Baltimore Ii

Social calendarDec. 13: 1998 AIRS Holiday Gathering will be held at a Guilford home at 5 p.m. Benefits the Don Miller House and AIRS (AIDS Interfaith Residential Services) Family Program. $60. Call 410-433-1109.Dec. 18: The Maryland-DC Minority Supplier Development Council is sponsoring Business After Dark, BAD, at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Cocktail reception and a performance Handel's "Messiah." 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Tickets $150 for reception and performance. Call 410-997-7599.Dec. 19: Maryland Artists Equity Foundation's Winners Circle Exhibition will feature the works of 28 alumni, all of whom are winners of past scholarship competitions.

ABOARD THE PRIDE OF BALTIMORE II -- "Let's shoot all four of them!" called Capt. Jan Miles, to the ship's eager gunner, John Paul Hope, who scurried into place."

SHANGHAI, China -- If you're planning a trade mission in the rapidly changing world of global finance, you might do better to rely on a 747 than a 19th-century Baltimore Clipper ship.That's one of the early lessons of the Pride of Baltimore II's goodwill tour of Asia, which until last summer was the star of the world's economy. As the Pride arrived here last week at its first port of call in China, the region continued its struggle to climb out of a financial crisis that has seen currency values plummet and millions lose their jobs.

Daniel S. Parrott, who swabbed the decks of the original Pride of Baltimore and met his wife on the second one, rejoined the schooner this week to skipper a leg of its yearlong voyage to Asia.The Pride of Baltimore II appointed Parrott, 36, interim captain for 5,000-mile stretch from Panama to Hawaii. The trip amounts to a tryout for Parrott, the leading candidate to become one of the ship's two permanent captains."I'm delighted to be aboard," Parrott said yesterday, speaking by satellite phone as the Pride sailed in a warm, windy Caribbean about 240 miles east of the Panama Canal.

For second mate Amy Strange's first voyage on The Pride of Baltimore II, the exciting part will be setting foot in China.Deckhand Jennifer Muther, on her third Pride trip, awaits those evenings when the boat cruises under a full moon and a heaven full of stars: "It's something completely magical."Captain Jan Miles has a veteran sailor's "concerned eye" about the threat of Pacific typhoons on what will be the Pride's first voyage to Asia and its farthest in mileage.He and his crew of 11 are preparing to leave the Inner Harbor at 4 p.m. tomorrow.

THIS HAS to be a science teacher's all-time dream assignment.You join the Pride of Baltimore II on its first visit to the Far East. Using a laptop computer and a digital camera, you transmit daily logs and pictures by satellite to the Pride's Internet site (www.pride2.org), where they augment a curriculum designed for older elementary and middle school children.You're no longer a teacher at Westlake High, Waldorf, Md., USA. Now you're a teacher in any classroom in the world with a computer and modem.

Capt. Bob Glover stood on the dock at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut at nightfall on a cold March day and watched as director Steven Spielberg filmed Africans disembarking from the slave ship Amistad."

NORFOLK, Va. -- "Secure the watch," barked the executive officer, Lt. Cmdr. Patrick C. Gill. One at a time, sailors in dress whites filed over the brow to the dock, pausing midway to salute the Stars and Stripes at the stern.With that, the nuclear attack submarine USS Baltimore was decommissioned yesterday after 15 years of undersea service, a victim of post-Cold War economics. Once a powerful, unseen sentry, the sub was transformed into a potential pile of scrap.Precisely at noon, the red, white and blue commission pennant was hauled down in the fog and drizzle that formed an appropriate backdrop to the bittersweet ceremony.

There were no electronic sensors. No digital photographs from satellites. No high-tech gadgets of any kind to guide the way for the warship Constellation.A century seemed to fade into the morning mist yesterday as 20 men and women tugged the sagging, creaking ship into Dry Dock 5 at Baltimore's Fort McHenry Shipyard.They did it the old-fashioned way: pulling on heavy ropes and slowly walking along the dock."If people from 100 years ago had come here today, they would have recognized everything," said Louis F. Linden, executive director of the Constellation Foundation.

Cannons were fired from one well-known ship and a wreath was dropped from another yesterday in an afternoon of homecoming and remembrance at Baltimore's Inner Harbor.Returning from a nine-month tour of Europe and the Caribbean in full, regal sail, the Pride of Baltimore II fired a fusillade of shots from the 4-pound cannons mounted on its sides.The shots, which echoed across the harbor, coincided with the dropping of a red, white and blue wreath by three survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor from the stern of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Taney.