Perpetually sinking boat

From Julien Berthier

Love love’ is perhaps one of Julien Berthier’s more unusual sculptural installations.
The floating sculpture is made from a large sailboat that has been modified to appear as if it is capsizing.
Despite its battered appearance the boat is fully functional and able to move around thanks to a built-in motor.

To create the piece a 6.5 meter yacht was cut in half and a new keel was added to allow the boat to remain upright in the sinking position.

Since its construction Julien has taken the boat out on numerous trips inside harbours like canary wharf in London and in Normandy, France.

For this piece he adapted an abandoned 6.5 meter yacht so that it appears to be perpetually sinking.

To create this, the vessel was split and a new keel was constructed allowing it to be sailed by Julien at a 45 degree angle off the coast of Normandy.

Love-Love, like much of his oeuvre, is impressive, poetic and humorous.

In this project, the artist invests his energies and resources into creating an art of fiasco, aiming in his words to “fix an object at the moment of its deregulation.”

The image, and metaphor of the sinking ship is an iconic one – it signifies death, lost hope and sinking dreams.

Berthier’s Love-Love freezes those sentiments permanently both celebrating and overturning them.

On display in the gallery will be the boat itself as well as a series of accompanying photographs and documentary video showing the performance in Normandy.

The boat now belongs to some wealthy London Banker to whom he sold it for £50,000.

Julien Berthier is an artist with great sense of humor.

We recommend spending some time on his website, exploring his methods of work.

Max Hardberger: repo man of the high seas

Max Hardberger makes his living by stealing back stolen cargo ships,
beating pirates at their own game from Haiti to Russia.

From TheGuardian

May 1987. The day after the Naruda had finished offloading its rice cargo in Haiti, armed guards boarded the freighter.
Moments later the captain, Max Hardberger, had a grubby, badly photocopied piece of paper placed in his hands. "Pour les dettes," the guard said.

"What debts?" Hardberger asked.

The guard shrugged and said: "It's a matter for the courts. In the meantime my men will remain on board."

There were no debts, but that was beside the point. Haiti was a law unto itself; a place where court officials could be bought. And one clearly had been. The Naruda was about to be stolen from under Hardberger's nose.

He played for time. He pumped the guards with booze and waited for dark before ordering his engineer to lock them into their cabin. It was a toss-up whether they would try to shoot their way out, but they were either too drunk or not being paid enough to bother. Hardberger started the engines, switched off all the lights and sneaked out of harbor. If they were spotted, the Naruda would be seized, and he'd be slung in jail. Only when he was in international waters could he relax. Hardberger called down to the guards. He offered to set them loose in a lifeboat or take them to Venezuela; the choice was theirs. They chose the lifeboat.

This event was the making of the man who looks a bit like a salty Hulk Hogan, whose life could be a Hollywood film and whose name is a scriptwriter's dream. And the man with one of the world's wildest jobs. As far as he knows, Hardberger is the only man who makes a living by stealing back stolen cargo boats. When you think of modern-day piracy you probably imagine Somali gunmen holding men and boats for ransom. Yet there are many easier ways to steal a ship than making a mid-ocean boarding raid and hijacking a tanker. Throughout the more lawless ports of the world, piracy is a great deal more frequent than you might imagine. In fact, it's almost an institution in some places.

"The shipping business can be worse than the Wild West," says Hardberger in his southern drawl. "The normal rule of law just doesn't apply in some places; if you can bribe an official to say you have a claim against the boat or its owners, then you can have the boat impounded in that port indefinitely. Possession really is nine-tenths of the law."

Here's how semi-legalized piracy works: you wait until the cargo has been offloaded – the cargo's owner and the boat's owner are rarely one and the same, and you don't want to confuse the issue legally – and then bribe a local court official to validate your claim. And there's nothing the owner can do about it because the boat is subject to the court's jurisdiction.

"One of two things usually then happen," says Hardberger. "The owner either pays out on the bogus claim just to get his ship back, or the claimant uses his court order to sell it." It sounds absurd, but it's true. A chancer can't take the ship out of port, as once it is in international waters it would no longer be under local law and the claim would instantly be recognized as invalid elsewhere; but he can sell it at auction. Under International Maritime Law, all auction sales are deemed to be final; even if the claim against you is subsequently proven to be invalid, there is no means of redress, either against the new owner or the one who stole it off you. Once it's sold and renamed, it's out of reach . . . And it's financially rewarding; a 20-year old, 4,000-tonne freighter can fetch $500,000.

There is actually a third thing that can happen. You can get Hardberger to get your boat back. Word got round after he saved the Naruda, and since then Hardberger has retrieved "about 15" – he's not saying precisely how many – from ports in the Caribbean, South America and Russia. Though not Somalia. "That really is dangerous." It will cost you, mind; simple extraction starts at about $100,000, and the price rises sharpish the more complicated it gets. Even so, he reckons he's worth every cent.

"I've never actually failed to get a boat back," he says. This is less a boast; more a statement of the obvious. If he had failed, he'd probably be still stuck in a hellhole of a jail. "And I've got some basic rules. I never use violence and I don't accept jobs where there's a chance of someone getting killed."

Apart from that, pretty much anything goes. Over the years, he's distracted crews with prostitutes and witch doctors, bribed officials to look the other way, conned Russian mobsters and hidden from naval radar by riding out thunderstorms at sea; he's even taken a 10,000-tonne freighter out of Haiti while the 2004 revolution was going on around him. "It's basically a matter of planning," he says. "To get a boat out of port, you need a chief engineer and a one or two crewmen in your team, so everyone has to know exactly what they are doing.

"I make sure we all arrive in port separately. The aim is to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible, so none of us fly in; rather we come in by ferry or cargo ship. I always stay in lowlife hotels in the seediest part of town, as it fits with my usual cover story of a sea captain looking for work. During the daytime I will scope out the port, working out the easiest way to get the boat out of port; it's always best to have a plan where you can board it brazenly, rather than creep on surreptitiously. In the evenings I act the stereotypical drunk captain, tipping my whiskey down the sink while no one is looking. And when it's time, we move in."

Is it really that simple? "I guess not," he concedes. "I get scared each time I go in. Who wouldn't? You're in places where the normal rule of law doesn't apply. The secret is to be able to keep thinking straight under pressure and not panic. There have been times when I haven't been sure that everyone was on my side, and times when I've been fairly sure the local guys knew something was up. You just have to stay on your guard and try and stay ahead of the game."

And you can't help feeling it is the challenge of the game that is the main attraction for Hardberger. The job has already cost him his marriage – his wife couldn't stand the strain of not knowing if he was going to end up in jail each time he went away – but he keeps going back for more. He even lives for part of the year – "I'm not saying exactly where" – in one of the most lawless parts of Haiti.

"There's no real legal structure there," he laughs, "but it's surprisingly peaceful. Sure, you can have someone killed for $50, but the murder rate is very low. Apart from the passion killings. There's a lot of pilfering, but people leave me alone. I guess it's because I drive a white SUV with blacked-out windows and people aren't sure I'm not the local police chief . . . "

With most people, the longer you spend talking to them, the more normal they appear. With Hardberger, the reverse applies. Just when you think you've heard it all, he comes up with something wilder. He could just as easily have made a career in academia. He's got an English degree from the University of New Orleans, an MA in poetry and fiction from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa (one of the best creative-writing programmes in the US), has a law degree from the University of Northern California, and has taught English and history at high school.

It's just that his seemingly hotwired need for an adrenaline rush kept tempting him away. First, to light aircraft, where he made a living flying dead bodies round the country, towing banners and cropdusting. "It wasn't the danger that stopped me," he says. "I had no worries flying so close to the ground; I just thought I was getting exposed to too many toxic chemicals." His piece de resistance was organizing a squadron of young pilots to help him spirit 47 light aircraft out of East Germany shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, by flying them under radar to Rostock on the Baltic.

He eventually settled on a career at sea in his late 30s. "Like most kids from New Orleans, I'd been messing about in boats since I was 15, getting work on the oil-rig supply boats to pay my way through college," he says. "And while I was at a loose end, I kept noticing cargo freighters being sold at super-cheap prices; so I thought I might get one. Within a couple of days I was a captain . . . "

For a long while he made a living by plying a junk route between Miami and Haiti, transporting buckets, bicycles and cooking oil, until one day someone tried to steal his boat. It was a defining moment. Hardberger made his choice, and has gone on to carve out one of the more unusual careers on offer, and is still going strong at 62. But for how long? "Who knows?" he says, though he's in no mood to quit any time soon. And what next? "There's talk of a Hollywood movie and a videogame of my life." Silly me. I should have guessed.

Links :

• www.maxhardberger.com
• Time : High-seas repo man Max Hardberger
• VessEx / Shiprotek : ship and aircraft recoveries, anti-piracy services
• 'Seized' book review (Daniel Sekulich)
  

Transcendent underwater sculpture acting as artificial reefs

The Silent Evolution : new installation currently in progress by Jason deCaires Taylor, installed in The national marine park of Cancun/ Isla Mujeres, Mexico. 250 of the 400 life size Statues casted from local members of the community to form an artificial reef.

From ArtistADay

Jason de Caires Taylor was born in 1974 and divided the earlier part of his life in Europe, Asia and the Caribbean.
Much of his childhood was spent on the coral reefs of Malaysia where he developed a profound love of the sea and a fascination with the natural world.
This would later lead him to spend several years working as a scuba diving instructor in various parts of the globe, developing a strong interest in conservation, underwater naturalism and photography.

In 1998, Taylor received a BA Honours in Sculpture and Ceramics from Camberwell College of Arts, but his scuba diving qualification would prove equally important to his art career—in May 2006 he created the world’s first underwater sculpture park in Grenada, West Indies, furnished with underwater sculptures of his design.
These sculptures create a unique, absorbing and expansive visual seascape, highlighting natural ecological processes while offering the viewer privileged temporal encounters.

His underwater sculptures, designed to create artificial reefs for marine life to colonise and inhabit, embrace the transformations wrought by ecological processes.
The sculptures are made from porous materials that will encourage coral to grow.
The works engage with a vision of the possibilities of a sustainable future, portraying human intervention as positive and affirmative.
Drawing on the tradition of figurative imagery, the aim of Jason de Caires Taylor’s work is to address a wide-ranging audience crucial for highlighting environmental issues beyond the confines of the art world.
However, fundamental to understanding his work is that it embodies the hope and optimism of a regenerative, transformative Nature.

The sculptures are sited in clear shallow waters to afford easy access by divers, snorkellers and those in glass-bottomed boats.
It is hoped the installation will provide a habitat for marine life, and relieve pressure on natural reefs from over half a million water-going tourists who visit the region every year.
Viewers are invited to discover the beauty of our underwater planet and to appreciate the processes of reef evolution.

Links :

• TheGuardian : 8 photos of Jason deCaires Taylor's sculpture submerged
• Jason is currently resident in Mexico as Artistic Director of the new Cancun Underwater Museum
• to see more of de Caires Taylor’s work, visit www.underwatersculpture.com

Route du Rhum IMOCA 60 : Bilou makes history

Canyousea

From SailWorld

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.

Links :

• Canyousea : Bilou website
  

Okeanos Explorer returns to San Francisco with data trove

From SFChronicle

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."

Links :

• NOAA Okeanos Explorer : new ways for exploring the ocean