 when she crossed eastbound in 3 days, 10 hours, 40 minutes for an average speed of 35.6 knots. She beat the previous record holder, Queen Mary, by 10 hours. On the return trip she set a westbound record of 3 days, 12 hours, 12 minutes for an average speed of 34.5 knots beating the Queen Mary's record by 9 1/2 hours.

At 35 knots she would have been using about 150,000 shaft horsepower.

The SS United States had accommodation for 1,972 passengers and 1,011 crew. Much of the credit for the two crossing records must fall on the navigator who was responsible for seeing that the SS United States did not err from the shortest line between ports.

He worked so hard, in fact, that he did not even take the time to bathe on either of the crossings. You could say he was a dirty double crosser.

Answer: Calypso

The Calypso started life as a British minesweeper in World War II. In 1950, millionaire Thomas Guinness bought her and leased her to Cousteau. He used the Calypso to launch his mini-submarines and diving saucers as he studied sea life around the world. The Calypso sailed almost everywhere--from Antarctica and the Red Sea to the Mississippi River. In 1996, the Calypso was struck by a barge at Singapore and sunk. In recent years restoration of the ship has been held up by disputes within the Cousteau family. As of 2009 the Calypso was in Brittany awaiting restoration.

I cannot believe that a ship like this that could sail in shallow water as well as deep water has not been restored. It is simply unfathomable.

Answer: Robert E. Lee

The Robert E. Lee travelled the 1,278 river miles in 3 days, 18 1/4 hours--almost 4 hours faster than the Natchez VI. However (isn't there always a however?) the Natchez was stuck on a sandbar for six hours and also carried passengers. The Robert E. Lee did not have any passengers; the captain had removed all unnecessary items to lighten the ship, and had prearranged barges along the way for faster refueling.

The Natchez VI would have gotten off the sandbar sooner but when they called for Captain Poopdeck and his tug boat, he was out to launch.