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English seas get new marine conservation zones

JNCC interactive map

From BBC

The English government has announced it will create 27 new marine conservation zones (MCZs) to protect wildlife in the seas around the English coast.

The MCZs will help seahorses, coral reefs and oyster beds to remain safe from dredging and bottom-trawling.
The Marine Conservation Society welcomed the "significant milestone".
But it warned there were still fewer than a quarter of the number of MCZs recommended by scientists to complete an "ecologically coherent" network.

UKSeaMap 2010 interactive map : predicted habitat

'Better protected'

Last December a two-year £8m consultation involving the government's own science advisers recommended the creation of 127 MCZs to halt the rapid decline of fish, lobsters, oysters and seahorses.
But earlier this year, ministers announced plans to construct just 31 zones aimed at protecting life on the ocean floor.

At the time, campaigners described the plan as "pitiful" and a "bitter disappointment" - but the then environment minister Richard Benyon insisted that the scientific evidence for a large proportion of the zones was "just not up to scratch".
He said another £3.5m was being spent on gathering more evidence that could support more zones being designated in future.

Announcing the 27 new zones, marine environment minister George Eustice said the department was doing "more than ever" to protect England's marine environment and almost a quarter of English inshore waters and 9% of UK waters would be "better protected".
He said that the new MCZs - which would join over 500 marine protected areas that already exist - would cover an area roughly three times the size of Wiltshire and would span the waters around the English coast.
The scheme would ensure areas such as Chesil Beach and the Skerries Banks are safeguarded.
The minister said that the number of new sites had been reduced from 31 to 27 because two of the sites - at Stour and Orwell and Hilbre Island - were too costly,
A final decision on the two remaining sites - at Hythe Bay and North of Celtic Deep - will be made in the next phase of the project.

The areas within which are the new MCZs are:

Inshore sites:

• Blackwater, Crouch, Roach and Colne Estuaries, Essex;
• Aln Estuary, Northumberland;
• Beachy Head West, East Sussex;
• Chesil Beach and Stennis Ledges, Dorset;
• Cumbria Coast;
• Folkestone Pomerania, Kent;
• Fylde, Lancashire;
• Isles of Scilly;
• Kingmere, Sussex;
• Lundy;
• The Manacles, Cornwall;
• Medway Estuary, Kent;
• Padstow Bay and Surrounds, Cornwall;
• Pagham Harbour, Sussex;
• Poole Rocks, Dorset;
• Skerries Bank and Surrounds, Devon;
• South Dorset;
• Tamar Estuary, Devon/Cornwall;
• Thanet Coast, Kent;
• Torbay, Devon;
• Upper Fowey and Pont Pill, Cornwall;
• Whitsand and Looe Bay, Cornwall

Offshore sites:

• The Canyons, Cornwall;
• East of Haig Fras, Cornwall;
• North East of Farnes Deep, Northumberland;
• South-West Deeps (West), Cornwall;
• Swallow Sand, Northumberland

Mr Eustice also announced plans to designate two more phases of MCZs over the next three years, with a consultation on the next phase expected to be launched in early 2015.
"This is just the beginning," he said.

'Threatened sea bed'

Melissa Moore, senior policy officer at the Marine Conservation Society, said that the organisation broadly welcomed the new proposals.
"This announcement is a significant milestone for marine conservation", she said.
But she added: "We urge government to bring forward designation of future tranches to prevent many threatened seabed habitats being further damaged - these 27 sites represent less than a quarter of the number recommended by scientists to complete an 'ecologically coherent' network."

She also pointed to the need to "police" potentially damaging activities.
"The MCZs will be multi-use, so low-impact fishing such as potting will be permitted in most sites," she said.
"It is vital that within these sites there is a clear notion of what can and can't happen, and who is responsible for policing those activities, otherwise we're just creating paper parks."
Defra said it had received around 40,000 responses to their consultation to 31 March 2013, which asked for feedback on the proposals via their website.

Links :

• The Guardian : England names 27 new marine conservation zones
• Fish fight : a new network o MCZ around the UK can safeguard our seas
• Blue and Green tomorrow : Marine conservation could be worth ‘billions’ to UK economy
• Fugro : Fugro completes 2 year nautical charting survey for Maritime and Coastguard Agency

'Un-mappable' Great Barrier Reef finally mapped in 3D

From EOMap

German and Australian scientists launched a set of groundbreaking, high resolution, shallow water topography maps for the entire Great Barrier Reef.

These world-first digital maps of the coral reefs, using satellite derived depth (bathymetry) techniques, are a critical step towards identifying, managing and essentially preserving and protecting what lies within the waters of this global icon.

Project partner, Dr Robin Beaman of James Cook University, says the product is different to anything else available, as until this product, nearly half of the shallow water reef area on the Great Barrier Reef had not been mapped using modern digital surveys.
Dr Robin Beaman says the data provides a complete picture of the world's largest coral reef ecosystem.
"It's like a terrain map," he said.
"Google Earth is a good example, but in the ocean it's much harder to do.
"We use satellite images to look into the sea floor to about a 30-metre depth.
"Digital data is what's really critical in this day and age."
Dr Beaman says the data could provide policy makers and researchers with vital information needed to combat threats to the reef.
This includes measuring the impact of rising sea levels and helping to measure water quality and ocean currents.

A major study released in October 2012 found coral cover had been halved since the mid-1980s due to cyclones, bleaching and the crown of thorns starfish.

While these coral reefs are the most ecologically significant, they are also the most difficult to map due to being either too remote or because of their shallow nature, which makes them navigationally dangerous.

Instead of relying on traditional surveying vessels or aircraft to map the many 'un-mappable' areas of the reef, Germany-based aquatic remote-sensing company EOMAP used space-borne satellites to overcome these hurdles.

The result is the largest project of its kind ever conducted in Australia, and possibly the entire world. The 3D water depth maps have a 30m horizontal resolution over approximately 350,000 km2 of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and Torres Strait, providing not only more detailed individual reef data, but also a complete picture of Earth's largest coral reef ecosystem.

"This information is regarded as essential for any government or company involved with managing the reef environment," states Professor Stuart Phinn, University of Queensland, another partner on the project.

The EOMAP product will aid the 'big picture' assessments of the Great Barrier Reef including water quality modeling, measuring responses to both man-made and natural impacts, such as sediment transportation and tropical cyclones, and helping to predict the likely impacts of climate change effects, such as sea level rise and increased tropical cyclone frequency.

It will also help target priority areas for more detailed data collection, for example with the vast improvements this promises to ocean current modeling, scientists can model crown of thorn starfish larval trajectories to where they are next likely to inhabit the Great Barrier Reef.

"There is often a disconnect between research and industry, where researchers generally look at changes on individual reefs and habitats," comments Dr Nathan Quadros from the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, also a partner on the project.

"But industry want the overall picture of the reef -- this product brings the two together."

All of the mapped areas, no matter how small, are available for purchase by anyone via the EOMAP website.

A coarser product (500m spatial resolution) is also available, free of charge, together with sample data of the high resolution products.
Looking ahead, EOMAP has already demonstrated the viability of the next generation product: a 2m resolution version using DigitalGlobe's Worldview-2 satellite.

"Based on our trials, this promises to be an even more astounding product," says Dr Magnus Wettle, Senior Scientist at EOMAP.

"To be honest, I'd like to see the Australian Government partner with us on this, our next endeavor, so that it would belong to Australia as a national resource," he said.
"Having said that, our priority is to make it happen, so we have to be prepared to be pragmatic."

EOMAP last week received an award from Copernicus (the European Commission remote sensing peak body) for its work on making affordable aquatic remote sensing products for industry and the public sector.

GBR - Project 3DGBR:
High-resolution Bathymetry for the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea (JCU)

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : 3-D maps reveal depths of sea floor
• Australian Geographic : Mapping Australia's sea floor
  

Marine GeoGarage : website temporarily down for maintenance

Version 2 of the Google Maps JavaScript API which was used for the Marine GeoGarage web application since 2010 has been deprecated by Google and officially turned down for existing applications on Tuesday November 19, 2013 (actually early this morning on Wednesday 20th).

The maintenance period is used to migrate the basic features of the Marine GeoGarage to the v3 API.

We are sorry for this inconvenience, please check back later.

Notes :
Maintenance only affects the User Interface of our route planning and viewing web app, but not the nautical charts stored in our Cloud Computing solution, so :
- universal iPhone & iPad mobile apps (which are not using Google Maps API) continue to work for viewing charts.
- no problem for our B2B customers who use our different chart layers in their own web applications.

Is this Polar Pod genius or just plain insanity?

Polar Pod from Sylvain Bergeon (for francophones)
The polar Pod is a project of vertical buoying scientific exploration station that will allow a team of 7 people, scientist and crew, to navigate around the Antarctic pole during one year.
This project, lead by the famous explorer Jean-Louis Etienne, is currently in its study phase. 

From Deep Sea News

People come up with all sorts of wacky ideas to explore the oceans.
And here is another one of those ideas.
Meet the Polar Pod, a manned research platform dreamed up by French Explorer/Physician Jean-Louis Etienne to drift around Antarctica in the Southern Ocean.
My first thought when I saw this concept was WTF.

A permanent observatory in the "furious fifties"

But upon further inspection, I became intrigued.
Modeled after Scripp’s R/P FLIP, the Polar Pod is a floating stick with a giant weight at the bottom to keep it ballasted and upright so the living quarters that are stuck on top don’t tilt into the ocean (this FLIP don’t FLOP).
When FLIP is upright, it is a super stable platform is almost completely unaffected by waves.
The Polar Pod is a little different, as it has an open frame, making it more susceptible to wave action. Even so, the designers think it will still be pretty stable, only swaying as much as 5 degrees making it nearly seasickness proof.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current :

24000 kms / 15000 mi long and 1000 kms / 620 mi wide, it is the most powerful current on the planet.

Driven by legendary winds - the famous "furious fifties" - nothing stops its great swell around Antarctica.

The biological activity there is intense; it is a vast sanctuary for seabirds and marine mammals.

And this is perfect, because Explorer Etienne wants to set this thing adrift in the Southern Ocean, circling Antarctica via the massive current that flow around it, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

 A major player in the climate :

Its cold waters absorb a significant portion of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities.

Just like a drive belt, it connects the waters of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, to the cold waters of the cold waters of the Antarctic ocean.

It helps insulate the cold of Antarctica from the mid latitudes heat fluxes.

It is the main source of the World Ocean deep water formation.

The freeze and thaw periods around Antarctica feed the formation of deep water.

As I said before, I’ve been somewhat fascinated by this entire concept since I first learned about it. Mostly because it really made me think of the feasibility of such an experiment.
So let’s start on a positive note, the cons of this project:

1. The Southern Ocean can be nuts.
Massive winds, waves and not to mention icebergs make it a sane mariners nightmare (bah, who am I kidding. No dedicated mariner is completely sane).
If they can manage to stay afloat for an entire year, then kudos to them.

2. They plan to use the platform to observe the Southern Ocean.
Getting oceanographic data in the Southern Ocean is hard.
The window of ‘good’ weather is small so ships don’t go there to take data during certain times of the year. But the Polar Pod will be there!
And maybe what they observe will help to fill the gaps in our scientific knowledge.

3. Power.
When scientists themselves aren’t exploring the Southern Ocean in ships, they are sending all sorts of autonomous oceanographic robots down there to explore it.
But these things are run on batteries, and batteries don’t have a lot of power.
Whatever instruments are mounted on these autonomous samplers need to sip power.
And the number of instruments that do this are limited.
But hopefully for all of those onboard, the Polar Pod will have a bigger power generator.
This means MOAR POWER and MOAR INSTRUMENTS!
Even fancier, you could even power satellite internet.
Send all that data back to us scientists on shore and simultaneously Skype with all your friends back home.

4. Instrumentation.
The underwater spar can be rigged up with all sorts of instruments.
Get profiles of water velocity with high-powered ADCP current meters, sure.
String of CTD’s down the side, yes please!
Drop turbulence profiler off the side, OUI!
And for good measure, slap a meteorological station on the top.

Jean-Louis Etienne, France's most famous living explorer, sat with the French Embassy press team to discuss his life of adventure.
Dr. Etienne has led or been a part of expeditions to the farthest-flung corners of the earth — including Mount Everest, worldwide sailing journeys, and both poles — since 1975.

Now for the cons:

1. The Southern Ocean can be nuts.
Who is going to rescue them if they run into trouble?
And how is a freely drifting ship going to avoid ice bergs?
What if hits one of those pesky ice bergs?

2. Supplies.
Both food and fuel will have to resupplied via boat, which is a sort of nutty idea.
From talking to people that have been on FLIP, moving anything from a small boat that is going up and down with the waves to a platform that is not moving at all is a potentially stupid dangerous situation. I can’t even imagine what it would be like in the Southern Ocean swell.
But from what I can gather, is seems as though everything will be done by winch from the ends of it’s wings, which may make it a lot easier.

3. A proposed oceanographic research platform with no science plan (that I can find).
Is this guy for real?
You can’t tout your new multimillion euro vessel as a oceanographic research platform and have no science plan *pulls hair out in frustration*.
But then again, his plan could be that this is a ship of opportunity for scientists who will then dictate what can and can’t be done.
Anyway, I am curious to see what will happen with this project.
It may never materialize.
But at least it got me thinking of all the expensive shit I could drop into the Southern Ocean.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Vertical ship marks 50 years at sea / Sea orbiter, a Bond villain lair? No, this strange boat is a floating lab that will help marine biologists unlock the secrets of the world's oceans

Ortho Littorale France Atlantique v2

Ortho littorale v2 (2011) MEDDE

All the aerial stitched pictures were made in the quest of optimum viewing
with the specific conditions:
no swell, no rain for 48 hours, large tide (foreshore) and lower low water (water depth less than 1m), ...

Arcachon (OrthoLittorale v2 view)

Note : this layer can be accessible as any GeoGarage georeferenced layer for external webmapping applications via the GeoGarage API.
So don't hesitate to contact us if your are interested.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Ortho Littorale France Méditerranée v2

Mystery of how the wandering albatross travels 10,000 miles in a single journey without flapping its wings is solved

Dynamic Soaring: How the Wandering Albatross Can Fly for Free

The wandering albatross spends weeks, even months, at sea without ever returning to land.

With precise GPS data and custom navigation software, researchers have finally figured out how. 

Animation: Institute of Flight System Dynamics

From DailyMail

• Wandering albatross fly using a technique known as 'dynamic soaring'
• Involves gaining height by angling their wings while flying into the wind
• The mighty birds can then turn and swoop along for up to 100 metres
• By repeatedly using this method, the birds can travel thousands of miles without flapping their wings

The mighty albatross can use its huge 3.5 metre wings to circumnavigate the globe in just 46 days.
But its ability to travel 10,000 miles in a single journey, without expending almost any energy, has long confounded scientists.
Now a team of researchers believe they have worked out how these majestic creatures are able to stay aloft in the skies without flapping their enormous wings.

 The mighty albatross can use its huge 3.5 metre wings to circumnavigate the globe in just 46 days.
But its ability to travel 10,000 miles in a single journey, without expending almost any energy, has long confounded scientists

Researchers, led by Gottfried Sachs of the University of Technology, Munich, used advanced GPS tracking on a group of 16 wandering albatross.
This allowed them to measure each bird’s position 10 times a second and to within a few centimetres, providing a detailed record of their flight path.
They found that once in the air, the birds performed a flying trick that seemed to involve characteristic repetitive up and down manoeuvres – a technique known as ‘dynamic soaring’.

This map reveals the distance that a wandering albatross from the island of Kerguelen can travel without flapping its wings

The 4850 km path (projected to the sea surface) of a long-distance flight of a wandering albatross is shown. GPS tracking stopped after the first 6 days of this 30-day-long foraging trip

Dynamic soaring involves the birds gaining height by angling their wings while flying into the wind.

They can then turn and swoop along for up to 100 metres at speeds of up to 67 miles per hour.

By repeatedly using this method, the scientists believe the wandering albatross can travel thousands of miles without flapping its wings.

Aerospace engineer Gottfried Sachs said dynamic soaring has been observed before, but its mechanics have remained a mystery since as early as the 1880s.

‘Students of the albatross’s flight understood early on that the bottommost layer of wind blowing above any surface, including that of water, will incur friction and thus slow down,’ explained Professor Sachs, writing in IEEE Spectrum. 

 Illustration: Emily Cooper

Flying Free as a Breeze: Unflapping flight, called dynamic soaring, allows the wandering albatross to extract energy from the shear wind field, in which the wind’s strength increases with each additional meter above the water’s surface.

Beginning near the surface, the bird climbs into the wind [1], turns to leeward [2], descends [3], and again turns into the wind [4].

‘This layer itself then becomes an obstacle that slows the layer just above it’.

This result is a 10 to 20-metre high region known as a ‘boundary layer’ through which the wind speed increases smoothly the higher you go in the field.

‘Dynamic soaring manoeuvres extract energy from that field, enabling the albatross to fly in any direction, even against the wind, with hardly any effort,’ said Professor Sachs.

Exactly how the bird extracts energy from a horizontally blowing wind, however, was a puzzle.

By combining computer modelling with GPS tracking, the team were able to accuratley simulate the flight of the bird in different wind speeds.

Wandering albatross have the record for the bird with the largest wingspan at 3.5 metres.
Distances are hard to measure, but one banded bird was recorded travelling 6000 km in twelve days.
They spend most of their life on the wing, returning to land only to court a mate and to breed.
The female Albatross lays just one egg that can weigh 1.2lb (0.5kg), in a basic nest on the ground.
The parents take it in turns to incubate the egg for 2-3 months depending on the size of the Albatross species.
Chicks can take anywhere from 5 to 10 months to fledge, depending on the size of the Albatross species.
Albatross are very long living Birds with an average age of between 40 and 50 years old.

Each dynamic soaring cycle consists of (1) a windward climb, (2) a curve from wind at the upper altitude, (3) a descent and (4) a curve from the wind at a low altitude, close to the sea surface

Dynamic soaring involves the birds gaining height by angling their wings while flying into the wind.
The technique involves flying from the relatively windless layer close to the ocean waves into a region of much faster winds above it.
This gives the birds a boost in airspeed that allows them to soar 30 to 50 feet into the air.
Then they turn, gliding with the wind to get an additional speed boost while swooping downward close to the sea waves.
By repeatedly using this method, the wandering albatross can travel thousands of miles without flapping its wings.

They found that albatross could soar dynamically as long as the wind speed is a bit more than 30 kilometers per hour (16 knots).
Their results also indicated that the shear wind field alone could enable the flight of the birds.

While the albatross had existed for about 50 million years, today it is estimated that fishing vessels kill one albatross every five minutes.

Longlining poses the greatest single threat to seabirds worldwide.

Boats cast lines up to 80 miles long carrying thousands of baited hooks, which trap the birds and drag them under - drowning them.

All 22 species are in trouble with eight currently critically endangered.

Links :

• Spectrum : The Nearly Effortless Flight of the Albatross

Ocean of Life: How our seas are changing, by Callum Roberts – review

Roberts tells a wonder-filled story of humankind and the sea, including its horrors

From The Guardian

The best science writers can command words, imagery and cadence to match any award-winning novelist.
That is not, however, why we read science books.
We read them for what they have to tell us: the best science books are triumphs of substance over style, and Ocean of Life is one of them.

Callum Roberts starts with something that could hardly be more substantial: the 70% of the planet that most of us know almost nothing about, even though it is the planet's defining feature, and the birthplace and nursery for all known life.
Roberts is a marine biologist and an occasional columnist for the Guardian.
His command of research is prodigious, and his generosity with example is prodigal.
He is good on the big picture, but he understands even better how to burnish an argument with gleaming detail.

Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Are there plenty more fish in the sea?
For every hour spent fishing today, in boats bristling with the latest electronics, fishers land just 6% of what they did 120 years ago; landings per unit of fishing power are down 16 times for plaice, over 100 times for haddock, 500 times for halibut.
In 1870 a Massachusetts newspaper reported that predator bluefish drove the local menhaden ashore and upriver so thickly "that one could take a common fork and pitch them into the boat".
In 1785, a Loch Fyne fisherman told a visiting MP that it was not unusual to catch 350 turbot, sole and "large, fine flounders" on just one long line of 400 hooks.

Of course, the catastrophe of overfishing is compounded by climate change, sea level rise and ocean acidification.
On the Antarctic Peninsula, Adélie penguins that once nested in snow now huddle ankle deep in mud, downy feathers adapted for snow are soaked in sleet and drizzle, and chicks die.
Adélie populations on the Peninsula are down 90% in 30 years.
In the last 25 years, the North Sea has warmed 1.25C. Of 36 species surveyed in the North Sea, 15 have moved northwards by an average of 300km.
The alternative, since water cools with depth, is to dive a little.
At the present rate of warming, fish would have to submerge 3.5 metres every year.
But light falters with depth, so herbivores can only survive in the zone of photosynthesis.

Sea levels are rising: in the first seven years after its opening in 1984 the Thames Barrier was shut four times; now it closes between five and 10 times a year.
The Mississippi delta loses 50 square kilometres of land a year through a combination of subsidence and sea level rise.

Naturally occurring "champagne seas" off Ischia are home to molluscs with paper-thin shells "so weak they can be crushed between thumb and finger".
But humans are altering the chemistry of the oceans on a global scale.
When in 1998 Joanie Kleypas, a US expert in coral reefs, first realised that by the 21st century corals would be bathed in water corrosive enough to destroy them, she found the discovery so overwhelming that she excused herself and ran to the bathroom to be sick.

Roberts is alive to the small things.
Pteropods grow in polar seas to densities of 10,000 per cubic metre "within shell castles sculpted from transparent crystal whose cold beauty seems perfectly fitted to icy seas".
They are a keystone species in the food web: within 50 years they could be off the menu because of acidification.
All the viruses in the ocean – four billion to a litre of clear seawater – if stretched end to end in a thread a 200th of the thickness of the finest spider gossamer, would stretch for 200 million light years "so far across the universe it would pass by 60 galaxies".

 La Jolla - Red tide

Roberts has a way of bringing marine disaster closer to home.
The long summer vacation of British parliamentarians is not a reward for their legislative labours but a consequence of the Great Stink of 1858, in which a Thames choked with sewage and refuse became so vile that parliament's windows were hung with sheets soaked with bleach.
Summer sittings were subsequently abandoned.
Cycles of nutrient overload and plankton bloom are now exported downriver to the sea, where oxygen levels plummet and everything that cannot move simply dies and rots.
Off the Mississippi delta, the dead zone at its peak now extends across 20,000 square kilometres of sea.

There are winners – there are always winners – and one beneficiary of the combination of nutrient enrichment, low oxygen and overfishing are the jellyfish; polyps that are 95% water, "blobs of seawater wrapped in a transparent glaze", some of them toxic to the touch.
In 2004, in Monaco alone "an estimated 45,000 swimmers were treated for stings".

He is good on the horrors of oil spills but he points out that the Gulf of Mexico's fishing fleets kill more marine life in a day than BP's notorious Deepwater Horizon disaster did in months.
Oil companies are easy to demonise but the biggest source of oil pollution is either run off from land or directly injected by the two stroke engine of the recreational boat: the floating fuel and oils concentrate on the surface, poisoning the eggs and hungry larvae of hundreds of species.
There the oils join the polychlorinated biphenyls from plasticisers and fire retardants and other persistent organic pollutants that concentrate in the ocean's meniscus.
This is a surface layer "not much thicker than a piece of kitchen clingfilm" that is rich in fats, fatty acids, proteins, floating eggs and millions of microorganisms, a region critical to life in the sea.
So the pollutants find their way into the fat and breast milk of the ocean's top predators.

By weight, a third of all human waste is plastic: an enduring polymer that also ends up in the ocean gyres, on beaches and shores and reefs even in the remotest regions, and of course in the stomachs of albatrosses, turtles, sharks and even whales.
"A dead pygmy sperm whale stranded in Texas had a plastic rubbish bin liner, a bread wrapper, a crisp packet and two other pieces of plastic sheeting choking off its stomach."
A dead albatross chick in the Pacific contained a piece of plastic with a serial number – "it was traced to a US bomber that had crashed into the sea in 1944".

And don't even get him started on the so-called silent world, a world in fact blasted by the roar of supertanker engines, of military sonar and seismic explosions, a world in which any noise travels at five times its speed in air.
In Ocean of Life, Roberts tells a wonder-filled story of humankind and the sea: all of it illuminating, not all of it hopeless, and some of it unexpectedly exhilarating.

Links :

• WSJ : Fathoming the Ocean's Future

Circumnavigate Rangitoto island

A fast blast around Rangitoto Island in Auckland
aboard 'Jaunty' a John Welsford designed Navigator, in wind of up to 35 knots :
about the pleasure of sailing a small boat.

>>> geolocalization with th Marine GeoGarage <<<

 Rangitoto Island, Hauraki Gulf, Auckland, New Zealand