Ship

With a week remaining in the Schaefer administration, port officials are expected to ask the Board of Public Works today to approve the purchase of a 1.2-acre parcel from AlliedSignal Inc. to build an Inner Harbor cruise ship terminal.The passenger terminal -- expected to cost $50 million, or double initial projections -- is a priority with Gov. William Donald Schaefer, who is due to leave office next Wednesday. Because of the unexpectedly high cost, state officials said they must team with a private developer to help fund the facility.

Maryland port officials hope that the port of Baltimore will reap a cargo windfall from an agreement under discussion by two of the port's most important steamship lines, Maersk and Orient Overseas Container Line.Neither Maersk nor OOCL has confirmed an agreement, but if a deal has been reached, both lines are likely to revise their ship schedules. The impact on Baltimore could be substantial, probably to the port's advantage, but possibly to its detriment.Maryland port officials are anxiously awaiting word on what ports the two lines will continue to visit if a ship-sharing agreement has been reached.

Gunter Seutter walked out of the Hyatt Hotel yesterday and up the gangway of an old German dream.There, on the other side of Light Street, beckoned the Gorch Fock.He had yearned to walk the decks of such a vessel since he was a kid back in the Fatherland."I was flabbergasted," said Mr. Seutter, who emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1953. "My lifetime dream was to see a square-rigger."Funny, how dreams come true.In town with his Hagerstown-born wife, Rose, for last night's New Orleans Saints-Miami Dolphins football game at Memorial Stadium, Mr. Seutter was looking out of his Hyatt hotel window and thought he glimpsed the German flag flying over the harbor.

Joseph Arthur Denisch, a retired WBAL radio and television engineer and former ship's radio operator whose tales of the high seas enlivened many a gathering, died Thursday of leukemia at St. Joseph Medical Center. He was 92.The personable Long Green Valley resident was born in New York City and raised in Brooklyn.The lure of the sea and the great passenger liners and lowly freighters that arrived and departed from the Hudson River piers caught the young man's imagination and fired his wanderlust.

Harry C. Agro, a World War II gunner's mate who survived two ship sinkings and nearly three years of confinement in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, died of cancer Friday at Harbor Hospital. The Baltimore Highlands resident was 81. Mr. Agro was born in Baltimore, one of eight children of immigrant parents from Sicily, and raised on West Barre Street. He attended city public schools. At 17, he left a job in a Southwest Baltimore piston ring factory to enlist in the Navy in 1942. Mr. Agro was assigned to the SS Paul Luckenbach, a Liberty ship loaded with 18 tanks, 10 B-25 bombers and other war materiel, heading for the Russian port of Murmansk when it was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean by a German U-boat on Sept.

MAGALUF, MAJORCA / / After jostling crowds at one tourist-clogged port after another, the chance for a shore break on this sunny Mediterranean island was just what the ship's doctor ordered. The beach at Magaluf beckoned, and Kevin, my 19-year-old son, and I stretched out under the shade of a thatched umbrella hut. Bikini tops tied to the yardarms of the huts around us fluttered in the breeze, like flags of hedonism, while their owners got that little extra bit of sun. Now we know why some call Magaluf "Majorca's party capital."

Within the slick dark waters of Baltimore harbor, hidden as if by a shroud, there lies a riotous jumble of broken old boats. Forget any romantic ideas about the Outer Banks of Carolina as the graveyard of the Atlantic, with hundreds of ships come to grief. Right here in Baltimore there are, easily, thousands of wrecks.A few of them still can be picked out; some are only half submerged. Most are long forgotten, but all of them had their day in the sun.Jutting out of the soupy black waves of Curtis Bay, for instance, is the rotting, charred prow of the USS Dover -- a screwy idea for a ship that endures as a monument to a government boondoggle of 1917.

Scott Durbin was fortunate. The water was warm, the seas calm and the Coast Guard just nine miles away when he decided to dive off the side of a cruise ship near the Bahamas late Sunday night. The 28-year-old Rockville man survived the 36-foot plunge, and the Coast Guard plucked him from the ocean 50 miles east of Boca Raton, Fla., an hour later. Durbin and three friends apparently boarded the Carnival Liberty in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at 11 a.m. Sunday, and he began drinking before its 5 p.m. departure for Freeport in the Bahamas, according to Judy Orihuela, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Miami office.

Life at sea could be hard in the 1860s, but Capt. Henry Schreiner Stellwagen's quarters on the Constellation were pretty cushy. He slept in a bunk rather than a hammock hung from hooks. He bathed in a small tub instead of washing with deck hoses as crewmen had to do. And while the sailors' bathroom was on a plank suspended under the bowsprit, Stellwagen had his very own "seat of ease." The captain's spacious cabin was his domain. He dined there, did paperwork, called misbehaving underlings on the carpet.

The Moby Dick, the only ship in operation that is owned by Greenpeace -- the international environmental group -- is spending the holidays docked in Fells Point while its crew awaits instructions on its next mission.The ship, a converted 83-foot side trawler built in the Netherlands in 1959, arrived in Baltimore on Dec. 3 from New Bedford, Mass. It is working its way south after spending the summer and fall on a tour of the Great Lakes to warn of the harmful effects of toxic and radioactive pollution on humans and wildlife.