To help you locate specific kinds of information during the Voyage of the Training Ship Golden Bear this summer, we’ve divided things into groupings listed along the right side of the home page including Ship Links, Calendar and Categories. To see all entries added to the FTV site for a given day, just place your cursor over that date on the Calendar.
E-Mailing the Ship: Email transmissions move back and forth in near real-time with no major waits. However, with some 300 people able to send and receive e-mail in real time that can create potential system overloads at peak usage times. Therefore, there is a limitation in place on e-mail size. Do not attempt to send any messages to the ship larger than 200K including any attachments. Picture attachments or insertions or large files will exceed this limit. Messages which exceed the limit will be blocked and your message will not go through. Similar limits apply aboard ship for outbound messages. We appreciate your cooperation and understanding.
Some of the following Categories may not appear every day.
CATEGORIES:
Ask FTV: If you are curious about some aspect of the cruise or vessel operations and would like to know more, submit your questions to our Ask FTV feature. You can e-mail your queries to us and time and resources permitting, we’ll respond to the best ones sent to us.
Bear’s Tale: During the Voyage, the Bear’s Tale serves as a daily shipboard “guide” for cadets. Prepared by Cal Maritime’s Leadership Development office, it lists everything from times for important meetings, classes and events to general announcements, work duties, special dress requirements, and availability of various shipboard or shore-side resources.
Captain’s Log: As events and time warrant, the Captain of the Golden Bear may prepare periodic “Log Reports,” explaining various shipboard operations or events, or providing his perspectives on everything from the voyage, to training programs, or operational decisions.
Cruise Candids: We’ve divided FTV photography into two broad categories….so-called “official” photos taken by assigned FTV staff aboard the ship (and included in the FTV Reports section), and Cruise Candids — casual photos taken by faculty, staff and cadets and posted periodically in this category. If you have a son, daughter or friend aboard and you’re looking for those “Hi Mom” kinds of photos, they’re probably posted here in Candids.
FTV Reports Essays: FTV staff aboard Golden Bear set out to chronicle the day’s activities in words and images and report them in FTV Reports. These may include essays in words and pictures. Expanded reports may also be posted which help explain some of the behind-the-scenes details of vessel operations, training, maintenance and safety. If there’s an area you would like to more about, check out our Ask FTV section where you can post your question. If we choose your question, we’ll prepare a detailed response for everyone to see.
Vessel Operations: Golden Bear is effectively a 500-foot long, self-contained floating “city” with some 300 people aboard at any given time. Each day we’re traveling on the broad waters of the Pacific or in port for a few days. Vessel Operations gives you a quick summary of the ship’s position, fuel and water supplies, miles traveled, course heading, distance to go, etc.
Weather Reports: Compare the weather where you are with what we’re experiencing wherever we may be. Part of our task is navigating a course which keeps us out of really bad weather.
SHIP LINKS:
Subscribe to FTV Updates: With modern Internet tools, we can now notify you anytime we’ve added something important to FTV. Go to this area to sign up for RSS Feeds.
Track the TSGB: Go to this area to get the most accurate information on the current location of Golden Bear in transit. Each day we broadcast a local weather report to maritime authorities and when we do, we also send our location. You can plot those locations, day by day on our tracking map.
Vessel Itinerary: Where have we been? Where are we headed? When will the ship be where? It’s all listed in the Detailed Cruise Itinerary section.
Voyage Map: See a map of the Pacific showing the summer’s cruising “range” for Golden Bear. Click on a tag for a given port of call and learn more information about the port and the country.
Contacting the FTV Editor: To communicate directly with the FTV Editor aboard Golden Bear, send e-mail to [email protected] Depending on workload and mail volume, we cannot guarantee timely response to all queries but will do our best to reply. If you want to know more about vessel operations or have an idea for additional coverage use our Ask FTV feature to submit your questions.
