Vessel

Potter Willie Leftwich worked as an engineer and lawyer before taking up ceramics after his retirement at age 60. More than 50 of his three-color, wood-fired clay vessels, glazed in warm earth tones with accents of blue and green, are on view in the James E. Lewis Museum at Morgan State University. Leftwich sees his work as an expression of intuitively grasped "essential realities" that lie beyond the power of words to express. His pots, vases, bowls and other vessels are inspired by the shapes and proportions of the human body, and their tactile qualities are as much a part of their meaning as are their formal properties: These are works that beg to be touched.

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.

Building for the future isn't easy. At least that's what Royal Caribbean International's Harri Kulovaara said at a recent event, unveiling details about the line's latest city-sized behemoth, Freedom of the Seas. When Freedom launches next May, the 158,000-ton, 4,370-passenger vessel will wrest the title of world's largest cruise ship from Cunard's 150,000-ton Queen Mary 2. Freedom is the first of three planned vessels in this monster-of-the-seas category. It will be more than a fifth of a mile long, 184 feet wide, 15 decks tall and 75 feet longer than RCI's leviathan Voyager-class ships.

NAIROBI, Kenya - Suspected Somali pirates operating deep in open waters have seized an oil tanker as long as an aircraft carrier, the U.S. military in the Middle East said yesterday. The Liberian-flagged Sirius Star was hijacked Saturday and its multinational crew of 25 taken prisoner by pirates in the Arabian Sea, more than 450 nautical miles from the major port of Mombasa, Kenya. The ship appeared to be headed toward Somalia, the East African country from which many of the region's pirates set out on raids, according to the U.S. 5th Fleet.

The man steering the cabin cruiser that hit a fishing boat full of people on the mouth of the Choptank River on Thursday - sending two of them to the hospital - says he feels badly about the accident but alleged that the fishing boat was improperly anchored in a channel. Keith Price, 42, of Pennsylvania said yesterday that he was at the lower console helm of his 53-foot cabin cruiser when he struck a fishing boat. Witnesses at the scene had said they didn't see anyone driving the boat.

The owner wasn't trying to make waves. Just the opposite, even if he did recently cruise into the Inner Harbor for a two-month stay on an eye-popping 120-foot yacht that cost $10 million. The man wanted to keep a low profile, a crewman said. "He's here to have a good time," explained ship's mate Paul Victor, part of a five-member crew that keeps Patti Lou humming. "People bother him a lot." Who was this mystery man Victor referred to as "the owner"? Some tycoon? Obscure royalty? A celebrity?

The Maryland Natural Resources Police are searching for a power boat that struck and injured a Virginia man Saturday in the Chesapeake Bay. Police said the 55-year-old man was swimming to get a minnow pot near his anchored sailboat when the power vessel ran over him, striking both his legs. Passengers on the man's boat called 911, and when rescue workers arrived they had to jump into the water to keep the man above the surface. He was transported by helicopter to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center.

Every schoolchild in Maryland learns about the Dove, a British trading and scouting vessel that set sail for the New World 368 years ago. But when Raymond K. Miles of Eldersburg tried to build a model replica of the 40-ton ship that brought the first English settlers to Maryland, he could find few details. It took the 73-year-old retired newspaper carrier four years of research and nearly a thousand hours in his home workshop to create a nearly exact replica of the Dove -- a model so accurate that Historic St. Mary's City Museum has asked to borrow it for two years.

For 22 years, until being decommissioned last week at the Curtis Bay Coast Guard Yard, the cutter Red Birch was a familiar sight to mariners and those who live along the shore of the Chesapeake Bay.The diminutive vessel and her crew of 31 enlisted men and six officers tended the bay's buoys and unmanned lighthouses.They also helped with search-and-rescue missions and during winter months took on ice-breaking duties to keep the bay's shipping lanes open to navigation.From Hooper's Straits northward to Baltimore, the Red Birch once maintained the largest buoy patrol area in the country.

A 100-foot tugboat sank off Pier 3 in Locust Point on Saturday night. The tugboat Kaleen McAllister sank before 10 p.m., Mike Reagoso, the vice president of Mid-Atlantic operations for McAllister Towing, said Sunday. No one was injured in the incident, Reagoso said. Everyone had left the boat by the time it sank, said Petty Officer David Marin, a Coast Guard spokesman operating out of Baltimore's Curtis Bay yards. "It is too early to determine what the extent of the damage may be, but the submersion of the tug is not expected to interfere with any harbor operations or any port operations," Reagoso said in a statement.