Vessel

Baltimore County Executive Roger B. Hayden has lost much of his right-side vision after suffering a ruptured blood vessel in his brain Sunday, a Johns Hopkins Hospital neurologist said yesterday.Dr. Kyra Becker, an intensive care neurologist who was treating Mr. Hayden, said "a large portion of his vision on the right side is gone," but she added that the condition should improve with time.Asked if the county executive will regain normal vision, Dr. Becker said, "It would be hard to say."She said such cases are difficult to predict.

A Chesapeake Bay sailing skipjack and a wooden canoe are far apart on the spectrum of watercraft. One is designed for carrying a hard-working crew to harvest oysters, the other for one or two people to paddle quiet waters.But consider the far wider gap between these vessels, hand-made toolboxes and the streets of urban Baltimore, where young people are lured by drugs and guns.That is the span being celebrated next week with the re-launch of the Sigsbee, a 1901-vintage vessel that is the latest project of the Living Classrooms Foundation.

More than 15,000 tons of hope sit dead in the water along a spooky stretch of South Baltimore harbor known as Fairfield.Lashed to bollards down at the gray and battered end of Childs Street is the Sanctuary, an old American hospital ship that was one of the first vessels to visit the nightmare of Nagasaki, Japan, after the atomic bomb. A generation later it was a workhorse of the Vietnam War, treating more than 25,000 casualties over four years.Now it just sits in the Patapsco, 522 feet of potential good will.

PORTSMOUTH, Va. - Construction crews working on a new Portsmouth ferry slip have unearthed the remains of what archaeologists have preliminarily identified as a late 18th-century sailing vessel.The rare find would make the ship one of only about a dozen known Virginia wrecks dating from the period, said archaeologist John Broadwater, who helped conduct the underwater excavation of a Revolutionary War vessel off Yorktown during the 1970s.It also would represent the only chance scientists have had since that time to study something more substantial than fragments that have washed ashore.

MOSCOW - A South African rescue ship managed to push its way far enough through the thickening sea ice around Antarctica yesterday to begin the helicopter evacuation of Russian scientists and technicians from a cargo ship trapped closer to the coast. Two helicopters from the rescue vessel Agulhas picked up 21 of the 107 people aboard the stranded ship, the Magdalena Oldendorff, and dropped off 1,100 pounds of food before the brief twilight of the Antarctic winter vanished. A blizzard that whipped the stranded ship with 55-mph winds cleared yesterday.

As another hurricane season commences, old-timers may recall a 1955 storm that produced high tides and rough seas on the Chesapeake Bay and resulted in the loss of the Levin J. Marvel, a 64-year-old, three-masted ram schooner under the command of an inexperienced captain. Fourteen passengers and crew perished in the turbulent waters off Holland Point near the Calvert County village of Fairhaven. The loss of the 125-foot Levin J. Marvel remains one of the worst maritime calamities in the history of Tidewater Maryland.

Hampered by barnacles but freed from the U.S. sanction that kept it waiting idly in the Baltimore Harbor, the Durmitor sailed yesterday for the first time since 1992.The Yugoslavian ship left shortly before noon and is reportedly heading for Spain -- but it won't get there soon. Going 10 mph because of marine growth on its hull, the Durmitor may travel for 16 hours just to get to the Atlantic Ocean.Five years ago, the ship was forced to unload its cargo -- which included General Motors machinery -- and drop anchor here while on a routine trip to cities along the North and South American coasts.

The rusty freighter, home to 18 seamen, one stowaway and hundreds of rats, sits at Canton Marine Terminal.Known as the Advance, the 452-foot South American vessel sailed into Baltimore's Inner Harbor nearly a month ago to unload 11,000 tons of unrefined sugar at the Domino refinery. Then the Coast Guard ordered it to dock, saying it wasn't safe enough to sail.Its massive hull is peppered with holes; its water tanks are contaminated by sewage and fuel oil. Stairs are rusted through, and its hatches are so corroded that sea water destroyed tons of cocoa beans earlier this year.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr. said yesterday that he plans to sell the state's yacht as promised during his election campaign but will replace it with another boat - possibly leased or donated. "The governor should have access to a [water] vessel of some type," Ehrlich said, noting a need to entertain corporate executives, members of Congress and other dignitaries. `Legitimate purpose' "We need to have something, whether we lease it or someone gives us a vessel," Ehrlich said. "It serves a legitimate purpose."

Once, this was a stout ship, with oak futtocks and floor timbers, fastened with iron nails, built with saw and adz and the calloused hands of shipwrights now long dead. Two centuries ago it was a simple coaster, hauling goods around the eastern capes, armed against pirates, and ending its days at a wharf in New York City. As the years went by, it sank into the harbor mud, entombed beneath what would one day become the World Trade Center site. Shortly after noon Monday, two trucks bearing the ship's unearthed skeleton pulled into a Maryland science complex on the shore of the Patuxent River in St. Leonard's, where scores of eager archaeologists and curators waited as if for the bones of a dinosaur.