The pioneering sailor you’ve probably never heard of: Nicolette Milnes Walker

Nicolette Milnes Walker sailed from Dale to Newport in just over 44 days; she took the Azores route across the Atlantic.

Credit: Nicolette Milnes Walker Credit: Nicolette Milnes Walker

From PBO by Julia Jones

 

In 1971 Nicolette Milnes Walker was the first woman at 28 to sail solo and non-stop from the UK to the USA. Julia Jones charts her trailblazing achievement

 
Ann Davison had crossed single-handed in 1952 in her 24ft wooden yacht Felicity Ann but she’d taken more of a cruise approach, pausing several times along the way. 
It had been a remarkable achievement by a remarkable woman. 

Almost 20 years later, Nicolette Milnes Walker was planning something different. 

Nicolette Milnes Walker enjoyed fixing gear at sea, as it prevented boredom from setting in.

Credit: Getty

Boats and equipment had changed during the boom years of the 1960s. 
Like thousands of other people Nicolette had built a Mirror dinghy from a kit.

She’d been living in a Bristol University student flat and had to get it out through the window. 
By the end of the decade mass production using GRP had revolutionised sailing as a leisure activity. 
There was much more stuff on the market and many more people ready to have a go, even if they didn’t have a big bank balance or generations of sailing experience. 
Practical Boat Owner, founded in 1967, was just the magazine they needed. 

Nicolette Milnes Walker: Spark of an idea 

In January 1971 Nicolette had been to the International Boat Show at Earl’s Court and had become fascinated by the variety of equipment available. 
The year before she’d sailed to the Azores with friends. 
Now she began collecting catalogues, making lists and calculating what she’d need to sail to America alone. 
To begin with it was just a game.

She was good at planning – her current job was as an industrial psychologist devising experiments that helped test how people in high tech jobs might react under stress. 
Gradually her ideas developed from the ‘what if?’ stage to the ‘why not?’ 

Aziz was the 39th Pionier class racer to be built in the UK.

Credit: Nicolette Milnes Walker

There were plenty of negatives.

She wasn’t a hugely experienced sailor. 
She could manage a dinghy but had never handled a yacht on her own, though her trip to the Azores had taught her what an Atlantic gale felt like. 
She wasn’t a good swimmer but swimming alone in the Atlantic wasn’t going to help much anyway. 
She was short sighted, she was female.

Should that stop her? 
Nicolette had a hunch that there were aspects of women’s inherited experience that might potentially make them more resilient than men. 
That was one of the things she wanted to test, with herself as the subject of the experiment. 

Aziz was fitted with Hasler Gibbs self-steering gear.

The boat didn’t have a stern pulpit so a bracket had to be fitted to support the windvane.

Credit: Nicolette Milnes Walker

She wanted to know how she’d react to fear and loneliness: she also wanted the thrill of being first to succeed. 
Imperceptibly she found she’d reached a decision: “I could find no reason for not going. So I decided to go.” 
She resigned from her job and borrowed enough money to buy a small yacht. 
She chose a second hand Pionier, a very early GRP design by EG van der Stadt. Built in 1963 and named Aziz (from its first owner’s polo pony) it would probably be considered unsuitable for single-handed distance cruising today. 
Instead of the traditional long keel, giving good directional stability, Aziz had a fin keel and spade rudder. 
Later, Nicolette described how difficult it had been to keep Aziz steady under engine, ‘a moment’s inattention and she whips round in a semi-circle’. 
It became ‘quite a laugh’ to dash down to the cabin for a cigarette and matches and get back to the helm before Aziz shot off in the wrong direction. (In 1971 even a doctor’s daughter could smoke without shame!)

Transformative

Under sail, however, Aziz responded well to a Hasler Gibbs servo-pendulum steering system, another 1960s innovation that was transforming life for the single-handed sailor.
Nicolette made clear, practical decisions about what not to take – such as a spinnaker. 
She’d never used one and guessed that twin headsails, poled out, would be much easier to handle. 
She chose to prepare and set out from a small yachting centre – Dale in Pembrokeshire – rather than the more conventional south coast centres which might be too busy to bother with an enterprise like hers. 
Setting out from Milford Haven also avoided most of the busy Channel shipping. 

Nicolette Milnes Walker decided to leave from Dale in Wales, rather than a South Coast yachting centre. 

Credit: Nicolette Milnes Walker

Once she was away from land, Nicolette remained practical and analytical. She was given a tape recorder into which she spoke each day. 
When she listened to these after the voyage, she realised they were much more revealing than her careful diary entries. 
Her subsequent book, When I Put Out to Sea, reveals that she was hard on herself, getting angry over what she regarded as ‘stupid’ errors. 
She also enjoyed using her initiative to fix her mistakes. 
Later she would joke that she’d almost looked forward to things going wrong at sea because having something to fix relieved the monotony. 

Nicolette Milnes Walker sets off on her Atlantic crossing. It was only the second time she has sailed solo over any distance. 

Credit: Nicolette Milnes Walker

She was also young and fun-loving.

She enjoyed the freedom of summer days without clothes. 
She daubed herself with scent, dressed up and drank brandy for special, solitary celebrations.

(She also used the alcohol to fix her steering compass.) 
All the time she was observing herself as the subject of her own experiment. 
She wondered whether she would lose her voice if she spent time without speaking to people; she noticed she was “thinking very loudly”. 
She endured periods of despair and believed she was facing death. 

Party time

When she arrived safely at Newport in Rhode Island, she changed into a mini-dress and flung herself into celebration. 
Yet it wasn’t long before she was noticing that this also had an effect on her personality. 
It’s probably not surprising that after a period of celebrity –press articles, TV interviews, Women of the Year lunches, Desert Island Discs, an MBE – she decided that it was time for a new challenge… which turned out to be raising twin daughters, Rosalind and Frances. 
When Nicolette decided to retire from the fray, she did so thoroughly, packing away her notes, cuttings, photos and memorabilia and setting herself up not only to make a success of motherhood, but also to be a successful bookseller with her husband, Bruce Coward, at the Harbour Bookshop Dartmouth. 

Being presented with a painting of Aziz by Robin Knox-Johnston. 

Credit: Nicolette Milnes Walker

She never spoke about her achievement and most people have never heard of her. 
Now she is about to be 80 and has been persuaded to unpack some of those packages as a new edition of her book is published. 
She will give a single talk in Dartmouth in aid of the RNLI. 

When I Put Out to Sea is released on 15 March 2023 

Buy When I Put Out to Sea by Nicolette Milnes Walker at Waterstone (UK) 

She has written a brief Afterword. “I have often been asked to give a talk about the crossing, but always declined, as I felt that I was no longer that girl who had set out with such excitement to challenge herself. 

“But re-reading this book after very many years makes me realise that I am indeed not that girl, but a new version of her. I have changed my opinions on a number of the views expressed in the book. But I do remember her and I know that her experience gave me the confidence to accept who I am and to be delighted in the life I have. "
“That seems almost as important an achievement as sailing the Atlantic.”

When I Put Out to Sea by Nicolette Milnes Walker is republished by Golden Duck, priced £11.99, www.golden-duck.co.uk and is also available on Amazon Kindle. 

Deep-sea mining causes immediate loss of seafloor life

From Earth by Eric Ralls

Far below the ocean surface, the deep seafloor is often described as one of the planet’s least disturbed ecosystems.
That assumption is now being tested.

Companies are preparing to mine mineral-rich nodules scattered across the abyss.
The shift raises urgent questions about how quickly damage could appear once industrial machines begin operating.

A new field experiment offers one of the clearest answers yet.
Researchers found that a single trial of a deep-sea mining collector physically removed more than one-third of the animals and species living directly in its path.

The results show that biological impacts can occur immediately, not only after years of full-scale extraction.

Examining the seafloor test tracks

The damage was documented along fresh tracks carved into the abyssal seafloor during a 2022 trial that removed thousands of tons of mineral-rich nodules from deep Pacific sediments.

By comparing conditions before and after the test, Eva C. D. Stewart and colleagues at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London directly documented how animal communities thinned and simplified inside those tracks.

The decline appeared within months of the trial, standing out even against the strong natural ups and downs that shape deep-sea life over time.

That contrast between rapid disturbance and slower background change sets the boundary of what the evidence can already show and what the rest of the seafloor response still needs to reveal.

Nodules support seafloor life

Mining companies target polymetallic nodules – rock-like lumps on the seafloor that contain valuable metals such as nickel, cobalt, and copper – because global demand for these materials continues to rise.

Across much of the deep ocean, these nodules sit scattered on soft mud and act as rare patches of hard surface.
Many animals attach to them or use them for feeding, shelter, and breeding.

When mining machines collect the nodules from the seafloor, they remove these living spaces along with the minerals.

Because so many species depend on the nodules themselves, the impact of mining must be measured in terms of habitat loss – not just the amount of metal extracted.

Tracks caused the biggest drop

Inside the fresh tracks, counts of macrofauna – seafloor animals visible without a microscope – fell sharply within two months.
The collector churned the top inch of sediment where most creatures live, and it left a bare lane behind.

With pre-mining sampling in hand, the team reported a 32 percent drop in species richness inside the tracks.

“Finally, we have good data on what the impacts of a modern commercial deep-sea mining machine might be,” said Stewart.

 

Plumes rewired the seafloor community

Far from the tracks, sediment plumes, clouds of stirred-up mud that drift and settle, changed who dominated without lowering animal totals.

The team sampled about 1,300 feet from the lane and saw a thin layer of sediment coating the nodules.

Animal counts stayed steady there, but a few species became more dominant, which reduced overall biodiversity in the plume zone.

Because plumes can spread beyond mined lanes, monitoring has to track community balance, not only head counts, across wide areas.

Natural cycles obscure damage

Animal densities rose and fell across the abyssal plain – a flat deep seafloor covered in fine mud – for two years before mining began.

Changes in surface winds and currents affected how much food reached the bottom, and seafloor communities responded.
These natural swings reduced animal numbers at several sites even before the test, making clean controls essential.

Without repeated sampling, managers could mistake a climate-driven decline for mining damage and draw the wrong boundary for protection.

Across 80 mud cores, the team sorted 4,350 animals and identified 788 species, though diversity remained under-sampled.
Projections suggested that about 15,000 individuals, or 400 cores, would be needed to capture most species.

Researchers tracked species richness – the number of different species per core – which often falls when mining reduces animal communities.

“We have also discovered many new species and shown how the abyssal ecosystem changes naturally over time,” said Stewart.

Mining recovery may take decades

Evidence from past tests suggests recovery will be slow and uneven.
A separate study tracking a 1979 mining test strip still found strong disturbance 44 years later.

Deep-ocean sediments mix slowly, and replacing removed nodules takes far longer than human lifetimes, so communities rebuild at a crawl.

Some small, mobile creatures returned, but many larger animals remained reduced where the seafloor had been scraped.
This history suggests fresh tracks may persist for decades, meaning the early losses measured today could be only the first signal.

Understanding those long-term changes will require stronger monitoring.
Future surveys must include enough sediment cores to capture natural variation, with at least five recommended per site.

Additional cores reduce the chance that a single unusually rich or sparse sample drives the result, especially when animals cluster in patches.

Surveys will also require specialists to identify animals to the species level.
Without that detail, monitoring could miss which species disappear first and fail to detect slower ecological shifts outside mined tracks.

Seafloor evidence fuels mining debate

The International Seabed Authority has signed 15-year exploration contracts with 22 contractors, while industry continues to push for rules governing commercial mining.

Regulators already require baseline surveys and environmental impact plans, and these new results highlight why both must include long-term time-series monitoring.

In the recent trial, Nauru Ocean Resources partnered with Allseas to operate the collector.
The trial demonstrated how mining activity can produce immediate seafloor damage alongside broader, subtler ecological changes that unfold over time.

Until extended follow-up data become available, policymakers will face a difficult decision about how much uncertainty they are willing to accept.

Continued monitoring will determine whether affected communities can recover.
The same rigorous sampling approach could help guide future permitting decisions or justify pauses as governments weigh economic demand against environmental risk.

Links :

• Nature Ecology & Evolution : Impacts of an industrial deep-sea mining trial on macrofaunal biodiversity
• Earth : Sediment clouds from deep-sea mining threaten seafloor life  
• Hydro : NOAA to map mineral-rich seafloor off American Samoa 
• Alaska Beacon : U.S. Interior Department agency solicits interest in seafloor mining off Alaska
• NYTimes : New U.S. Rule Aims to Speed Up Mining of the Seafloor
   

Scientists can spy shrimp eggs from space

Brine shrimp, and brine shrimp eggs, are teeny-tiny.

But by analyzing the light they reflect, scientists can now identify aggregations of them from space.

Photo by Kim Taylor/NPL/Minden Pictures

 

From Hakai Mag by Saima Sidik

By analyzing the light it reflects, scientists can say whether that floating blob in a satellite image is made up of plastic, shrimp, seaweed, or something else.

It’s become a bit clichéd to say with surprise that something—a wildfire, the Great Barrier Reef, a ship blocking the Suez Canal—can be seen from space.
But every so often, scientists manage to spot something from space that truly is surprising.
Case in point: University of South Florida optical oceanographer Chuanmin Hu and his colleagues have worked out ways of spotting aggregations of small floating objects, such as shrimp eggs, algae, and herring spawn, from space.
And not only can they find these buoyant masses—they can tell you which is which.

Hu and his team can’t zoom in on a satellite image enough to actually see a shrimp egg in the way that you could look at the picture and say, “That’s a shrimp egg!” So how can they tell the difference?

The key to identifying the objects, says Hu, is that “every floating matter has its fingerprint.”

Different objects, being made of different materials, reflect characteristic wavelengths of light—patterns that scientists can read using multispectral instruments mounted on satellites.
Using these patterns to identify substances is known as spectroscopy.
The technique is common in labs, and scientists in the rapidly evolving field of remote sensing are carrying it over into satellite analysis.

Hu and his team, along with scientists around the world, are building a knowledge base of what different objects and materials look like from space.
That way, when they come across an unfamiliar floating object on a satellite image, they can look to see whether the wavelengths it reflects match up with anything that’s been analyzed before.

Sometimes Hu and his colleagues can only speculate about the identity of floating matter until they have a chance to take a close-up look.
A trip to Utah’s Great Salt Lake, for example, confirmed their suspicion that filamentous white slicks they’d seen on satellite images were massive accumulations of brine shrimp eggs.
Over the past year, Hu’s team has also published a method for identifying herring spawn, and they are attempting to identify sea snot—the disgusting films of phytoplankton mucus that plagued Turkey last summer.

But there’s also a pressing problem that scientists hope remote sensing can address—the vast amounts of plastic that are clogging the oceans.

“The main idea is to create an algorithm that can detect the plastic litter,” says Konstantinos Topouzelis, an environmental scientist at the University of the Aegean in Greece.
“So the cleaning efforts can be guided.”

But identifying plastic from space comes with challenges.
For one, there are many kinds of plastic, and some blend in with the surrounding water.
Plastic also aggregates and disperses quickly.
And while some aggregations are huge, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, many are small and difficult to pick out in the images.

For the past few years, Topouzelis and his students have been deploying and analyzing targets, such as shopping bags and fishing nets, made of various plastic materials.
The spectral signatures of these known plastics give researchers a starting point when they’re wondering whether the swirls and swooshes on other satellite images might be plastic.

Oceanographer Katerina Kikaki, at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece, is taking a different approach.
She and her colleagues have scoured through seven years of scientific publications, records from citizen scientists, and media reports to find examples of plastic pollution.
They recently published a database of satellite images that correspond to these known plastic accumulations.
“Our data set can enable the community to explore the spectral behavior of plastic debris,” Kikaki says.

Kikaki’s and Topouzelis’s studies are examples of ground truthing—analyses of known objects that help confirm if remote assessments are accurate.

Having eyes on the ground can really help drive the field forward.
Just looking at satellite observations, “my view is narrowed,” Hu says.
“I may ponder over [a satellite image] for weeks or months.” 

But if a boat captain tweets a picture of sea snot along with some geographical information, that can save Hu a lot of time.

So if you’re on the water, and you stop to appreciate some mysterious slime, put it on social media! 

An optical oceanographer may be staring at a picture of the same region, wondering what’s out there.

How the “Atlantic Grand Canyon” came to exist

 From Nautilus by Jake Currie

New research sheds light on the mysterious underwater structure

On land, most canyons are carved by erosion from rivers over millions of years. 

In the ocean, things are a bit trickier. 

 

Visualization with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO nautical raster chart)

 

Zoom visualization with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO nautical raster chart)

 

Zoom visualization with the GeoGarage platform (STRM bathymetric chart)

 

The King’s Trough Complex, located more than 600 miles off the coast of Portugal, is a massive canyon that includes one of the deepest points in the Atlantic Ocean—and was once a candidate to become

The chain bag dredge is brought back on board.

It can be used to collect specific rock samples from depths of several thousand meters. 

(Image credit: GEOMAR)

But how did it get there? 

 

To find out, geologists from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany hit the seas in a 300-foot research vessel equipped with high-resolution sonar systems to map the ocean floor and a chain bag dredge to retrieve rock samples. 

After analyzing the chemical composition of the volcanic rocks, the team was able to determine how and when this deep-sea canyon formed. 

They published their findings in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G-Cubed).

 

HIDDEN DEPTHS: This bathymetric map of King’s Trough Complex shows the deep basins at its eastern end, based on new data.

Image courtesy of Geomar. 

 

 

 

“Researchers have long suspected that tectonic processes—that is, movements of the Earth’s crust—played a central role in the formation of the King’s Trough,” study author Antje Dürkefälden explained in a statement. 

“Our results now explain for the first time why this remarkable structure developed precisely at this location.”

Between 37 and 24 million years ago, a tectonic plate boundary shifted to the area, resulting in the crust fracturing and the seafloor between Europe and Africa opening like a zipper in an east-west direction.

 

(a) Cartoon showing the eastern North Atlantic region at ∼37 Ma after the plate boundary had just jumped to the KTC area resulting in oblique extension beginning at the Peake and Freen Deeps due to the continued anticlockwise rotation of the Iberian/African plate.

(b) After a new plume conduit had branched off toward the south (resulting in the steady build-up of the Azores plateau) and the relocation of the plate boundary to the Azores-Gibraltar Fracture zone, transtension and rifting in the KTC area ceased and the northern plume branch wanes but is still reflected by the 45°N anomaly at the MAR. 

 Credit: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (2025). DOI: 10.1029/2025gc012616

 

Prior to the shift, the crust was thickened and heated by an upwelling of molten rock from the mantle, making it particularly fragile.

“This thickened, heated crust may have made the region mechanically weaker, so that the plate boundary preferentially shifted here,” added co-author Jörg Geldmacher. 

“When the plate boundary later moved farther south toward the modern Azores, the formation of the King’s Trough also came to a halt.”

It’s a remarkable example of how activity deep within our planet’s molten mantle can have a dramatic impact on the surface.

 

 Links :

• AGU : Origin of the King's Trough Complex (North Atlantic): Interplay Between a Transient Plate Boundary and the Early Azores Mantle Plume 
• Phys : King's Trough: How a shifting plate boundary and hot mantle material shaped an Atlantic mega-canyon
• Discover : The Atlantic Ocean May Have Its Own Grand Canyon — and It Might Be Even Bigger
• Eureka : The “Grand Canyon” of the Atlantic 
• SciTechDaily : Scientists Uncover Unusual Origins of Mysterious Ocean Trench Bigger Than the Grand Canyon
• ECO : The Grand Canyon of the Atlantic 

Women & the wind

Women & the Wind is an independent, self-produced documentary following three women as they cross the North Atlantic aboard a 50-year-old wooden catamaran.

Their voyage follows the journey of plastic pollution across the ocean, exploring the deep and fragile synergy between humanity and nature.