Avast Ye! Today, it be Talk Like a Pirate Day an’ we’ve got a barrel-load of piratey-themed sights fer ye landlubbers!

Las Vegas’ Treasure Island be havin’ a daily pirate battle, ‘ere the swashbucklers by defeated by th’ booty-shaking o’ “the sirens o’ ti”. Not yer usual kind o’ booty neither!

Them “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie-films wi’ buccaneer Johnny Depp, they be based on a children’s ride! Those children orta be workin’ the sail and swabbin’ the decks! Arrr!

There be a swashbuckling ship maze on the Isle of Wight! Shiver Me Timbers!

This even be a plane in middle o’ Santa Cruz, ‘ere they be callin’ it ‘Th’ Pirate Plane’! Flyin’ Pirates? Whaterenext!

Be seein’ you also The Pirate Skull of Vegas.

Thanks to these scurvy dogs: Juan Manuel Gil, bruv, Virtual Globetrotting and Munden.

(It’s Island Week 2 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week.)

On the mighty Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee, is Mud Island, which is home to a steamboat museum, restaurants, an outdoor amphitheatre and some nice large type.

Okay, technically Mud Island isn’t actually an island, but rather a small peninsula. However, it does contain a hydraulic scale model of the lower Mississippi recreated in miniature all the way from Cairo, Illinois south to New Orleans!

Which probably makes this the world’s only model of a river on an island (that’s actually a peninsula) in the river that the model is a model of…

Or something.

Read more about Mud Island at Wikipedia. Thanks to dedHED and Nat Case.

This is the Badeschiff or “bathing ship” in Berlin, Germany – an old barge which has been converted into an outdoor swimming pool, actually in the River Spree.

Opened in the summer of 2004, the facilities have proved highly popular as it has allowed Berliners to swim (at least in a figurative sense), in the long polluted and unsanitary Spree. In fact on closer inspection you can see several people swimming when this image was captured.

The 32 metre-long pool also has a bar with DJs until midnight, and is even open all-year-round.

Read more at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Jake.

The Caen Hill Flight is a set of 16 locks, designed to allow canal boats to rise 237 feet in just 2 miles of canal. This means that Caen Hill is officially the world’s steepest flight of locks. We do love obscure world’s largest facts.

Normally, canal boats travel up to a speedy 4 mph. But with all the opening and closing of gates, navigating the Caen hill flight usually takes about 5-6 hours. This means you’d be lucky to travel an average of 0.3 mph.

You may also notice that the individual locks of Caen Hill are so close together that they require an extended reservoir to the side.

Wikipedia: Caen Hill Locks

Thanks: ajho

While on holiday we missed the news of a new Chinese nuclear submarine being spotted on Google Earth.

Not much is known about the new class of Ballistic Missile Submarine, which is called the Jin-class or Type 094, but the US government estimated last year that China might build 5 of them to act as a permanent sea-based deterrent.

While we’re on the subject of elusive submarines, this brown looking mini-submarine is in fact a real-life Yellow Submarine!

It was built by an enterprising chap from Brooklyn who intended to recover the treasures of the sunken Andrea Doria, which wrecked on its way to New York city in 1956. With investment from the locals he designed and built the mini-sub himself, painting it yellow because it was the cheapest paint to hand.

Unfortunately, during its launch in 1970, the submarine sank (unintentionally) and the locals weren’t prepared to continue to invest in the builder’s madcap idea. The sub was eventually scavenged itself, and its rotting shell remains abandoned in the small ship graveyard of Coney Island Creek.

The full history and pictures from the past and present of the submarine are available on Forgotten NY

Thanks: Thomas Paul