Cargo Ship

Amer Sports Too retired from Leg 7 of the Volvo Ocean Race yesterday after it was dismasted Wednesday en route to LaRochelle, France. The all-woman crew aboard the second entry of Nautor Sports decided to motor to Halifax, Nova Scotia, rather than try to sail the remaining 2,500 nautical miles to France by jury-rigging what remains of the mast. Amer Sports Too left Annapolis on Sunday on the 3,400-mile leg with seven other Volvo boats. Skipper Lisa McDonald told Volvo headquarters yesterday that she and her crew were 250 miles southeast of Halifax and that they expect to arrive there sometime tonight or tomorrow.

Parents' guide CURIOUS GEORGE Rating -- G. What it's about -- An inquisitive young African monkey has fun and misadventures after stowing away on a cargo ship and arriving in New York. The Kid Attractor Factor -- He's one of the most beloved figures in children's literature, and this is a major studio cartoon. Good lessons/bad lessons -- "Let your curiosity lead you." Violence -- None, of course. Language -- Squeaky clean. Sex -- None, Drugs -- Oh no. Parents advisory -- Skews a little younger than most recent cartoons, but those 8 and younger will eat this up. THE PINK PANTHER Rating -- PG for occasional crude and suggestive humor and language What it's about -- The incompetent Inspector Clouseau is brought in to track down a murderer who also stole a big honking diamond.

A 34-year-old Fredericksburg, Va., man was hospitalized yesterday after he lost control of the helicopter he was landing at the Dundalk Marine Terminal, authorities said. The unidentified man crashed about 2:30 p.m. on a lowboy trailer, a device similar to a flatbed truck. The left side of the landing gear touched down on the trailer, but the rest of the helicopter did not, said Richard M. Scher, a spokesman for the Maryland Port Administration. "He didn't just drop from the sky," Scher said.

Federal customs agents seized $3 million worth of cocaine hidden in a cargo ship from Ecuador and docked at Baltimore's main port, officials announced yesterday. Agents discovered the cocaine during a random search Monday of the containerized cargo on the vessel Alianca Shanghai. Michael Hrinyak, the customs agency's security director at the port, said it was one of the largest cocaine seizures at the Baltimore port in recent years. A contraband enforcement team with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Anti-Terrorism found 310 pounds of cocaine on the ship after a drug-sniffing dog alerted authorities.

Baltimore Customs and Border Protection agents have ordered a shipping container of rice from Pakistan to be sent back or destroyed in an effort to block a destructive, invasive beetle from entering the United States. Customs officials said in a statement that entomologists confirmed on Friday that a 46,200-pound container that came through the Port of Baltimore contained 40 dead larvae of the Khapra beetle, which they called the largest infestation they have seen in Baltimore since 1996 and 1987.

A Panama-based shipping company will pay $4 million for illegally dumping 6,000 gallons of oil-contaminated sludge and bilge waste in December 2009 during the voyage from Gibraltar to Baltimore, officials said. Irika Shipping S.A., a ship management corporation, pleaded guilty Thursday to concealing the dumping from the M/V Iorana, a Greek-flagged cargo ship that made stops in Baltimore, Tacoma, Wash., and New Orleans, according to the U.S. District Court in Baltimore. Crews used a bypass hose to avoid pollution prevention equipment required by law, court documents state.

Capt. William Winfield Meadors, a decorated career naval officer and a Ruxton resident, died of cancer Monday at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation & Extended Care Facility. He was 85. Captain Meadors was born and raised in Albany, Ga. After graduating from North Georgia College. he enlisted in the Navy and was commissioned an officer. During World War II, he served as gunnery officer aboard the destroyer USS Heermann in the Pacific and in 1944 participated in the Leyte Gulf campaign that destroyed the Japanese fleet.

BOSTON -- Eleven Romanian stowaways followed each step of the plan that some of their compatriots used in April: They sealed themselves inside the same kind of metal container, crossed the Atlantic aboard the same cargo ship and broke out midway through the voyage with the same kind of tools.And, like the earlier stowaways, they met the same fate when the ship arrived in Boston yesterday: They were taken into custody by agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.Longshoremen cheered the stowaways as they were led in shackles down the gangplank of the Innovation, a 43,000-ton freighter that docked at the Conley Terminal in South Boston.

A port worker drowned Saturday night while trapped inside a sedan that rolled off a tow truck and into the Patapsco River as it was being moved onto a ship, police officials said. The victim, identified only as John Jordan, 23, was in the driver's seat of the late-model Geo Prism to maneuver it onto a HUAL North America cargo ship docked at the port of Baltimore when a winch that kept it on the tow truck came unhooked between 9:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m., according to a preliminary police report.

WILMINGTON, Del. -- Two men who ran a business in Annapolis have been sentenced to prison for ocean dumping.Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Roderick R. McKelvie sentenced William P. Reilly, 66, of Severna Park, Md., to 37 months in prison and fined him $7,500.He was convicted in June of ocean dumping without a permit, lying to a federal grand jury, and lying to a federal district judge in Philadelphia.Judge McKelvie also fined John Patrick Dowd of Washington $20,000 and sentenced him to five months in prison to be followed by five months in home detention for lying to a federal grand jury.