The familiar megawatt smile lit up the darkness on a still Caribbean night as Roland Jourdain and his Veolia Environnement finally ghosted to a halt in Pointe à Pitre, Guadeloupe as the charismatic skipper wrote himself further into the history of the Route du Rhum as the first sailor to win the monoholl division twice in consecutive editions.
Over an ocean racing career already spanning 25 years Jourdain has felt the depths of disappointment – having to abandon in two successive Vendée Globe races and the last Barcelona World Race – but the Finistèrian skipper who grew up sailing with and against Michel Desjoyeaux, Jean Le Cam, and raced with Eric Tabarly in 1985 in the Whitbread Round the World Race - matched his greatest solo success to date with a hard earned win in a race which had many meteorological twists and turns from start to finish.
He confirmed that he had a message of warm congratulations from long time sparring partner and close friend Desjoyeaux, who lies seventh with more than 350 miles to the finish.
Other than starting on the back foot in Saint Malo after making a late sail selection he was never out of the top three throughout the 3539 miles course and took the lead on Wednesday 3rd November when he punched further north and gained as the leading pack went around the north of the Azores high.
Four different skippers lead in the early stages of the race, but Jourdain's strategy underlined his vast experience and this time, as the charismatic skipper noted on the dockside this morning, he proved to be consistently in phase with the meteo, with his boat, with his strategy and fleet management tactics.
2006 was a very different race, when he beat Le Cam by just 28 minutes at the end of a gruelling, high octane race. Jourdain sailed smartly through the transition areas and pushed hardest when he knew he could gain valuable miles. His routing through the final four days of light, unstable winds, down to Guadeloupe was an object lesson, while both of his main rivals suffered more either side of his.
Jourdain paid tribute to the winning boat, the three year old Farr designed Véolia Environnement 2, formerly Seb Josse's BT, which has consistently proven quick in previous but never yet delivered a major race victory. Their relationship – matching a skipper whose recent big races have been ill fated, with a boat which has been badly damaged and retired from last year's Transat Jacques Vabre and the 2008-9 Vendée Globe – may have seemed like an odd couple, but it is one which clearly bore fruit.
As Veolia Environnement crossed the finish line second placed Armel Le Cléac'h was at the NW corner of the island on Brit Air and expected this morning.
Roland Jourdan (FRA) (Veolia Environnement) broke the finish line off Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe at 06hrs 12mins 56secs today (Sunday, CET/Paris) (Sunday 05 hrs 12mins 56secs GMT/ Sunday 01hrs 12 mins 56secs local time (CET -4hrs)) Roland Jourdain on the IMOCA 60 Veolia Environnement took first place in the IMOCA Class overall in the ninth Route du Rhum-La Banque Postale solo Transatlantic race which started from Saint-Malo, France at 1302hrs (CET) Sunday 31st October.
The elapsed time for Veolia Environnement is 13 days, 17 hours, 10 minutes and 56 seconds.
His average speed is 12.02kts for the distance he sailed of 3957miles. Over the theoretical course distance of 3539 miles Roland Jourdain's average speed is 10.75 knots
Roland Jourdain: 'It is beautiful, it's amazing and I'm really happy. I won't say it was easy but it went well on balance. There was definitely a kind of winning aura with me. The little advance I had on Armel and the others helped me finish the race really nicely. It was different from four years ago as Jean [le Cam] was not hot on my heels. All the time I was telling myself, this one I need it, I take it ; I'll let the next ones to the others. I should not have talked badly about the boat, I believe that the boat and I, we did understand each other. We tamed each other. I gained confidence in her at the start, after a bad start I was sailing behind and caught the fleet back. I realised I was at ease with the boat.
I gave it all for 15 days of racing. When you are in a three month race you manage yourself for three months. At 45 years old you do not have the physical strength that you have at 25 so you are dealing with things differently. You are trying to be smarter in your efforts. What I still do not understand is how I could manage to do so many things in the race that are so painful when I am training. Sometimes you feel like you're Hulk. Our careers as sailors are different from other sports. We do not have a match every Saturday. As ocean racer we have an important race a year, our projects are big and our careers fragile. We're less paid that a football player but our careers last longer !
I really think we all did a good job. The boat is in a very good state, nothing broke and that is because she was well prepared by the team. That's beautiful to be able to take all this to the first place. My best memory is a sum of things. At the end what stays is when you're in phase with the elements. I don't get this feeling all the time but on this race I reached this state when you understand how the small air molecules and the small water molecules work and that's what made me win.'
Roland Jourdain (Veolia Environnement)'s race
In what has amounted to a very intense, tactical ninth edition of the Route du Rhum-La Banque Postale, with very many transitions and changes to negotiate Roland Jourdain sailed an impeccable race, consistently choosing a routing for best wind pressure rather than taking unnecessary risks to cut miles. When he had the opportunity he consolidated to manage the fleet, keeping them directly behind him.
In some respects it was a leaders' race and Jourdain was never out of the top three, at the front for ten of 13 days. As they worked west after Ushant he chose to tack north later than Armel Le Cléac'h (Brit Air). The key move was on the afternoon of Tuesday second when he tacked north in better wind pressure, and by the following afternoon, while both Armel Le Cléac'h erred a little too far south and snared himself in light winds as did Jean-Pierre Dick (Virbac 3) Jourdain was ahead, turning a deficit of 3 miles to a lead of 6 miles over that late afternoon.
After that Bilou was never overtaken. He was first to break through the front during Friday fifth and was able to emerge into the fast NE'ly conditions, his reward being a jump out to a 40 miles lead.
Le Cléac'h was first to gybe south on Saturday sixth, Jourdain held on and gained again as lined up to deal with Tomas, the tropical low. Le Cléach's early move took him south into less wind.
From here Jourdain has a lead of 55 miles on Thursday 11th when he has some 300 miles to Guadeloupe, and again his routing is spot-on. Le Cléach's easterly position leaves him in lighter winds.
The leader's benefit comes when he is into the light SW'ly headwinds, all the time with the fleet now in V formation behind him. And as Veolia Environnement reached the top of Guadeloupe he still had some 74 miles of margin over Brit Air.
After 180 days at sea, the NOAA research vessel Okeanos Explorer has returned to the Bay Area to be refitted in an Alameda dry dock for new expeditions to Indonesia's fabled "Coral Triangle," one of the richest regions of marine biodiversity in the world.
The scientists and technicians aboard, together with Indonesian colleagues, gathered precious ocean data with their highly advanced, remote-controlled shipboard instruments and transmitted their discoveries directly to researchers ashore for the first time in ocean exploration.
"We just drove the ship and they had all the fun," Robert Kamphaus, skipper of the newest vessel in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's research fleet, said when the ship docked briefly at Pier 30 on the Embarcadero last week.
The team deployed the ship's unmanned submarine, a remotely operated vehicle nicknamed "Little Hercules," to explore Indonesia's little-known ocean bottom. The vehicle discovered and transmitted images of intensely hot hydrothermal vents fuming on the flanks of a mile-high undersea volcano named Kawio Barat, where barnacles, worms, colorless shrimp and other strange creatures thrive in the heat around the smoke-filled steam. In their high-tech control room, researchers aimed the ship's multi-beam sonar to sound the bottom day and night, gathering precise images of unknown seamounts, ridges and flat plains of sediments laid down, possibly, for untold thousands of years.
The ship also towed a small vehicle called a "continuous plankton recorder" 30 feet below the surface across nearly 6,000 miles from the Sulawesi Sea through the Pacific Ocean to gather tiny plant and animal samples that will reveal much about the sea's varied floating life forms and environment.
For the first time in oceanography, all those undersea images and instrument data were shared instantly with scientists at seven specialized exploration command centers throughout the United States, thanks to the satellite-based broadband technology known as "telepresence."
Even after the ship left Indonesia, sailing on her final leg between Hawaii and California, biologists aboard described passing across a thousand miles of the notorious "North Pacific garbage patch," a region where ocean currents trap vast quantities of floating detritus from human sources on land, including chunks of plastic and even larger floating junk.
"For a thousand miles of the open ocean we sampled it all," said Miriam Goldstein, an oceanography graduate student from the Scripps Institute in San Diego. And while most of the garbage patch is made of microscopic plastic particles, invisible from the air, we did pick up pop bottles, a bucket lid and even a floating junked suitcase."
Stephanie Oakes, an oceanographer with NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, collected huge quantities of plankton organisms, both in Indonesia and again between Hawaii and the West Coast.
Changes in the density of plankton species and their biology in different areas of the ocean, she said, will provide unique insights into the nature of life on the surface of the ocean as the ship crossed eastward from Indonesia.
Oakes already has examined the collected plankton on board, but she is busy shipping samples to the little-known Plankton Sorting and Identification Center in Szczecin, Poland, for detailed analysis, she said.
A crucial part of the expedition, Kamphaus said, was the opportunity to join Indonesian oceanographers and work with their research ship, the Baruna Jaya IV. The Indonesian scientists focused largely on the shallower seafloor - an area known for greater marine biodiversity than virtually anywhere else in the world.
"The voyage revealed that biodiversity runs deep in Indonesia's waters," said Kelley Elliott, a marine archaeologist and the expedition's coordinator. "Dozens of new species were likely imaged during the voyage - from tiny crustaceans to stalked sponges and deep-sea corals - reminding us all how little we know about our ocean planet and how much remains to be explored."
The Earth's oceans remain virtually unexplored, said Stephen R. Hammond, chief scientist of NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research.
"This voyage has begun a new chapter in the history of ocean exploration that is certain to reveal many new discoveries that will help us to understand why, and how, the oceans are critical to life on Earth."
Aboard Mission Blue, oceanographer Greg Stone tells the story of how he helped the Republic of Kiribati create an enormous protected area in the middle of the Pacific -- protecting fish, sealife and the island nation itself (TED).
Greg Stone was a key driver in the establishment of the Phoenix Island Protected Area in the island nation of Kiribati. The second-largest marine protected area in the world -- and one of the most pristine -- PIPA is a laboratory for exploring and monitoring the recovery of coral reefs from bleaching events.
Greg Stone began his career as an ocean scientist, pioneering research in Antarctica on marine mammals and ice ecology where he mastered the art of diving into icebergs. Today he is well-known for his leadership in the effort to create the world's second-largest marine protected area (MPA), around the Phoenix Islands in Kiribati.
Working with the government of Kiribati, Stone helped establish the MPA using market-based tools to conserve ocean biodiversity, in order to encourage continued local economic development rather than destruction of local communities livelihoods. Stone is the Chief Scientist for Oceans at Conservation International and a prolific author and speaker on the state of the marine environment and how policy can make change.
Sometimes updates to devices and improvements to the Garmin site may slip past even the most diligent of Marine GeoGarage users. Today we want to highlight the importance of keeping your Garmin Communicator Plugin software updated with the latest and greatest, as well as encourage you to keep your device up-to-date with the latest firmware (see below).
Today, Garmin has just released a new version (v.2.9.3) of the Garmin Communicator Plugin :
The Garmin Communicator Plugin API is a browser plugin and JavaScript support code that allows developers to transfer location data – such as waypoints, track logs, maps and points of interest (POIs) – to and from a website and Garmin device.
"The Garmin Communicator Plugin lets you connect your Garmin GPS with your favorite website. Once the plugin is installed, just connect your Garmin GPS device to your computer, and you're on your way. The Garmin Communicator can send and retrieve data from any supported website."
The benefit of this service to the retail consumer is that the API will simplify loading location data created with the Marine GeoGarage to a Garmin GPS.
IBM-compatible PCs running Windows® 7, XP or Vista operating systems with Internet Explorer 6+ or Firefox 1.5+ Intel-based or PowerPC G4 or later Mac OS 10.4 or later with Firefox 2.0+ or Safari 2.0+
Already installed the Garmin Communicator Plugin?
Visit the test page to see if it’s properly installed. If the test page says your Communicator is successfully installed, but it's not detecting your device, download and install the latest Garmin USB drivers.
Garmin & Marine GeoGarage :
For the moment, our website doesn't support data import from the GPS to the Marine GeoGarage : only waypoints and routes export from the website to the GPS. This listing provides information about supported read and write GPS formats for different Garmin device models. Connection issues :
test with Google Maps at first :
Google Maps also includes the possibility to download POI into Garmin GPS : google-sendtoGPSHelp -> see video : in English / in French
1/ connect your Garmin device to your PC or Mac using the original USB or serial cable that came with your Garmin device 2/ visit the Google Maps homepage, enter the address, business or point of interest (POI) you would like to transfer to your Garmin device in the search field, and then click on "Search maps." 3/ click on the "Send" link located at the top right-hand corner of the Google Maps screen. A Send dialog box appears. Click on "GPS" from the left pane, select your GPS brand (Garmin in our case), and then click on the "Send" button.
If it works with Google Maps, it should work with Marine GeoGarage. If not, see below.
I have downloaded Garmin Communicator software and tried to establish contact between Garmin GPS and the Marine GeoGarage. It starts with "looking for GPS" and the I get a message "sorry can not unlock Garmin plugin"
Select in your browser : TOOLS > INTERNET OPTIONS > SECURITY> TRUSTED SITES > SITE (button) > now ensure that http://*.garmin.com is a trusted site and also uncheck the require server verification option.
Garmin GPS firmware : keep your operating software current
It's possible your GPS firmware is not updated : so use WebUpdater to automatically keep your GPS firmware updated -> see : current products version
Garmin and Linux users : use of GPX export
Because the Communicator API is currently limited to Windows (Internet Explorer and Firefox) and MacOS but not Linux, GeoGarage also supports online waypoints and routes to the GPX format.
Garmin forum : threads for Communicator Browser Mac PluginGarmin forum : threads for Communicator Browser Windows Plugin If all this information is not sufficiently valuable to solve your problems with the Garmin Communicator, don't hesitate to contact us or directly Garmin International support : Product Support Specialist , 2nd Shift Garmin Mobile Team Att: Eric Rosa, Associate #6957 P : 913-397-8200 / US Toll free 800-800-1020 / Canada 1 866 429 9296 / EuropeF : 913-440-8280Email : product.support@garmin.com
Political uproar over depicted boundaries on map servers isn’t just a Google Maps issue.
Vietnam on Friday asked China to remove a “U-shaped” line showing its claims to over 80 percent of the East Sea from its map on a newly launched online mapping service.
The China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping has critically violated Vietnam’s sovereignty over the Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly) archipelagoes by presenting the map with the nine-dotted line on the two websites www.tianditu.cn and www.chinaonmap.cn, said spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The statement from the Vietnamese government expressed their objection to the presence of “the nine-dotted line” on the map service. The nine-dotted line first appeared on Chinese maps in 1947 and “encloses the main island features of the South China Sea: the Pratas Islands, the Paracel Islands, the Macclesfield Bank, and the Spratly Islands. The dotted line also captures James Shoal which is as far south as 4 degrees north latitude.” The journal article, ”The Dotted Line on the Chinese Map of the South China Sea: A Note” quoted Professor Zhao Lihai of the Law Department of Beijing University
It has also violated Vietnam’s sovereignty rights and jurisdiction in its Exclusive Economic Zone (EZZ) of 200 nautical miles, she added.
Under the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea an island can generate its own EZZ of 200 nautical miles. A state has the right to use resources in the EEZ and regulate the behavior of other states in that area.
According to NGA, the act also violates the declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), which China and ASEAN member states signed in 2002.
Vietnam objects to this act and demands that China promptly removes violating data from the websites, she stressed.
China needs to follow the shared awareness of the two countries’ high-ranking leaders about maintaining peace and stability; and not complicate or extend disputes in the East Sea, the spokeswoman said.
According to Bloomberg, China’s new state-sponsored online map service, launched last month, aimed to offer the most comprehensive geographic data on the country.
