The old man and the sea: 73-year-old to sail solo around world in 'bathtub' boat

Yrvind implements test sailings with his boat Yrvind.com in Stockholm archipelago.

From CNN 

When faced with the most ferocious waves on the planet, most people would seek protection in the largest, sturdiest vessel they could find.
But when Swedish pensioner Sven Yrvind sets out on his ambitious mission to circumnavigate the globe, it won't be in a hefty ship piled high with food, creature comforts and telecommunications equipment.
Instead, the 73-year-old plans to traverse the high seas cocooned in a sailboat only slightly bigger than a bathtub.

 He first lived on a boat as a 23-year-old studying mathematics in Copenhagen, during the 1960s

For many, the proposition of sailing non-stop around the world for a year-and-a-half in a vessel just three meters-long will sound rather ambitious, and coming from a man well past the retirement age, downright far-fetched.
Indeed, few would likely take the idea seriously were Yrvind not one of the world's most respected boat-builders.

Click on the pindrops above to trace Sven Yrvind's proposed circumnavigation route.

During his accomplished life he has given lectures to the Swedish king and queen and received awards from the prestigious Royal Cruising Club in Britain, among others.
"People have said it's a suicide mission," said Yrvind.
"But a big boat is actually more dangerous than a small one. You've got bigger forces throwing you around -- a bigger engine, a bigger beam, a bigger deck.
"My small boat is like a little capsule -- nothing can happen to you. It's like throwing a bottle in the water -- it will capsize, it will pitchpole (somersault), but it will always come back up," he added.

If successful, Yrvind will make history for sailing the smallest boat around the world without docking on land.

The record is currently held by Italian Alessandro di Benedetto, who in 2010 circumnavigated the globe in a 6.5 meter yacht -- more than double the size of Yrvind's creation.

Yrvind, from the small village of Vastervik in south east Sweden, started building the ground-breaking vessel in March.
Now half-complete, he is reluctant to put a time on its launch.
Named Yrvind Ten after its 10 foot length, the miniature vessel will be just 1.8 meters wide with two six meter-tall masts.
Weighing 1.5 tons, it will be made out of a composite foam and fiberglass material which, he says, is "excellent for insulation and floatation."
Powered by wind, solar panels, gel batteries and a foot crank, Yrvind Ten will set sail from Ireland in a 48,000 kilometer return journey around the globe.

 Sir Robin Knox-Johnston became the first person to single-handedly sail around the world in a 9.8 meter yacht, in 1969.

Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first person to sail around the world in 1969 in a 9.8 meter yacht, said there was a real possibility Yrvind would complete the voyage.
Briton Knox-Johnston, who also founded the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, added that many people had thought his own bid to circumnavigate the globe was impossible at the time.
"One of the biggest challenges he'll face is when he's coming up against these massive 25 meter waves in the Southern Ocean. In a boat that size he's just going to be rolled around and around like he's inside a giant washing machine," Knox-Johnston said.
"He might also find he's using a lot more energy -- and will need a lot more food -- being rolled around like that."

The Swede will collect rainwater in sails, funneled by a hose to a tank.
With no heating equipment on board, he'll rely on 400 kilograms of muesli and sardines, supplemented with vitamin tablets and fish caught from the sea.
"I need just half-a-kilogram of food a day and this will give me enough food for 800 days," he said.
"In the beginning I will have fruit but obviously that will run out. I also have a friend in Melbourne with a boat who will come out with supplies."
The self-described "recluse" plans to spend his days swimming, philosophizing and reading more than 400 books, which weigh around 100 kilograms.
"On land, people are watching TV, driving cars in traffic, smoking, drinking -- it's not healthy," Yrvind explained.
"Out at sea it's a cleaner environment -- mentally and physically. When I come back I will be a healthier, younger person. This will prolong my life, not the other way around."

 Yrvind was inducted into the Museum of Yachting's Hall of Fame in 1988, for his many solo expeditions. In 1968 he sailed four meter boat "Anna" (pictured) from Sweden to England.

Growing up on the small Swedish island of Branno in the North Sea, Yrvind quickly learned to sail in an area so remote he needed to cross water simply to buy a loaf of bread from the shop.
In his 50-year career building boats, Yrvind has been lavished with awards from around the world. In 1980 he received a Seamanship Medal from the Royal Cruising Club in Britain for single-handedly sailing a six meter boat around the stormy waters of Cape Horn, Chile.

 The boat was named Bris, meaning "breeze" in Swedish. "I built her in 1972 and sailed her until 1982, criss-crossing the Atlantic many times," Yrvind said.

Eight years later he was inducted into the Museum of Yachting's Hall of Fame, based in Newport, Rhode Island, for his many single-handed expeditions.
The museum also has one of Yrvind's boats on permanent display -- a six meter yacht he built in his mother's basement and sailed from Sweden to Newport in 1983.

 Yrvind in the six meter yacht he built in his mother's basement and sailed from Sweden to Newport in 1983. The boat is now on display at the Museum of Yachting in Newport, Rhode Island.

In 1989 Yrvind also built and sailed a 4.5 meter boat from France to Newfoundland, now on display at the Swedish National Maritime Museum in Stockholm.
And the sprightly septuagenarian is no closer to slowing down -- last year sailing a tiny 4.5 meter-long boat from Ireland to the Caribbean.

Yrvind, who is also on the look-out for sponsorship, hopes his boat will not simply break the record books, but pave the way for a new environmentally-friendly design for living.
"We are on Earth living beyond our resources -- oil is running out, fossil fuels are running out, water is running out," he said.
"If I can show I can live on a boat 10 foot-long for more than a year, with all the food I need with me, I think it might benefit mankind."
For a man who "loves all things small," should he accomplish the feat it would be a huge achievement in the history of sailing.

Links :

• YouTube : Yrvind Ten Sometime in early 2012 / Yrvind Ten 2012-04-19

Model boat Snoopy Sloop on unmanned Atlantic crossing challenge

Snoopy Sloop 8, the latest robot sailing boat from Team-Joker, may attempt to cross the Atlantic, from the UK south coast to the USA east coast before the end of 2012.

If not, it may try next year :-)

This is part of the friendly, international competition known as MicroTransat.

The video starts with recent clips of Snoopy Sloop 8 being tested, then shows the history, including sinkings and rescues, since May 2008.

From BBC

A retired Nato scientist has launched what he hopes will be the first unmanned boat to cross the Atlantic.

Robin Lovelock's 5ft (1.5m) boat, Snoopy Sloop set sail from the Hampshire coast.

A Global Positioning System (GPS) computer is designed to pilot the boat for the 5,000 miles (8,000km), but he admitted it would be a "real struggle".

It is thought no unmanned boat has ever crossed the Atlantic.
Recent tries hit weather and technical problems.

Mr Lovelock has developed the £450 boat on Bray Lake near his home in Sunninghill, Berkshire, over the past four years.
He is making the attempt as part of the Microtransat Challenge (web) to become the first unmanned vessel to cross the Atlantic Ocean from a point to the south of Ireland.

 The challenge: Snoopy Sloop will depart from Barton-On-Sea, then sail along the English Channel before heading south towards the Azores and then off to the Bahamas, to eventually land in Plymouth, Massachusetts

A tracking device on board the solar-powered boat allows internet users to track its progress on its pre-programmed journey from Barton-on-Sea to the Bahamas on his website.

Travelling at 3mph, it would take about six months to complete the trip.
He said: "We'll just throw it into the water and see if we're lucky.
"I'm kissing bye-bye to a lot of hard work - let's hope it doesn't all end in tears.
"The chances of something hitting it are pretty remote - it should just get brushed aside."

Alongside the home-built technology on the boat is a model of cartoon dog Snoopy at the bow, which Mr Lovelock said showed he was not taking the project "too seriously".
"If it doesn't work I've got plenty of other boats and bits of boats sitting around the house," he said.

Since 2010, two French boats have foundered in bad weather and a University of Aberystwyth vessel suffered technical failure.

Links :

• DailyMail : Retired scientist hopes to make history by sailing 4ft MODEL boat 6,000 miles across the Atlantic
• Kickstarter : Robotboat Mark VI
• GeoGarage blog : Robotic boat transatlantic Challenge
• Microtransat blog
• Other autonomous sailing robots : 'iBoat II' (project) / 'Breizh Spirit DCNS' / 'VAIMOS Ifremer' / Auton Sail Boat

Gas tanker Ob River attempts first winter Arctic crossing

 The retreating ice is opening up new sea routes from the Atlantic to the Pacific

From BBC

A large tanker carrying liquified natural gas (LNG) is set to become the first ship of its type to sail across the Arctic.

The carrier, Ob River, left Norway in November and has sailed north of Russia on its way to Japan.
The specially equipped tanker is due to arrive in early December and will shave 20 days off the journey.

The owners say that changing climate conditions and a volatile gas market make the Arctic transit profitable.

The tanker was accompanied by the Vaigach and 50 Let Pobedy nuclear-powered icebreakers during its nine-day voyage along the Northern Sea Route.
The tanker, which traveled in the Arctic at an average speed of 12.5 knots left the route on November 9 and is currently heading for the Japanese port of Tobata.

Long-term preparation

Built in 2007 with a strengthened hull, the Ob River can carry up to 150,000 cubic metres of gas.
The tanker was loaded with LNG at Hammerfest in the north of Norway on 7 November and set sail across the Barents Sea.
It has been accompanied by a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker for much of its voyage.
The ship, with an international crew of 40, has been chartered from its Greek owners Dynagas by the Russian Gazprom energy giant.

It says it has been preparing for the trip for over a year.
"It's an extraordinarily interesting adventure," Tony Lauritzen, commercial director at Dynagas, told BBC News.
"The people on board have been seeing polar bears on the route. We've had the plans for a long time and everything has gone well."

Mr Lauritzen says that a key factor in the decision to use the northern route was the recent scientific record on melting in the Arctic.
"We have studied lots of observation data - there is an observable trend that the ice conditions are becoming more and more favourable for transiting this route. You are able to reach a highly profitable market by saving 40% of the distance, that's 40% less fuel used as well."

 Despite the ice, the Arctic is navigable through November

But melting ice is not the only factor.
A major element is the emergence of shale gas in the US.
The Norwegian LNG plant at Hammerfest was developed with exports to the US in mind.
But the rapid uptake of shale in America has curbed the demand for imported gas.

The Ob River tanker carried about 135,000 cubic meters of LNG,
loaded at Hammerfest LNG terminal in Norway.

Meanwhile in Japan, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, there has been a growing interest in alternative power sources, especially gas.
"The major point about gas is that it now goes east and not west," says Gunnar Sander, senior adviser at the Norwegian Polar Institute and an expert on how climate change impacts economic activity in the Arctic.
"The shale gas revolution has turned the market upside down; that plus the rapid melting of the polar ice."

He stresses that the changes in climate are less important than the growing demand for oil and gas.
"The major driver is the export of resources from the Arctic region, not the fact that you can transit across the Arctic sea."

 Gazprom Marketing & Trading LNG carrier makes world’s first voyage via Northern Sea Route
According to Viktor Olersky, Russia’s Deputy Transportation Minister, the LNG tanker’s voyage marked another stage in the development of the new high-latitude sea route linking Europe with Asia-Pacific countries.
He said that Russia, which owns the world’s largest fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers, opened a new page in the history of Arctic navigation.
“We proved the possibility of such voyages [of high-tonnage ships along the Northern Sea Route] and are not going to stop at this stage,” Olersky said.
He also said that experts will analyze data collected by Sovсomflot shipping company team during this experimental voyage in order to upgrade regulations of the Northern Sea Route navigation.

There is an expectation that because of changing climactic conditions, sea traffic across the northern sea route will increase rapidly. 2012 has been a record year both for the length of the sailing season and also for the amount of cargo that has been shipped.

But Gunnar Sander says there are limits to the growth and some perspective is required.
"Nineteen thousand ships went through the Suez canal last year; around 40 went through the northern sea route. There's a huge difference."

Links :

• Oil&Gas : Record number of vessels pass through the Northern Sea Route in 2012
  

Vendee Globe : Ascension & Saint Helena islands

>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

On 15 November 2012, cloud vortices stretched away from the St Helena island to the west-northwest.
When moving air masses encounter an obstacle such as a volcanic island, the wind flow is disrupted.
Downstream from the obstacle, von Karman vortices form.
These double-row vortices alternate their direction and rotation.

photo : MODIS/Terra/NASA

  Saint Helena island
>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

St Helena is a small, rugged volcanic island in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
At its highest point, Mount Actaeon, the island rises 818 meters above sea level – high enough to affect cloud formation.
Located more than 1,100 miles west of Africa, St Helena is as remote as it is rugged.
The island was uninhabited when the Portuguese first discovered it in 1502, and became famous centuries later as the final home of Napoleon Bonaparte of France.

 Napoleon was exiled there in 1815 and died on the island in 1821

 Ascension island

>>> geolocalisation with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

Ascension island pertains to Shuttle support which are to be an Emergency Landing Site and to provide orbital tracking (home of radar 12.15, the only equatorial sensor in the Western Hemisphere)

Links :

• BBC : Life on one of the world's most remote islands
• TheGuardian : Frigatebird returns to nest on Ascension for first time since Darwin
  

Rising seas, vanishing coastlines

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/24/opinion/sunday/what-could-disappear.html

From NYTimes

THE oceans have risen and fallen throughout Earth’s history, following the planet’s natural temperature cycles.
Twenty thousand years ago, what is now New York City was at the edge of a giant ice sheet, and the sea was roughly 400 feet lower.
But as the last ice age thawed, the sea rose to where it is today.

Now we are in a new warming phase, and the oceans are rising again after thousands of years of stability.

As scientists who study sea level change and storm surge, we fear that Hurricane Sandy gave only a modest preview of the dangers to come, as we continue to power our global economy by burning fuels that pollute the air with heat-trapping gases

Map of New York City if sea levels rise 3 meters (areas underwater are in light blue).

The map was published in 2007 in a report warning about the dangers of unabated climate change and sea level rise.

The picture resembles superstorm Sandy's impact on Lower Manhattan.

Image courtesy of Architecture 2030

This past summer, a disconcerting new scientific study by the climate scientist Michiel Schaeffer and colleagues — published in the journal Nature Climate Change — suggested that no matter how quickly we cut this pollution, we are unlikely to keep the seas from climbing less than five feet.

More than six million Americans live on land less than five feet above the local high tide. (Searchable maps and analyses are available at SurgingSeas.org for every low-lying coastal community in the contiguous United States.)

Worse, rising seas raise the launching pad for storm surge, the thick wall of water that the wind can drive ahead of a storm. In a world with oceans that are five feet higher, our calculations show that New York City would average one flood as high as Hurricane Sandy’s about every 15 years, even without accounting for the stronger storms and bigger surges that are likely to result from warming.

Floods reaching five feet above the current high tide line will become increasingly common along the nation’s coastlines well before the seas climb by five feet.

Over the last century, the nearly eight-inch rise of the world’s seas has already doubled the chance of “once in a century” floods for many seaside communities.

We hope that with enough time, most of our great coastal cities and regions will be able to prepare for a five-foot increase.

Some will not.

Barriers that might work in Manhattan would be futile in South Florida, where water would pass underneath them by pushing through porous bedrock.

According to Dr. Schaeffer’s study, immediate and extreme pollution cuts — measures well beyond any discussion now under way — could limit sea level rise to five feet over 300 years.

If we stay on our current path, the oceans could rise five feet by the first half of next century, then continue rising even faster.

If instead we make moderate shifts in energy and industry — using the kinds of targets that nations have contemplated in international talks but have failed to pursue — sea level could still climb past 12 feet just after 2300.

It is hard to imagine what measures might allow many of our great coastal cities to survive a 12-foot increase.

photo AtomicShark

WE might find comfort in the fact that this is just one set of projections, and projections are notoriously tough to get right.

But a second study that also came out this past summer erases any such comfort.

Led by the geochemist Andrea Dutton and published in the journal Science, the second paper uses deep history, not model projections, for clues to the future.

About 125,000 years ago, before the last ice age, there was a warm period that lasted 10,000 to 15,000 years.

It was perhaps a little warmer than today, but cooler than the temperatures that climate scientists expect later in this century without sharp pollution cuts. Dr. Dutton’s research strongly reinforces a prior study led by one of us, which found that the warm-period sea levels rose roughly 20 to 30 feet higher than those of today.

We just don’t have a clear picture of how fast that could happen again.

Any sea level forecast must be interpreted carefully: things could be better, or worse.

 Homes in Tuckerton, N.J., after Hurricane Sandy.

U.S. Coast Guard/Getty Images

The Schaeffer study uses the relationship between global temperature and sea level over the past 1,000 years — when it was cool, and the great ice sheets were generally stable — to extrapolate over the next 300 years — when it will be hot, and the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica may behave differently. Other scientific teams have tried the notoriously difficult task of forecasting ice sheet decay in physical detail, and this has tended to produce slower estimates of sea level rise than the Schaeffer team’s method.

But any projection is compromised by the fact that we are sending heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere far faster than anything the planet has seen for at least 55 million years.

The Dutton study comes with caveats, too. Earth’s orbit was different during the last warm period, bringing more sunshine to the Arctic and complicating the analogy with today.

But today we are on a path to a planet that will be much hotter than it was in the period Dr. Dutton studied.

Beach house in Rodanthe, North Carolina

 photo Andrew Kemp

There are two basic ways to protect ourselves from sea level rise: reduce it by cutting pollution, or prepare for it by defense and retreat.

To do the job, we must do both.

We have lost our chance for complete prevention; and preparation alone, without slowing emissions, would — sooner or later — turn our coastal cities into so many Atlantises. 

Benjamin Strauss is the chief operating officer and director of the program on sea level rise at Climate Central, a research group.
Robert Kopp is an assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at Rutgers University and associate director of the Rutgers Energy Institute.

Links :

• HuffingtonPost : New York Harbor Barrier, will City Act to protect itself from future storm surges?
• GeoGarage blog : Rising sea levels: Is global warming making the US East Coast a 'hot spot?' / Surging seas maps sea level rise in Coastal U.S.