Route du Rhum 2014

Yann Elies skipper on his MOD 70

From The Independant by Stuart Alexander

The biggest gathering of fans at any sports event in Europe this weekend will not be at a soccer or rugby match but crowding the dockside of St. Malo in Brittany at lunchtime Sunday to watch 91 singlehanded sailors start their 4,500-mile Route du Rhum race across the Atlantic to Guadeloupe in the French West Indies.

3542 nautical miles
www.routedurhum.com

A few of the competitors will be at the helm of giant machines, most will be steering smaller boats that can and will be tossed about just crossing the English Channel, they race in five different divisions, and there will be just three Brits among them.

 250,000 set to line the banks of Brittany

to wave off 91 singlehanded sailors on their wet and windy path to exhaustion

In the run-up to the start, up to 200,000 people a day, say the police, have crowded the walled city and its harbour to catch a glimpse of these crazy adventurers and a fleet festooned with flags in part celebrating its 10 edition.
Sunday, weather willing, there will be 250,000 to watch the kick-off and then to wonder, as they make their way back to warm homes and beds, what is waiting for the departed masochists.
Answer, in the first 24 hours a wet and windy path to exhaustion.

 Robin Knox Johnson, the oldest competitor

Fatigue and lack of sleep is one of the biggest dangers.
The sea is no respecter of age and reputation and the oldest competitor, the 75-year young Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, admitted worrying not a little about the task of hoisting his relatively big mainsail on Grey Power and not being able to sleep much until through the shipping lanes, across the Biscay, and then turning right into the warmer Atlantic .
Relative because on the two biggest boats, the 105-foot trimaran Banque Populaire and the even bigger 130-foot Spindrift, Loick Peyron and Yann Guichard have adapted a bicycle pedalling solution to the task.
Legs are stronger than arms.

Wind forecast (NOAA)

The fleet is predicted to be bashing into stiff breezes and lumpy seas as they exit the Channel but the quick boys – Sidney Gavignet estimates his 70-foot trimaran Musandam-Oman Sail will be past Finistère soon after breakfast on Monday morning – will then pick up a favourable shift in wind direction and enjoy some fast progress.
The Bay of Biscay could be free sailing as they head for the big right turn.

The record, 7d 17h 19m, was set by Lionel Lemonchois in the 60-foot trimaran Gitana in 2006 and odds are that it will be broken this year.
As he is in a stretched, 80-foot version, Prince de Bretagne, Lemonchois could break it himself, but others should be even faster.
But while the fastest eight or 10, assuming no disasters like capsizes, should make it in just over a week the class that constitutes nearly half the fleet, the Class 40, can look forward to 10 more days before enjoying the rum punches and Franco-Caribbean cuisine of Point à Pitre.

Among them are the two other British competitors, Conrad Humphreys, carrying from Plymouth the colours of Cat Phones, and Miranda Merron racing against instead of with her French partner Halvard Mabire.
“It will be like doing half a dozen Figaro singlehanded races in succession,” says Humphreys, whose goal is a second crack at the Vendée Globe singlehanded non-stop round the world race in 2016 or 2020.

Ninety-one boats and 91 goals but two in complete contrast are those of Peyron and Gavignet.
For Gavignet the mission was almost accomplished before he left the dock.
It was strictly commercial as thousands trooped through the Oman tourism marquee picking up leaflets – or having their children’s hands hennaed.

There are various strands to the initiative which is Oman Sail from youth development and sail training/schools at home to tourism and inward investment abroad and its Yorkshireman ceo David Graham is quietly proud about seeing the programme, which includes having an Omani sailor in the Olympic opening ceremony, knit together and expand.
He is more animatedly proud of having built a team in Muscat which continues to promote Omani women to senior management positions.
And he is working on having a Volvo round the world campaign to run alongside the Olympic goal. The dots of what may turn out to be a permanent national strategy built around sailing are being joined up.

For Peyron, well, what can you say?
He is a phenomenon who can straddle all types of sailing, solo or in a crew, and he picked up this gig at the last minute because Armel le Cléac’h suffered a bad injury to his right arm.
It means that Peyron’s own Rhum project, a yellow 30-foot trimaran called Happy, is for sale up on the hard at La Trinité with part of the sale contract including the stipulation that Peyron can borrow it back to do the quadrennial Rhum in 2018.
That will be after the America’s Cup in 2017, date to be confirmed, venue to be confirmed.

Peyron is a key part of Sweden’s Artemis AC team, run by British gold medallist Iain Percy and recently joined by fellow China Games gold medallist Paul Goodison, who had been sailing with Ben Ainslie.
The Artemis team will be travelling mob-handed to Melbourne at the beginning of January with Peyron as both coach and competitor in the Moth World Championship.
“My job is to control the back of the fleet,” he says self-deprecatingly about an event which will attract several America’s Cup team personnel. Before that “I am in a war, for sure. Especially with this weapon.”
Every major manoeuvre takes at least an hour but the platform is more stable.
“I wouldn’t have given up my project to do the Rhum in a MOD70 [the boat in which Gavignet is racing] and I already have a lot of grey hair from sailing small trimarans,” says Peyron ruefully

Yann Guichard, whose at other times co-skipper and partner is Dona Bertarelli, has the kit to deliver a new record.
Peyron is a canny and doughty competitor.
Both have weather experts working around the clock to calculate the fastest route.
And so do many of their rivals.
But competitors without the grandee budget touch just have to work things out for themselves.
Which is what Columbus had to try to do.

Surfing @ 1000 frames per seconds

Surfing @ 1000 frames per seconds from Chris Bryan

Thilafushi: An island of trash in the Maldives

Thilafushi Gon'Dudhoh, waste final destination in Maldives from GreenwichPlus7

Documentary of the waste problem in the Maldives

From AsianCorrespondant by Graham Land

The Republic of the Maldives is the smallest country in Asia, both by landmass and population.
It is also the country with the lowest elevation on Earth, rising to only 1.5 meters above sea level. Due to climate change, the Maldive Islands are under threat of rising sea levels.
In 2012 President Mohamed Nasheed called his country the 3rd most at risk from flooding due to climate change, even stating that, “If carbon emissions continue at the rate they are climbing today, my country will be underwater in seven years.”

Thilafishi, artificial island situated to the west of Malé (Marine GeoGarage)

While President Nasheed’s predictions may sound extreme, there are legitimate concerns about the future of the Maldives.
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that most of the 200-some islands that make up the Maldives will need to be abandoned by 2100.
It seems like it may be too late to slow climate change in time for the survival of this tourist paradise and there are plans to buy up land in other Asian-Pacific countries for future climate refugees from the Maldives.

Praised as a pristine eco-destination and a nation that is abandoning fossil fuels (as well as a symbol for what the world is losing through burning them) the Maldives stands on figurative high ground if not literally so.
It is also a diver’s paradise where one can spot the illusive and rare whale shark.

Because the island sits only one meter above sea level, environmentalists worry that toxic waste could leach into the water.

Yet there is a dirty secret that has helped to keep most of the Maldives clean, pristine and litter free.
It is Thilafushi, a manmade island of rubbish — a landfill in paradise, overflowing with floating plastic waste.
It is estimated that around 330 tons of garbage are brought to Thilafushi daily — so much that the island is physically expanding by about one square meter with each new day.
The hazardous waste that is mixed in with the regular rubbish in the landfill has lead to Thilafushi being described by local environmentalists as a “toxic bomb“.

Thilafushi lagoon fill, with used batteries, asbestos, lead and other potentially hazardous waste mixed with the municipal solid wastes, is an increasingly serious ecological and health problem in the Maldives. Even though batteries and e-waste are quite a small fraction of municipal waste disposed at the Thilafushi, they are a concerted source of toxic heavy metals such as mercury, lead and cadmium. Chemicals can leach out into water table or sea and endanger the surrounding sea and reefs.
—Maldives environmental activist group Bluepeace 

Thilafushi aerial view

Links :

• : Filmmaker Alison Teal has made a documentary about her time in the Maldives, including footage of her riding her surfboard through piles of floating plastic garbage.

Check out some remarkable photos of Alison’s trip to the garbage island here.

Whales butchered in bloody seas: Faroe islanders say it’s tradition, others protest

 Inhabitants of Faroe Islands catch and slaughter pilot whales (Globicephala melaena) during the traditional 'Grindadrap' (whale hunting in Faroese) near the capital Torshavn, November 22, 2011. (Reuters/Andrija Ilic)

watch documentary

From RT

The Faroe Islands, in the harsh North Atlantic, are part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
The diverse community of around 50,000 has traditions dating back centuries and a remarkably low crime rate.
Yet the Faroese are often called the last barbarians of Europe.
Recent pictures of their slaughter of pilot whales went viral on the internet and in the media. Marine mammals killed and hacked into pieces while children play in the blood-red waters were shocking to many.
Unmoved, the Faroese are determined to continue their tradition and devise new weapons for killing the ‘grinds’, insisting that it's no different to killing any other animal for food.


The waters on the shores of Denmark’s Faroe Islands turn red in summer.
The islanders are keen on preserving a centuries-old bloody practice of whale hunting, which turns small bays in slaughterhouses despite the efforts of activists to stop them.
“This is an old tradition, and as you know, there’s some conflict in this, because there are people from outside, from the mainland who don’t like what we’re doing here,” local journalist Finnur Koba told RT.

 Faroe islands ENCs with the Marine GeoGarage

The Faroe Islands are an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, about halfway between Norway and Iceland where the Norwegian Sea meets the North Atlantic.
For their northerly latitude their climate is relatively mild and barely changes between summer and winter, with a mean summer temperature of 13 degrees Celsius and a winter average of 3 degrees.

Eugéne Riguidel, Florence Arthaud and Jean-Yves Terlain, former racing sailors
on the Colombus, Sea Shepherd ambassador boat in the Faroe, last July

Last month six protesters from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society were found guilty by a Faroe Islands’ court of interfering with the grind, or whale drive hunts.
Sea Shepherd was founded by Paul Watson in the 1980s with the aim of halting the practice of killing whales and uses confrontational tactics such as ramming whaling ships.
During a whale grind a flotilla of small power boats drive the whales or dolphins into a shallow bay where they are slaughtered with knives, in a process which is part of a 1,000 year old tradition.

Although Denmark is an anti-whaling member of the EU and is subject to laws prohibiting the slaughter of cetaceans – marine mammals including whales, dolphins and porpoises – it defends the right of the islanders to practice the grind.
Once the whales are in shallow water, people on the shore cut the whales’ neck and try and break the spinal cord and although there is a lot of blood, death occurs quickly.

Whale hunting has been a common phenomenon for a long time.

It is known to have existed on Iceland, in the Hebrides, and in Shetland and Orkney.
Archaeological evidence from the early Norse settlement of the Faroe Islands c. 1200 years ago, in the form of pilot whale bones found in household remains in Gøta, indicates that the pilot whale has long had a central place in the everyday life of Faroe Islanders.

The meat and blubber of the pilot whale have been an important part of the islanders' staple diet.

The blubber, in particular, has been highly valued both as food and for processing into oil, which was used for lighting fuel and other purposes.

Parts of the skin of pilot whales were also used for ropes and lines, while stomachs were used as floats.
Rights have been regulated by law since medieval times and references are found in early Norwegian legal documents, while the oldest existing legal document with specific reference to the Faroes, the so-called Sheep Letter from 1298, includes rules for rights to, and shares of, both stranded whales as well as whales driven ashore.
Records of drive hunts in the Faroe Islands date back to 1584.

Although whale hunting was carried out in other European communities, they have either stopped completely or changed their techniques to cut down on the amount of blood shed.
In the Faroes, the islanders still feel a real cultural attachment to the practice and point out that the hunt is primarily for food.
Whale meat can be boiled, broiled as a steak or air dried and can even be eaten raw in thin slices.
But not everyone in the Faroes is happy with the practice.

A Faroe islander, Ingi Sørensen, who also is an underwater whale photographer believes the practice belongs in the history books.
“It belongs to the past. In those days it gave us life. Without the grind there would be no life here. But today it’s absolutely unnecessary,” he said.

 Faroe Islanders watch as men inspect whale carcasses taken during a grind in 1947.

photo : Raymond Kleboe, Getty Images

Pitting tradition against modern values is something most Faroe islanders are happy to do, Finnur Koba explained.
“The tradition is very difficult to explain. It’s something that lives deep inside you, its culture you know. It’s what defines who you are,” he said.

However, the long-term yearly average catch of whales is about 800, not enough to dent the large population of pilot whales in the northeast Atlantic, or big enough to make any real difference to the local economy.
There are no professional whale hunters any more on the Faroe Islands and no one relies on it for their living.
All whalers have a day job and when the call to the grind goes out on mobile phones, local radio and social media, everyone tries to get the beach in time for the hunt.

"grindadráp" or simply, “the grind” : 

236 pilot whales on the docks of the Klaksvik harbour, Bordhoy island (July 2014)

One islander explained to the RT crew that he took his daughter to a grind to show her how whales are killed and then cut up for meat.
He said he wanted her to understand where food comes from.
His daughter was not apparently particularly fazed either way about what she witnessed.

The islanders are adamant that they kill the whales as humanely as possible and they point out that they only hunt pilot whales not the bigger killer whales, which in some areas of the world are a protected species.

If there is anything likely to put a stop to the practice, it’s not protests by animal rights activists but health concerns as increasing amounts of heavy metal toxins are being found in whale meat.
Some Faroe islanders, including the head physician of the islands Dr Pál Weihe, are not enthusiastic about eating it.

In 2008 Weihe, alongside the Chief Medical Officer of the islands, advised against human consumption of pilot whale.
“The amount of toxins found in pilot whales has not decreased, and we still don´t know much about the long-term damage caused by biological toxins. This is why we warn that pilot whale is not fit for human consumption,” Weihe told a Faroese magazine in September 2013.

Links :

• YouTube :  Trouble in the Faroe Islands | Whale Wars: Viking Shores
• National Geographic : Faroe Island Whaling, a 1,000-Year Tradition, Comes Under Renewed Fire

Where did all the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill go?

This image shows controlled burning of surface oil slicks during the Deepwater Horizon event.
(Photo Credit: David Valentine)

From Science2.0

Damage assessments from environmental hazards are always a challenge because of the competing constituencies pulling on science and the fuzzy nature of estimates.
After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration was editing science reports to reflect its goals, environmentalists were raising money claiming earth was ruined and using wild guesses for damage, and BP lobbyists were mitigating penalties behind the scenes by claiming it wasn't so bad.

What about possibly 2 million barrels of oil that are still down there?
Are they a hazard?
Where did they go?

Map of study sampling sites identified as small circles with hotter colors indicating higher levels of contamination. - See more at: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2014/014454/where-did-all-oil-go#sthash.wJZW7YHs.dpuf

Map of study sampling sites identified as small circles with hotter colors indicating higher levels of contamination.

By analyzing data from more than 3,000 samples collected at 534 locations over 12 expeditions, they identified a 1,250-square-mile patch of the deep sea floor upon which 2 to 16 percent of the discharged oil was deposited.
The fallout of oil to the sea floor created thin deposits most intensive to the southwest of the Macondo well.
The oil was most concentrated within the top half inch of the sea floor and was patchy even at the scale of a few feet.

 Hydrocarbon contamination from Deepwater Horizon overlaid on sea floor bathymetry, highlighting the 1,250 square mile area identified in the study. Credit: G. Burch Fisher

Researchers recently set out to describe a path the oil could have followed, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They collated data from other agencies, the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Obama administration estimated the Macondo well's total discharge — from the spill in April 2010 until the well was capped that July — to be 5 million barrels.

The investigation focused primarily on hopane, a nonreactive hydrocarbon that served as a proxy for the discharged oil.
Researchers analyzed the spatial distribution of hopane in the northern Gulf of Mexico and found it was most concentrated in a thin layer at the sea floor within 25 miles of the ruptured well, clearly implicating Deepwater Horizon as the source.

 A simulation of the patchy distribution of oil

resulting from deposition of oil-bearing particles over 100 square feet of ocean floor.

"Based on the evidence, our findings suggest that these deposits come from Macondo oil that was first suspended in the deep ocean and then settled to the sea floor without ever reaching the ocean surface," said co-author David Valentine, a professor of earth science and biology at UC Santa Barbara.
"The pattern is like a shadow of the tiny oil droplets that were initially trapped at ocean depths around 3,500 feet and pushed around by the deep currents. Some combination of chemistry, biology and physics ultimately caused those droplets to rain down another 1,000 feet to rest on the sea floor."

The team were able to identify hotspots of oil fallout in close proximity to damaged deep-sea corals.
According to the researchers, this data supports the previously disputed finding that these corals were damaged by the Deepwater Horizon spill.
"The evidence is becoming clear that oily particles were raining down around these deep sea corals, which provides a compelling explanation for the injury they suffered," said Valentine.
"The pattern of contamination we observe is fully consistent with the Deepwater Horizon event but not with natural seeps — the suggested alternative."
While the study examined a specified area, the scientists argue that the observed oil represents a minimum value.
They purport that oil deposition likely occurred outside the study area but so far has largely evaded detection because of its patchiness.

This analysis provides us with, for the first time, some closure on the question 'Where did the oil go and how?' " said Don Rice, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean Sciences.
"It also alerts us that this knowledge remains largely provisional until we can fully account for the remaining 70 percent."
"These findings should be useful for assessing the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon spill as well as planning future studies to further define the extent and nature of the contamination," Valentine concluded.
"Our work can also help to assess the fate of reactive hydrocarbons, test models of oil's behavior in the ocean and plan for future spills."

Links : 

• GeoGarage blog : Image of oil spill off US Gulf Coast / Live from the ocean floor: new oil leak widget features 'Spillcam' / Online maps & data resources related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill / NOAA nautical charts displaying Deepwater Horizon oil spill projections in Google Earth / Hollywood at the rescue of BP / Bluefin tuna spawn & oil mixing in Gulf of Mexico now / The long-term fate of the oil spill in the Atlantic / Looking for the oil ? NOAA says it's mostly gone / New microbe discovered eating oil spill in Gulf / Updated kmz files for Deepwater Horizon / Deep sea BP spill dispersants din't degrade for months / BP oil spill: the environmental impact one year on / Giving nature its own rights might avert future oil disasters / Unprecedented impact of Deepwater Horizon on deep ocean revealed / No protocol ready for Deepwater oil spill / Lasting scars three years on from BP oil disaster / Crude oil causes developmental abnormalities in large marine fish /
• ThinkProgress : Scientists Discover Huge ‘Bathtub Ring’ Of Oil On Sea Floor From BP Spill