From the gCaptain news:
“TS Kennedy is actually on loan to the Texas A&M Maritime Academy and set sail earlier this month on 56-day training cruise from Galveston”.
Just a question:
Who is steering the ship, and thereby responsible, Texas or Massachusetts?
Depends on who is on there. When the Empire State got loaned out, usually the Captain and Chief Mate went with it, but Mass/Texas may have a different arrangement.
Maybe there were some really pretty birds on that cliff??
I don’t need inside info to tell you it was both of these 
If it was A+M crew. Maybe they were doing supply boat practice. Seeing how close they could get to a rig
Class of 1981? What happened to BAY STATE in 1981? Want to keep throwing stones?
Some poor youngie burned alive. Low blow.
Just pointing out to all of the jack wagons making disparaging comments about another school that they had better examine their own houses before throwing stones.
I went to Maine. My son is on KENNEDY right now. Perhaps we should be examining the politics that resulted in a maritime academy being in a position to have to demand use of a strange (to them) MARAD ship in order to train.
My house is the Alaska Maritime Academy at the following locations: Southeast, Gulf of Alaska, Aleutian Islands, Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea. Expect the stones to keep coming.
Kennebec Captain,
Actually, I thought your comments about “old school” behavior are the right types of conversation in this case. I objected to belittling the school or it’s graduates.
I spent 20 years in USN and experienced some of those blowhard type captains and some better ones.
Side note: What is left out at Adak? I lived there as a kid in the early 80s.
Most of it is left, but in poor shape. When the USN left they boarded all the houses and buildings up. The native corporation that inherited the place bulldozed a certain number of buildings, knowing they could never maintain an entire town. But they hoped Adak would become the next Dutch Harbor, only with no city tax, and a big population move in to the ready-made town.
That never happened. The fish processing going on there is relatively minor. The empty buildings are slowly being weathered away. No way they can all be maintained with no one in them.
You can’t have thin skin in this business. The youth is challenged no matter what school. or what training ship. All the maritime academies give those young people a decent shot at a career at sea. Some may say one is better than the other. Not so fast people, Have a son who graduated top 11 in his class in a very good school. , does this make him a top eleven in his employment? Hell fucking no. It’s what they do afterwards with the license and degree they fought for. I was hands off once my guy signed on, some would do well to take the bubble wrap off. They will find their way without the hovering.
Comparing apples and oranges. The ship isn’t strange to them either, they’ve been using it since 2018.
They used it once with a Mass crew in 2018. This crew was assembled and boarded the ship within the last month. Their last cruise was 2019 and they had a TAMMA crew on GOLDEN BEAR.
They had a mix of mass and TAMU staff on the 2018 crew. They’re professional Mariners. We step on new ships all the time and are expected to be underway in less than 6 hours some times.
The Cadets aren’t running the bridge up there and “well they’re new to the ship” is a bs excuse.
These “training ships” and cadet cruises (where there are too many kids onboard to get any meaningful experience) are a waste of time and money.
The construction of these new mega millions, bullshit “National Security”, but actually useless training ships should be cancelled.
Cadet shipping is the only realistic and affordable way to go. If there are not enough ships and cadet berths available that should tell us something: we are training too many deep sea mariners for non-existent jobs.
If more cadet berths are needed there is a simple low cost solution: change the rules and put the cadets on ships of the American owned and managed flag of convenience fleet.
Have you spent a lot of time on the cadet cruises?
For the state academies, that’s already allowed. Whether the academies use that option is another issue.
Hence how they get out on drill ships.