| marine cement composites | concrete boat | ocean colonization technology | New-Atlantis™ | New-VENICE™ | oceanic business alliance™ | Ellmer Group | nautilusmaker® |
| concrete boat | 100 year service lifespan |
By Jim Thompson
Jim Tuckers’ boat — actually “The Boat,” a longtime local landmark moored just off Miracle Strip Parkway in Santa Rosa Sound — will be 100 years old on June 15, 2021.
“I might make it,” he laughed, sitting in the sprawling apartment office he’s fashioned in the stern of the triple-decked 150-foot vessel.
According to one yellowed page in a sheaf of records and photographs compiled by Tucker, the Army took delivery of the vessel on June 15, 1921. It was commissioned as the Gen. Frederick C. Hodgkins and placed in service as a troop transport in 1922, ferrying men and material along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina from Wilmington to Fort Caswell. The boat was built by the Newport Shipbuilding Company in Wilmington, and would return there twice during its checkered history.
Tucker’s early efforts to establish the history of The Boat were stymied by his assumption it was a Navy ship. He persisted for some time in trying to track the boat’s history through the Navy, until in his words, “They said, ’Idiot, how many times do we have to tell you it’s not a Navy vessel?”
By the late 1920s, according to Tucker’s research and various other historical accounts, the boat was in private hands, ferrying bananas from Venezuela to the United States. Just a few years later, it was moored in Biscayne Bay as a gambling boat. The boat returned to military service in 1941, used by the Coast Guard to house guardsmen being trained in Wilmington for overseas duty in World War II.
Immediately after the war, the boat was used as temporary offices for the U.S. Maritime Commission, a now-defunct federal agency that had been charged with modernizing the nation’s merchant ship fleet.
In 1951, the boat was purchased by Eldridge Fergus, a Wilmington fish merchant who turned it into a floating restaurant. In a couple of eerie reminders of its military origins, the Fergus Ark was hit by a Navy submarine in 1955, and six years later was struck by the USS North Carolina as the battleship was being maneuvered into a nearby mooring.
From there, the boat went to Tampa, where it served as a restaurant under two separate owners until 1974, when Fort Walton Beach developer A.P. Qualls purchased the vessel and moored it near Brooks Bridge as The Showboat.
It was there that the vessel first attracted Tucker’s attention. Over the years, it had developed a crack in its concrete hull, meaning that Qualls had to keep its bilge pumps running constantly. One day, Tucker said, he noticed the bilge pumps weren’t running, so he decided to jump into the water and check the barnacle-encrusted hull.
“The barnacles had sealed the crack!” he laughed.
Qualls had already been trying to sell the boat, and with a swap involving a couple of Tucker’s rental properties, the boat was moved a short distance to its new mooring.
Asked why he bought The Boat, Tucker says it was nothing more than “the novelty of it. It’s just one of a kind. There are other concrete ships, but none of this vintage or type.”
Over the years, The Boat has become home to a collection of artifacts and photographs from Tucker’s life as a 22-year Army veteran, his stint on the local city council and his business ventures. The top deck of the boat, an open area that clearly shows the vessel’s various restaurant incarnations, is jammed with Tucker’s memorabilia.
“I come up here and reminisce a lot,” he said.
At least initially, Tucker’s mooring of the boat next to St. Simon’s on the Sound Episcopal Church created some friction.
“The church fought me tooth and nail,” he said. “They thought I was going to use it for nefarious things.”
He hasn’t, but many passersby are under the impression The Boat is something more than just a boat.
“I’ve had all kinds of people who walk up and say, ‘Is this a bar?’ ” he said.
Tucker doesn’t mind the question at all. In fact, he’s obliged some of those visitors by sharing a drink with them.
“I’ve met some great people,” he said.
While concrete-hull boats aren’t common, they are among the easiest vessels to build, they’re durable and they’re easy to maintain, particularly as military vessels.
In fact, Tucker doesn’t worry at all about the hull of The Boat. But its wooden interior, subjected to the dampness of being on the water, is starting to be a concern. He estimates that he’ll spend as much as $30,000 on interior maintenance and repairs in the coming year.
That work will be done, in part, as Tucker considers the fate of The Boat after he is gone. Plans are in place to transfer the boat to his daughter, Charlotte, who lives in Mississippi.
“I don’t want it to be a white elephant for her,” he said.
https://www.nwfdailynews.com/news/20180227/concrete-boat-nearing-its-100th-berthday
context: Roman Concrete in Cesarea Harbor (Sebastos) | 2000 years exposed to salt water - perfect intact
• This makes building floating city foundations that stay 2000 years afloat (longer than Venice) a realistic possibility.
interesting in this context : barnacles as crack sealers
unlock the barnacle glue’s mysteries.
It’s actually surprisingly simple. The key to the super sticky cement barnacles create is actually the tiny drop of oil that their larvae release before attaching to a surface. This droplet clears the water from the surface, enabling them to lay down a phosphoprotein adhesive. Previously, scientists thought that the two substances mixed together to create a bond, but now it’s clear that the oil and the adhesive serve two very distinct roles.
“It’s an incredibly clever natural solution to this problem of how to deal with a water barrier on a surface,” said Dr. Nick Aldred, who authored a paper on the breakthrough that was published in Nature Communications this week. “It will change the way we think about developing bio-inspired adhesives that are safe and already optimized to work in conditions similar to those in the human body, as well as marine paints that stop barnacles from sticking.”
When silica fume is added to concrete, initially it remains inert. Once portland cement and water in the mix start reacting with each other (hydrating), primary chemical reactions produce two chemical compounds: Calcium Silicate Hydrate (CSH), which is the strength producing crystallization, and Calcium Hydroxide (CH), a by-product also called free lime which is responsible for nothing much other than lining available pores within concrete as a filler or leaching out of inferior concrete. Pozzolanic reaction occurs between silica fume and the CH, producing additional CSH in many of the voids around hydrated cement particles. This additional CSH provides the concrete with not only improved compressive, flexural and bond- strength but also a much denser matrix, mostly in areas that would have remained as small voids subject to possible ingress of deleterious materials.
The transport properties through the silica fume concrete medium are dramatically curtailed, i.e. liquid compounds and even electrical currents experience a diminished capability to migrate, resulting in very low permeability and high electrical resistivity. Silica fume’s benefits are already evident in the fresh concrete state before it begins to harden. Its small particle size which is 100 times finer than ordinary portland cement complements the finess modulus of concrete and provides a ball-bearing effect, which improves thixotropic behavior, in effect modifying concrete viscosity. Because of the high surface area of silica fume particles affecting the mobility of water within concrete, segregation and bleeding of concrete are virtually eliminated. Rheological benefits inherent in silica fume concrete allow for custom-tailoring concrete placement methods, such as very high cohesive workability, ability of fluid concrete to hold slope,and/ or long distance pumping of concrete.
https://www.norchem.com/silica-fume-concrete.html