Mighty Ships Series

She is the largest ship ever to sail on North America’s Great Lakes. She can carry fifty five thousand tons of cargo through ice, rough weather and impossibly narrow rivers and locks. The steel mills and power plants of American industry count on her to get through, whatever the risks. As you must have understood, this episode of the Mighty Ships series is devoted to Paul R. Tregurtha– mightiest of all Great Lakers.

Spring on Lake Michigan – the March ice is still thick but it is time for sleeping giant to wake up. This largest Great Laker is three hundred and eight meters long, just imagine that she is bigger than three football fields laid end to end. The ice is the biggest worry for the captain and crew members of this vessel. Paul R. Tregurtha is the first ship out of the gate and the competitors are going to follow her. She is only idle for two months of the season when the locks are closed by the Coast due to the freezing.

For then other ten months of the year she goes back and forth across the Lakes moving a truly astronomical amounts of coal and iron ore each trip. That is enough to fill five hundred railway cars. On the delivery end, she unloads the cargo herself using the eighty-meter conveyor boom…

She is called “Peace in Africa” and she is as rare as the diamonds she hunts for on the bottom of the sea. She is a massive, a huge one. Her crew checks thousands tons of mud trying to find a few precious stones. It is a tough and dirty job – a constant battle against unforgiving sea, mechanical breakdowns, and deadlines – this is not a full list of difficulties faced by the crew members every day.

No other ship in the whole world can handle a job “Peace in Africa” does. Thirty kilometers off the coast of West Africa she is mining the ocean floor for diamonds. For millions of years streams of the rivers formed the famous African diamond fields. While regular on-land diamond hunting implies digging very deep, this ship working offshore applies a pioneer underwater mining technique – one hundred and twenty meters below the seafloor.

The vessel is owned by the world famous De Beers Company. Delivered some thirty-five years ago, and originally designed to be a cable layer, this vessel was subsequently converted to the type of ship she is today. She has a huge seabed crawler installed to undertake the dredging and connected by means of the large rubber hose for transferring the seabed material to the plant…

This is one of the best episodes of the Mighty Ships series. It is devoted to the famous passenger cruise mega-liner Quantum of the Seas. The name of the vessel contains the word Quantum which is the Latin for "Quantity". The vessel has sixteen passenger decks and nineteen restaurants on board. There are more toys and gadgets offered here that on any other cruise ship anywhere in the world.

Watch this part of the series and join the crew members and passengers of this remarkable mega-liner on their twelve-day adventure. Making her very first full-length ocean cruise, the Quantum of the Seas is heading to the South Caribbean. She is absolutely full of various technological advances and innovations making this ship one of the most sophisticated of today's passenger ships.

She may easily be treated as the huge floating amusement park featuring all types of entertainment facilities for her four thousand guests. However, there is no time and no opportunity to play for the crew and the Master of the Ship. We would like to remind our visitors that there is one more video available at our website - an excellent documentary demonstrating the technology process reveal. An excellent video recommended to everyone.

This part of the Mighty Ships series tells us about the largest ro-ro ship in the world, Tonsberg. As we know, ro-ro technology stands for the roll-on/roll-off and is referred to as one of the widely used methods of marine transportation. The present vessel loads absolutely everything from construction equipment to luxury automobiles and transports the cargo across the Atlantics.

Owned by Wilhelmsen and delivered in 2011 at Nagasaki shipyard in Japan, this ship features a length and width of 265 and 33 meters respectively. Her gross tonnage exceeds seventy six thousand tons. Tonsberg was specifically designed to carry heavy and high cargoes and she is also capable of carrying break bulk, non-containerized cargoes and special project cargoes, even helicopters and locomotives - actually everything on wheels.

One of the largest ro-ro ships ever delivered, she is a sort of seventeen-story floating warehouse. You are invited to follow Tonsberg on her very latest delivery passage which is the four-port fifteen-days mission taking the ship across the ocean. You will share the difficulties faced by the crew members of this remarkable vessel including, but not limited to the shallow waters and tropical storms, tight channels and many others.

She is the vessel that keeps the world wired. Tyco Resolute builds the information highway under water. This cable ship is designed to submerge the strength of the worldwide web. Tyco Resolute will connect the nation desperate for twenty-first century communications. Its precision work in the dangerous time – the crew members never know what they are going to find and what they find is a trouble.

The vessel is now off pacific coast of Costa Rica. A small boat rises to pick up a special piece of cargo – a telecommunications cable. Tyco Resolute – a one hundred and forty meter long state of the art cable laying vessel is about to lay a vital link in the water. The economy of the entire country depends on her success. Resolute will plug a fiber optic cable into an outlet on the Costa Rican beach.

She will then run that line out to splice it into the major telecommunications trunk line running between California and Panama. The Pan-American crossing called PAC-1 can carry immense amounts of data but right now it bypasses Costa Rica. Attached to the end of a simple rope, the high-tech fiber-optic cables start to leave the ship... This is a must-watch video for anyone interested with the modern communications and sophisticated ships.

This episode will tell us about Umiak I, which is the lifeline to remote nickel mine at Canadian eastern coast. The mine desperately needs supplies. The ship has to get there. Fight through storms and swells, she returns to the mine with one hundred million dollar cargo. Out here in the ice, Umiak I is all on her own. Umiak I is the most powerful ice-breaking bulk carrier on the planet.

Driven by the largest single engine in Canada, she sails just one circuit, the 1100 miles between Quebec City and the nickel mine in the Voisey’s Bay in North-Eastern Labrador. From Quebec, Umiak I brings all the supplies required to sustain the mine and keep it working in the 24*7 regime. The returns loaded up with thirty-three thousand tons of nickel concentrate costing more than 120 million dollars. She makes a trip at least once a month, year-round, no matter what the weather.

Every journey is a heavy-duty obstacle course for the captain of the vessel and all crew members. In 2006, Captain Rose was first officer on her maiden voyage and four years later he was given command… In short, this video will provide lots of interesting information about a vessel of remarkable design and construction, and assigned a top important mission.

She is a giant symbol of hope and her mission is mercy. While the other ships deliver cargo such as the crude oil, containers or other types of goods, she delivers hope. Designed for war and disaster, she carries hope and comfort. The USNS Comfort offers a medical lifeline to some of the most vulnerable people on Earth.

United States Navy Ship Comfort is a huge floating hospital, one of the largest floating facilities of her kind. Originally, this ship was built for the United States Navy Fleet in order to provide medical care to the wounded military personnel in war zones. But nowadays her civilian mission makes her a lifesaver when ordinary people suffer from the national disasters such as the earthquakes and hurricanes.

This remarkable floating medical treatment facility will deliver medical care to any given point of the ocean. Watch this video and join USNS Comfort in her half-year mission of delivering medical service to eleven countries located in Latin America and Caribbean region. The name of the mission designed by the Navy is Continuing Promise and includes provision of the medical care on board this ship as well as ashore. The floating hospital ship can take up to one thousand patients...

She is the mightiest super-carrier of them all. USS Nimitz is a floating airbase – a large pad for the seventy-five aircrafts. The simplest mistake of any crew member can result in a catastrophe. USS Nimitz is preparing for the action and the Navy needs to be sure that she is ready for that. She is deservedly referred to as the deadliest warship in the whole world. Her weapon is the set of seventy-five Super Sonic Jets.

Note that we have another film about USS Nimitz waiting for you to watch it. The ship was originally commissioned in 1975 and was the first of ten Nimitz-class super carriers. Commanding Nimitz is a dream that come true for a twenty-eight-year Navy veteran… Just watch this video and you will get to know so much more about this remarkable navy vessel. The film will be of equally great value for the people with deep interest in the Navy fleet and for the shipbuilders and any other people who like sea and ships.

The construction of the vessel is explained in detail together with the various technical features. This ship definitely deserved one hour of your time. Just imagine – the huge ship with a height of a twenty-four-floor building, the area of the main deck exceeding four and a half acres, and a hangar base underneath has a volume more than the ten thousand cubic meters.