Antoine Albeau: the life and career of a windsurfing legend

ZephirProject : the limits of windfoil pushed by Antoine Albeau

From SurferToday

He is arguably one of the most successful competitive windsurfers on the planet.

Meet Antoine Albeau, the man who breathes trophies and records.

 

There is small yet prestigious room for sportspeople with over 20 world titles, and the most successful French sportsman in history has a seat in that reserved space.

He hates missing and losing races but is a huge fan of obstacles and beach starts in slalom windsurfing.

Antoine Albeau was born June 17, 1972, in La Rochelle, France.

His father opened École de Voile de La Couarde, a surfing and sailing school on the south coast of La Couarde-Sur-Mer in Île de Ré, where he learned to windsurf at the age of five.

Located off the west coast of France, Île de Ré is an island known for its stunning dunes, gorgeous beaches, imposing pine trees, exotic salt marshes, and checkered-like square waves.

By the time Antoine hit 11, he was already competing, and when he turned 19, guided by his father, he became a professional windsurfer.

Around 18 years old, Albeau actually sailed 315 times in a single year.

"My dad told me: 'OK. Now, you have to sail the maximum you can.' And so I was noting down every session of over half an hour," revealed Albeau.
"At the time, it was super hard because Windguru didn't exist, and no one was calling the weather forecast. So, you were going to the beach, and then you waited. It was way more difficult."

King of PWA World Tour

In 1994, Albeau made his debut in the PWA World Tour, even though he didn't do all the events until 1994.

For the first time, Antoine met the sport's stars, and he was in awe - Anders Bringdal, Bjorn Dunkerbeck, Robby Naish, and others were sailing side-by-side with the rookie.
"I didn't start early enough, and I didn't get the experience and maturity needed, but I had very good boards, and my dad was getting the best fins," recalls Albeau.

In 2001, the French won his first world title - curiously, a PWA Freestyle World Tour title.
"I was really good in freestyle because I was good standing on the board, less heavy than now, and I knew how to play with the sail."
"I was also doing all the maneuvers on both tacks and getting a lot of points. I remember an amazing final with Matt Pritchard in Pozo."

The path to success was no less than glorious.
Albeau went on to conquer 25 world windsurfing titles across nearly all disciplines: slalom, super x, freestyle, speed, and foil.
In his home country, the French won ten national titles.

Albeau has always been a fierce competitor and, at the beginning of his sailing career, he believed he crossed the line.
"I remember that when I was winning, I was mean. A guy once told me one day I was aggressive to people," reveals Albeau.
"And I said to myself: 'It is true.' So, I think I changed the way I sailed and was more respectful to the other riders."

 

Adventures and Stunts

On October 20, 2008, Albeau and multiple-time British windsurfing champion Guy Cribb crossed the English Channel.

The sailboarding duo spent nearly six hours battling raging winds and stormy seas before completing the 70 nautical miles (130 kilometers) from Cherbourg (France) to Poole (England).Albeau and Cribb had to face 13-foot (four meters) waves and swells and dodged large chunks of wooden planks floating in the water.

Despite the cramps and exhaustion, the windsurfers were able to sail at speeds of up to 30 knots and raise funds for a children's charity.

In 2010, Antoine Albeau was nominated for Laureus World Action Sportsperson of the Year.

On January 7, 2014, Belharra saw the world's best big wave surfers riding giant walls of salted water.

One windsurfer left his comfort zone and his sail to do the same on a surfboard because he never misses an opportunity to explore uncharted territories.

This time, he had to play the big wave game in home waters.

But Antoine was not new in Belharra.

He had been testing the French reef break, and he was more than prepared to ride it alongside the world's best big wave surfers.

Let's not forget that Albeau is a sports addict who excels in nearly all board sports, including stand-up paddleboarding, kiteboarding, and wakeboarding.

 

Speed Sailing Records

Albeau was the first windsurfer to exceed 100 kilometers per hour after sailing at 100.26 km/h (54.14 knots) in November 2012 at Luderitz, Namibia.
Antoine Albeau is the fastest windsurfer in the world.
On November 1, 2015, Antoine Albeau broke the windsurfing speed world record after sailing at 53.27 knots (98.65 km/h) in Namibia.

In only 48 hours, the champion windsurfer made 54 runs at the Luderitz Speed Challenge before setting a new mark later confirmed by the World Sailing Speed Record Council (WSSRC).
"I was like a machine. I remember Sophie from the organization asking me: 'Aren't you tired?' I end up going 15 times above 52 knots and nine above 53," recalls Albeau.
"I knew which fin, board, and sail I had to use. You could play a little bit with the stabilizing system, and I was confident with my gear."

In July 2020, Albeau broke windsurfing's nautical mile speed world record at Plage du Rouet in La Palme, France.
The French rode his windsurf board at 43.04 knots during the 2020 Prince of Speed, the speed sailing event organized by Principe Andrea Baldini.
At 48, he also broke the windfoil's nautical mile mark at 30.76 knots.

Simultaneously, Albeau announced he was working with Marc Amerigo to break the 500-meter speed sailing world record, currently in the hands of Paul Larsen and his Sailrocket 2 at 65.45 knots.
Is it possible? For sure - the goal is 66 knots.
"We have to understand that Sailrocket 2 is not that really powered by humans. There are cables and ropes. Kiters and windsurfers are different," explains Albeau.
"But we want to develop something that anyone can use at 40 knots - not just me."

 

A French National Treasure

The French sailboarder is a three-time winner of Défi Wind (2005, 2006, and 2007), the long-distance windsurfing marathon that takes place in Gruissan, France.
Antoine Albeau's sail number is FRA-192.

He is the uncle of Julien Bouyer, a former two-time Techno 293 world windsurfing champion.
Antoine Albeau is married to Paola Green.

The couple has two sons: Alani and Adriel.

The windsurfer was awarded a medal by Académie des Sports in 2014 for his performances in 2013 and named Knight of the National Order of Merit in 2015.

Antoine Albeau's most popular nicknames are "Tonio," "T1000," "Tony Elbow," "A²," and "running elephant."

His net worth is approximately $1.5 million.
The man who dislikes wasting time on travel arrangements and anchovies has blue as his favorite color and Maui, New Caledonia, and Tahiti as his favorite windsurfing spots.

Antoine Albeau is on Facebook (@antoinealbeauf192) and Instagram (@antoinealbeau).

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : 60 knots sailboat and 50 knots windsurf smash the barriers in ...

New Zealand (Linz) update in the GeoGarage platform

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A new generation of data standards

 Supporting the future of navigation and the future of our oceans

The next generation of navigation solutions will transform the way we use marine data – supporting safer, more efficient voyages, advancing the prospect of autonomous shipping, and underpinning an even wider range of decisions made by mariners and shore-based users.
At the heart of these new solutions is the new S-100 data standards; but what do these standards mean? And how will they support decision making?
The new data standards can also provide more insightful, more usable information to support improved decision-making on sustainability and protection of the marine environment.
This new animated digital twin of the real world, developed by the UK Hydrographic Office, briefly explores these data standards in context, showing the wide range of benefits they can unlock in the changing maritime landscape.

The way we manage the world’s oceans is evolving, driving autonomy, connectivity and smarter use.

This will be regulated by a new generation of data standards - unlocking a wide range of benefits, from supporting safety and efficiency to protecting the marine environment.

These standards will empower users to support the future of navigation and the future of our oceans.

This video explores the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) S-100 Data Standards in context and the benefits they can bring to a wide range of users, including: 

› S-101 Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs) 

› S-102 Bathymetric Surface 

› S-104 Water Levels 

› S-111 Surface Currents 

› S-121 Maritime Limits and Boundaries 

› S-122 Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) 

› S-123 Marine Radio Services 

› S-124 Navigational Warnings 

› S-127 Marine Traffic Management 

› S-128 Catalogue of Nautical Products 

› S-129 Under Keel Clearance Management 

› S-201 Aids to Navigation Information 

› S-412 Weather Overlay

A radar-illuminated ocean reveals dark fleets

Satellite radar imagery reveals the true scale of vessel activity in the Mediterranean Sea.

From GlobalFishing Watch by David Kroodsma

Satellite radar imagery is lighting up our view of previously unseen fishing patterns around the world

Last week, we announced the winners of the xView3 contest to use satellite radar imagery and artificial intelligence to reveal vessels at sea.

This week, we give you a gist of what this technology can do when deployed at scale.

We are using radar to “see” every large vessel on the ocean—including the countless ones that don’t publicly broadcast their locations, and are “dark” in monitoring systems.Satellite radar imagery reveals the true scale of vessel activity in the Mediterranean Sea.

To accomplish this goal, our automated cloud pipeline crunches petabytes of satellite radar imagery, processing about 400 scenes per day, and extracting more than 20,000 daily detections.
These images are then run through a sophisticated matching system to pair them with known vessel locations based on the automatic identification system, or AIS.
We are also developing a model to differentiate which of these vessels are fishing vessels, similar to the models in xView3, and we are excited about the results—it will soon be possible to map the dark fishing fleet globally.
Shown above is a subset of a global dataset of one year’s worth of detections, showing off all vessel traffic in the Mediterranean Sea.

We are excited to share a preliminary view of this radar data in our marine manager portal, where you can view radar detections for a full year across the Mediterranean Sea.
Shown is a subset of a global database of almost nine million detections extracted from 140,000 radar images taken by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites in 2021, a task made possible by Global Fishing Watch’s big data pipelines and our unique visualization technology.

 

 

Big data visualization technology allows interactions with millions of satellite detections.
Click to visit workspace.

 

Since we have matched these detections to our AIS data, you can click on the map and see which vessels were broadcasting AIS and which were “dark.” This map also includes lots of fixed infrastructure, such as oil platforms and wind turbines.
Future versions of the map will classify these structures to distinguish them from dark vessels.
We also aim to share the entire, global dataset in the near future.

A new age of mapping possibilities

Why is this so exciting? Because we can now see the incredible amount of fishing along the north coast of Africa that was hidden from view before—and this is just the beginning.
Zoom into the coastal waters of Africa and filter the map for vessels that are not matched to AIS, and you’ll see a great amount of activity.
Visit the map workspace in our marine manager portal.

Until now, much of our “seeing” of human activities at sea has relied on information from AIS transponders, such as those that the EU requires on all fishing vessels over 15 meters in length.
To illustrate how much more we are now able to detect with the addition of satellite radar imagery, the figure below shows the fishing activity we are able to see if we only use AIS data for 2021.
With this technique alone, the waters off of North Africa look practically empty and the picture is incomplete.

 

Fishing activity in the Mediterranean Sea and surrounding waters in 2021, when detected using AIS data alone, shows AIS-broadcasting vessels (yellow areas), but fails to show many non-broadcasting “dark vessels”— for example, very little is shown along North Africa. 

This image is a subset of a global dataset of fishing activity, which includes 1.5 billion GPS messages from about 70,000 fishing vessels.

By comparison, the next figure shows the density of vessel traffic across the Mediterranean and nearby waters for 2021 when we use SAR and machine learning to detect and classify vessels—technology that we can now automate and scale globally to reveal unseen fishing patterns around the world.

 

Fishing activity in the Mediterranean Sea and surrounding waters in 2021 is detected with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR).
Shown is the intensity of fishing and the fraction of vessels that were “dark,” or not broadcasting AIS (orange areas).

Suddenly, North Africa lights up with intense activity by vessels that are not broadcasting AIS but are now visible with our radar detection technology.
What’s more, our machine learning models say these are likely fishing vessels.

We are highlighting the Mediterranean in this initial release of data because radar imagery will be of immense help in this region over the next few years.
Our work in these waters has included three reports that analyze fishing activity inside fisheries restricted areas that protect vulnerable marine ecosystem habitat.
These reports draw on radar imagery data to identify potential vessels not broadcasting AIS.
We have also launched a dedicated Mediterranean and Black Sea marine manager portal that includes fisheries restricted areas and cold water corals locations.

We should note that although vessels that do not broadcast their position are sometimes linked to unlawful activity—as we found in a study of rampant illegal fishing in North Korea—“dark fishing” usually isn’t illegal.
Many of these vessels not broadcasting their position are actually not required to do so.
For example, countries along the coast of Africa or Albania in the Adriatic Sea don’t have AIS requirements as they are not members of the EU.
This lack of information is precisely what has clouded our ability to map out and understand the true footprint of fishing.

A next generation of modeling

To push the boundaries of what is possible with radar imagery, we co-hosted a competition to build better algorithms to detect vessels with this imagery.
Working with the U.S.
Defense Innovation Unit, and supported by the U.S.
Coast Guard, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office, we helped conduct the xView3 computer vision challenge to identify dark fishing vessels using satellite radar and machine learning.
For this contest, we processed and prepared thousands of images, provided detailed training data by partially drawing on our models, and challenged contestants to build the best possible algorithm.

xView3’s top contestant, BloodAxe, developed a model using complex scans that can estimate the size of a vessel and whether it is a fishing vessel.
This model did especially well close to shore, where it can be extremely difficult to differentiate vessels from rocks or human-made structures.
The model, now freely available, is something we will be studying in our effort to build a second generation model.
The other top algorithms, all open source, are now also available to share and use.

We are entering a new, exciting age in the monitoring of human activity at sea.
At Global Fishing Watch, we started our work by tracking vessels that broadcast their GPS positions.
With the rise of satellite radar technology and advanced machine learning, we are now transitioning to the ability to see every large vessel at sea.
Over the next few months, we will be scaling these models to estimate the true, global footprint of humans on the ocean.

Links :

• Global fishing Wtach : Transparent Ocean Data Can Drive Digital Innovation to Reveal Human Activity at Sea
• GeoGarage blog : The 'dark fleet': Global Fishing Watch shines a light on illegal catches /Towards a radar-illuminated ocean
  

Visualizing shipping lanes from Sentinel-1

 

 

From SENTINEL-1

 

I found in Twitter [1,2,3] that a simple way to visualize the sea lanes is to compute the maximum of each pixel across a time series of Sentinel-1 images.

 

 

Max composite of all Sentinel-1 images from 2015-Jan-01 to 2019-Jan-01

(interferometric wide swath mode, VH polarization, ground range detected, log scaling)

When a (big) ship is illuminated by Sentinel-1 C-band SAR, it returns a strong signal back to the antenna and therefore a bright spot is captured.

In contrast, the sea surface causes a smaller coherent scattering: the radar waves bounce off the water surface in many directions and thus only a small fraction of the energy return to the antenna, which explains why the sea looks much darker.

In Google Earth Engine it's straightforward to generate such a max composite using the function ee.ImageCollection.max().

Here the max composite was done after filtering the Sentinel-1 GRD collection to get images from a similar look angles (in this case ascending node).

Hence it provides a snapshot of ships density at the overpass time of Sentinel-1 at 6 pm local time (England). We can compare to the same composite made with descending orbits only i.e. 6 am.

The differences in the area near Calais and Dover may be due to the fact that there's a P&O ferry leaving Calais at 5:45 which is still near the French coast at 6am, while a ferry leaves Dover at 5:30 which is already farther off the English coast in the 6 am image.

On the other hand, a ferry leaves Calais at 5:55 pm, therefore it is still very close to the port of Calais at Sentinel-1 overpass time. It's fun too look at other straits with the same method...

Singapore strait

 

Gibraltar strait

 

Sea of Marmara

In the Sea of Marmara the traffic is dense between the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits. However, there is an intriguing dark area around İmralı island.

This is because there is a military base and a maximum-security prison on the island...

 

 Sentinel-1 max composite around Imrali island

Suez canal

A nice one spotted by Michel Le Page: the southern entrance of the Suez canal, one of the world's most heavily used shipping lanes:

The bright areas beside the main stream of ships are anchorage areas for ships waiting to enter the canal... 

 

Mississippi River delta

Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. Land surface from Sentinel-2 false color composite B4/B8/B2 on 2019-04-03.

Notes

Ship detection using SAR imagery can be a bit more complex. In particular a challenge is to deal with interferences from ground sources and SAR ambiguities which create "ghost ships" [1,2,3].

However, mass processing of Sentinel-1 data accounting for this effect has been donefor maritime surveillance in the Mediterranean sea.

 

Map combining the worlds shipping lanes and the main roads on one map

@PythonMaps

If you are a GEE user and would like to play with these composites here is a quick-start script: https://code.earthengine.google.com/522465700ba56fadc5814ac457219d85).
The shipping lanes can also be visualized using Automatic Identification System (AIS) data (an automatic tracking system on ships) as done by Marine Traffic.

AIS data are emitted by all kind of ships (even small ships that may not be detected by Sentinel-1) and not only at 6am or 6pm.

However, an AIS tracker can be switched off, whereas the Sentinel-1 radar at 693 km above sea level is out of reach...

It seems that a Greek startup SatShipAI is building a tool to automatically identify ships using Sentinel-1 data.

A new challenge for the yellow vests?
Wikipedia article on Environmental impact of shipping: "The International Maritime Organization estimates that carbon dioxide emissions from shipping were equal to 2.2% of the global human-made emissions in 2012 and expects them to rise 50 to 250 percent by 2050 if no action is taken"

 

Links :

• MDPI : Observation of Maritime Traffic Interruption in Patagonia during the COVID-19 Lockdown Using Copernicus Sentinel-1 Data and Google Earth Engine
• GeoGarage blog : New satellite data reveals whopping boost in shipping / Image of the week : satellite's view of ...  / Visualizing ocean shipping  / Image of the week : In a year's worth of photos, the Sentinel-1 ...