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Why the completed Volvo Ocean Race includes more than a nautical victory

From Forbes

After some 246 days since beginning, the sixth edition of the Volvo Ocean Race, held every three years, has a winner.
What is certain is that oceans are becoming clogged with plastics, which impact maritime health and seafood.

24 June, interview, Pascal Bidégorry/Charles Caudrelier, Dongfeng
Dongfeng race team navigator correctly predicted that "after more than 45,000 miles of racing, this is going to come down to the last 45 miles".

After some 246 days since beginning, the sixth edition of the Volvo Ocean Race, held every three years, has a winner.
The victor is the Chinese entrant Dongfeng Race Team, led by French Skipper Charles Caudrelier.
The finish was the closest ever in race history.

photo : Ainhoa Sanchez

“In the ocean you can sail fast and never stop.  There is maximum strong wind. It’s an amazing feeling. You can see nature, beauty. Everyone makes mistakes. We learn, we improve. And we win.”
These prophetic words came five months ago in Hong Kong from Chinese sailor Chen Jinhao, or ‘Horace,’ of the Dongfeng race crew.
Today, their race team was victorious in securing the winning trophy for the 2017—2018 race.

“The difficulty of this race is to last.
The ‘war of attrition’—that’s the Volvo Ocean Race," said Skipper Caudrelier when we last spoke.
His key to success?
Motivate the crew, trust them, allocate responsibility and make everyone feel important.

Obviously, that strategy paid off.

Watching Dongfeng pass the dutch isle of Ameland on a cloudy sundaymorning 

"We had so much frustration in the last nine months, we never won a leg. But we trusted our navigation and we had a clear idea before the start of where we wanted to pass."

With 24 hours before the finish, the race situation was unusually unique.
Three teams—Dongfeng Race Team (China), MAPFRE (Spain) and Team Brunel (Netherlands)—were virtually tied for points before the final sprint between Gothenburg in Sweden (home of Volvo) and The Hague in the Netherlands.
This winner takes all/capture the flag scenario ensured an aggressive media spotlight on the final leg of this around the world race, which has already become a media darling.

On Saturday night, June 23rd, boats chose separate lanes moving southward toward The Hague.
Some race teams—including Dongfeng, Turn the Tide on Plastic and Sun Hung Kai/Scallywag—chose to cling close to the eastern shoreline where winds were stronger but which required more vigilant navigation near sandbanks.
Others—MAPFRE, AkzoNobel, Brunel and Vestas 11th Hour Racing—stayed in more open water to the west, risking less velocity from lower winds but reducing potential navigation complexities.

With only hours until the finish, the western team, led by Brunel, turned east and aimed straight for The Hague while the eastern team, led by Dongfeng, headed directly south to that same location, but having almost one and a half times the distance to cover than the western team.
At about 1.30 p.m. on June 24th, Twitter feeds erupted saying that computers predicted Dongfeng catching up, and surpassing the others—while detractors on those same feeds called this nonsense.
At about 2.15 p.m. (three days since departing from Gothenburg) MAPFRE continued east at a speed of 8.2 knots (compared to Dongfeng’s 10.9 knots southward).
By 3.30 pm MAPFRE’s speed had increased to 9.2 knots, and Dongfeng’s had dropped to 10.1.
But whereas Dongfeng was on a clean trajectory forward, those who chose the western route chased a feebler wind.

With a minute to the end, Dongfeng was clearly in front, cruising at close to 14 knots.
In second place came Team AkzoNobel, followed by MAPFRE.

The seven entrants to this nautical scrimmage each raced identical 72.6 foot (22.1 meter) long Volvo Ocean Class 65 boats, created by a design/build consortium of separate companies based in the U.S., U.K., France, Italy and Switzerland.
These boats define the cutting edge of long distance maritime race technology.

This global circumnavigation race covered a total of some 45,000 nautical miles and included 11 legs between a dozen cities: Alicante, Lisbon, Cape Town, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Auckland, Itajaí, Newport, Cardiff, Gothenburg and The Hague.
The competition is so keen that roughly mid-way through the race at Hong Kong, after covering 22,500 nautical miles, there was only a seven and a half minute time difference between the first two boats.

Race positions and news have been available online via slick graphics, on-board reporting (including videos from race boat launched drones) and constantly updated statistics.
Such technology delivered this salt-smacked tale of competitive gumption into living rooms and online spaces of followers and families throughout the world.

Teams were accorded points, based not only on race times, but also on overall positions during each leg.

Begun in 1973 and originally known as the Whitbread Round The World Yacht Race, the event was transferred to Volvo in 2001.
Today the race attracts a huge, global audience.
A crowd of forty thousand assembled to watch the boats pull into Gothenburg before their final leg, while 1.3 million have checked out the progress of race teams on Facebook.
A million spectators, including 100,000 corporate guests, have visited this race—the longest edition since its inception.
The economic impact alone can be gargantuan.
When the race began in Alicante, Spain, in October of 2017, the 10 days of opening events are estimated to have generated an impact of a 100 million Euros ($117 million) for that city.

23 June, helicopter: off coast of Denmark

As technology improved over decades, the character of this race changed.
Images of capped, spry skippers with debonair confidence on elegant wooden boats were replaced by videos of race teams lined on carbon fiber craft.
As speeds increased, so did the proximity of competitors as they played out a match on undefined tracks across the planet.
Minutes and seconds sometimes separate prevailing teams on each leg.

This most recent edition of this protracted and punishing race has included fatalities, de-masting, and constant leapfrogging of leaders.
This is what sailors anticipate.
At the end of the day there is no hot shower, steak dinner or family banter, but spoonfuls of freeze dried goulash, huddling in a damp cramped space to check out weather reports and snoozing fitfully in salt sprayed clothes for perhaps 3.5 hours a night.

Physiologically, the race is brutal.

Chris Nicholson, Australian Watch Captain for Team AkzoNobel, said “We try to have 5,000 to 7,000 calories a day, but we often don’t because we’re too tired.
I lose 6 to 8 kilograms (13 to 18 pounds) each leg.”

Although sleeping bags are excellent and include three separate layers that can be zipped on or off, the four-hour on/four-hour off schedule gets tiring.
“They are the best sleeps of your life,” Nicholson said.
“They’re just not very long.”

He mentioned another aspect of the race that is chilling.
“This is my sixth race. My first was in 2001. I can absolutely guarantee you that the presence of marine life is going downhill.”

Specific reasons for any decline in ocean life can be debated.
What is certain is that oceans are becoming clogged with plastics, which impact maritime health and seafood.

One entrant to this race made sharing such truth a mission.

The city of Gothenburg, located in southern Sweden near an archipelago of verdant islands, was the penultimate destination for these race boats.
During their sojourn there, the race hosted a one hour long ‘in port’ race attended to by thousands of local residents (oblivious to rain) while air force jets screamed in formation above and a police helicopter buzzed the scene.

The ten-member team Turn The Tide on Plastic (partially sponsored by the United Nations) used this and other segments of the race as a platform to highlight the plight of oceans gummed up by plastics.
When the in-port race ended, British skipper Dee Caffari of that team communicated with me about their efforts.

This is my sixth time around the world.
The harsh reality for me is you’re seeing more rubbish.
My crew doing this for the first time kept commenting on plastics.
Bottles, balloons, bags, packaging.
We carry a science experiment aboard our boat and are sampling the water through filters, counting micro plastics for an hour every day all around the world.
We go to some pretty hostile environments.
For the first time ever we’ve got real live raw data.
Now we know that even at Point Nemo, which is the most remote part of the Southern Ocean, there are micro plastics.
They come from us throwing rubbish in the ocean that breaks down.
The reality is it is getting worse.
Micro plastics get eaten by animals, we’re eating the fish and it’s coming back into our food chain.

Time is everything.
I’ve seen it get worse.
We have two races: the sporting event and also the race to save ocean health.
The idea was to leave a legacy in the twelve host cities we visited, and we have.
People are signing up to that pledge.
We had mayors make bold statements—such as never having plastic shopping bags again.
They’re making promises to reduce plastics, and we’re holding them to it.
It feels as though we are making a difference in places we go to in the race.
When you get massive decision makers making a difference, it has a knock on effect.

One such influential visitor to their race boat that day was Niclas Mårtensson, CEO of the ferry company Stena Line, which operates 40 ships and has 6,000 employees.
His specific reason for visiting was to meet the Turn the Tide on Plastic race team.
The company he leads plans to be plastic free in their retail food and beverage lines this year.
“We’re now reducing all plastics, including knives and forks,” he said.
“In our retail shops we don’t have plastic bags anymore.
We use a bio-corn alternative that is the same weight as plastic but disappears in sixty days.”

Another member of the Turn the Tide crew is Martin Strömberg, one of Sweden’s best sailors, participating in his fourth Volvo race.
He echoed what Caffari said.
“You see a lot more plastics in the oceans. That’s what you see. But for me the problem is what you don’t see, below the surface. This boat is fantastic to join in and send that message.”

To help address such concerns, an Ocean Summit was held in Gothenburg, attended by HRH Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden.
There, Minister of the Environment Karolina Skog pledged 7.8 million Euros ($9.1 million) to ocean health, including plastics pollution.

The Volvo Ocean Race is now more accessible than ever via online media.
Its scope has also grown from that of racing to that of sponsoring improved custody of the world’s oceans.
Although the next edition of the race, beginning in 2021, will include new ownership, the event will carry on—likely faster and with more precise sailing than ever before.
Technologies that improve sailing and navigation may, in some form, eventually be associated with helping to clean up oceans over which these boats sail.

That would be a victory for the planet.

Links :

• SeaSailSurf : Volvo Ocean Race : Dongfeng Race Team win the Race with late pass on final day

Andrew Pekler charts imagined sounds on interactive atlas, Phantom Islands

Go on an audio cruise of 27 islands never proven to have existed.

Berlin-based sound artist Andrew Pekler has created an interactive online map called Phantom Islands, which combines the histories of islands that were once found on nautical maps with speculative sounds from each of the 27 locations.

“Phantom Islands are artifacts of the age of maritime discovery and colonial expansion,” Pekler writes.

“During centuries of ocean exploration these islands were sighted, charted, described and even explored – but their existence has never been ultimately verified. “Poised somewhere between cartographical fact and maritime fiction, they haunted seafarers’ maps for hundreds of years, inspiring legends, fantasies, and counterfactual histories.

“Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas interprets and presents these imaginations in the form of an interactive map which charts the sounds of a number of historical phantom islands.”

You can zoom in on individual islands to hear what Pekler describes as their “musical, biophonic and geophonic soundscapes” and click on their names to learn more about their story, or click ‘cruise mode’ to go on an audio tour.

Think of it as like an interactive ambient mixtape with an added history lesson. Phantom Islands – which was was commissioned by the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris for its Fourth Worlds: Imaginary Ethnography in Music and Sound exhibition – follows Pekler’s 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, an album of “synthetic exotica, pseudo-ethnographic music and unreal field recordings”.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : ‘The Phantom Atlas’ book review: paps with gaps

Future of hydrography

Whilst the primary purpose of hydrography remains the production of navigational charts, the role of hydrographers is changing fast.

Watch the video to find out about the innovative technology Fugro is developing that will ensure the global hydrographic community is positioned to play a more efficient, effective and important role in managing the marine environment and resources for a liveable world.

China is alone at sea. That means the U.S. has the advantage.

A Chinese aircraft carrier leaves Dalian, in China’s northeastern Liaoning Province, in May.

(Li Gang/Xinhua via AP)

From Washington Post by John Lee
John Lee is a nonresident fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney.
He served as senior national security adviser to the Australian foreign minister from 2016 to 2018.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered the dinner address at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual meeting of defense ministers held in Singapore.
As with keynotes by Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull and Japan’s Shinzo Abe in preceding years, Modi championed democratic principles and a free and open Indo-Pacific, while emphasizing respect for territorial rights and international law rights.

The next morning, during the opening plenary session, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis pursued the same theme but in far more pointed terms, calling out China for its intimidation and coercion of smaller nations in the region, which is what much of the room wanted to hear.

Although a number of senior Chinese military officials, including Lt. Gen. He Lei from the Academy of Military Science, were in the room, Mattis’s Chinese counterpart was not there to receive the message.
Beijing has not sent a defense minister to this elite gathering of 40 nations since 2011.

One might empathize with Beijing’s determination to downgrade what it sees as an annual China-bashing event.
But the fact that China has lost the room speaks to the myth that authoritarian countries have the strategic advantage because they can take the long view.

 courtesy of the Economist / Michael Morgenstem

Consider Chinese President Xi Jinping’s grand objective of achieving regional dominance through a combination of economic munificence and attempts to ease the United States out of the Indo-Pacific.
The latter can be achieved by degrading and weakening the United States’ alliances with regional powers, a strategy drawn directly from legendary strategist Sun Tzu.

In the last decade of the previous century, a more cautious China concluded relatively generous treaties with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to resolve border disputes and improve ties.
With relations smoothed over, China’s economic weight eventually allowed it to replace Russia as the most significant player in Central Asia.

Xi is ignoring salient historical lessons.
By reigniting age-old territorial disputes or else cooking up history to justify new claims, such as in the East and South China Seas and in border disputes with India, the Chinese leader has managed to alienate almost every significant naval power in the Indo-Pacific.

Chinese navy ships sail through the Strait of Malacca. Photo: Xinhua

The harsh words aimed against Beijing over the weekend are just one diplomatic consequence resulting from a counterproductive approach.
U.S. alliances and military cooperation with Japan and Australia are strengthening, as they are with India, which has been driven to discard its non-alignment philosophy in all but name.
We have never seen a powerful United States, Japan, India and China at the same time.
Although Chinese strategists have long feared the formation of a hostile maritime coalition of great powers, Beijing’s hubris is pushing these countries in that direction.

A web of security relationships is also starting to form between India and Vietnam, Indonesia and others.
These are not decisive, but they complicate the environment for China.
Taiwan is also less willing to countenance unification with the mainland than ever before — denying Beijing a strategic asset that Gen. Douglas MacArthur once called  an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” Control of Taiwan would enable the People’s Liberation Army Navy to break out into the Western Pacific.

Indeed, almost all significant maritime countries have moved from a neutral or hedging posture to a countering or balancing one to the extent that they are able.
This includes preparedness to host and support more U.S. military assets and closer naval and intelligence coordination with other countries in response to Chinese activity.

 courtesy of the Economist

All this is occurring at a time when China has emerged as the largest merchandise trading country in the world, dependent on the oceans for an overwhelming majority of this trade, and the largest trading partner to 16 nations in its region.

Even more untimely for China is that it is attempting the difficult transition from a land-based mind-set established over several millennia toward becoming a dominant naval power for the first time in its history.
It is doing so without any true seafaring strategic allies or reliable security partners.

This brings us back to the apocryphal advantage of Chinese authoritarianism, the character of which is a direct cause of its lonely rise and strategic isolation.
The current Chinese approach to countries on its periphery is largely based on the same principles Xi is using to consolidate power for the Communist Party under his rule: convincing elites through economic seduction and dependency, or else threat and coercion.

Chinese military assets in the South China Sea.

courtesy of SCMP

Aid and investment are deployed to buy obeisance from ruling elites in countries such as Cambodia, Laos and Brunei.
When larger and more open countries pursue unfavorable policies, Beijing threatens them with economic punishments.
That was the case against South Korea when Seoul decided to deploy America’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antiballistic missile system after North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January 2016.

Satellite images provided to CNN on June 11 show before and after images of Woody Island.

About one-third of countries earmarked to take part in the flagship Belt and Road initiative are at risk of being unable to pay back the loans.
While countries such as Sri Lanka, Mongolia and Pakistan have been forced to concede to agreements on terms favorable to Beijing, the initiative is solidifying China’s reputation as a predatory partner.

These are poor and fragile foundations for aligning long-term interests and securing lasting loyalties.
New governments discard allegiances sold by predecessors, as is occurring in Malaysia.
Oppressive debt creates long-term resentments, as it has done in Sri Lanka.

Constitutional changes, which could allow Xi to become his country’s first “leader for life” since Mao Zedong, are hardly reassuring.
A return to one-man rule further reinforces widespread suspicion of China’s increasingly hierarchical view of the world.

Confused messages and noise emanating from the White House are unhelpful.
However, China is still an incomplete maritime power, and resistance against Beijing is on the rise.
The advantage remains with the United States.

Links :

• The Economist : China has militarised the South China Sea and got away with it
• The Diplomat : Toward a New Maritime Strategy in the South China Sea
• The American Interest : Reading the South China Sea
• East Asia Forum : US pundits and politicians pushing for war in the South China Sea
• Nikkei Asia Review : How Beijing is winning control of the South China Sea 
• South China Morning Post : How US-China battle for control of the ‘global order’ is being played out in the South China Sea / Conflicting Claims / South China Sea tensions: does the US have an endgame, beyond war? / Can China, United States prevent a war of words over South China Sea becoming a military storm?