Torben Grael was calling tactics, Lorenzo Bressani was driving, and Matteo Plazzi was navigating. The racing is as tight as it gets, and any mistake, or bad luck with a shift, makes a big difference on the leaderboard. At the first windward mark we came in on port tack, and the lack of half a boatlength cost us two boats.
You can watch video replays of the racing here, but I shot some sequences which give a slightly tighter view of what this sort of racing, even in light wind, is like:
Here’s the Race 3 start, where Luna Rossa is the right-most boat (unfortunately the left was the place to be AND we sailed the race with a shrub wrapped around the keel).
At the second windward mark rounding in the second race, Emirates Team New Zealand was right on our stern, but ran into this little problem (they got a replacement up so fast they did not lose a single place).
And here is the start of Race 1, proving even Ben Ainslie (on Team Origin) sometimes has to bail.
Cousteau opened up the undersea world to generations of otherwise indifferent humans. And the degree of outrage we see today over BP is in no small part thanks to the awareness of the beauty and magnificence of the universe that exists beneath the surface of our oceans.
I wonder what Jacques would be doing and saying if he were still alive today? Vodpod videos no longer available.
Between about 3:00 pm PDT and 5:00 pm PDT we had many very short broken calls from iridium phone from inside boat.
Abby had been Knocked Down several times in 60 Kts winds earlier in the day. Last Knock Down stripped radar from gimbaled mount on mast. There was slight amount of water in boat. No other damage was noted running backs were intact. A full damage survey had not been done yet outside.
There are no other details of any of the particulars from Abby, like i said they were very very short broken and dropped calls.
She felt she was in good shape after these incidents. The main reason for the call was engine would not start. We got engine started and it was working OK. B&G wind instruments atop mast were still in working order she had 35 Kts wind and was sailing with jenny only. Basically she felt all was OK.
Iridium dropped another call and we expected a quick call back as she had been doing for several hours. 30 minutes to 1 hour passed with no contact.
Then USCG called with first EPIRB deployment this was a manual EPIRB from inside cabin. Short time later Personal EPIRB was also activated. There is also a Class 1 automatic deployment EPIRB in cockpit that has not activated.Both EPIRB’s were tracking with each other as best as could be determined at this early stage. Just about the time of EPIRB activation it would have been getting dark.
She does have a life raft and survival suite.
Her last water temperature report June 5 was 54 degrees F and cabin was 60 degree F…since then just yesterday (i think) she has reported verbally a cabin temp of 65 degree F
Search and Rescue has been handed over to the French.
French navy vessel 2 1/2 days away has been diverted to EPIRB position. Fishing vessel 40 hours away has also been diverted to EPIRB location.
Initial EPIRB location was 557 NM NNE of PORT-AUX-FRANCIAS.
That is the extent of what we know.
This is the most full and complete info you will get from anywhere I was on the phone calls with her. If you hear anything else but this it is either not true or it is new info.
The good news I take from this is that the automatic EPIRB has not been activated. That likely means Wild Eyes is still afloat, and as long as Abby is still aboard that gives hope. Stay tuned.
Update: Similar account from Abby’s family on her blog. I’m starting to hope that after getting creamed she just decided she’d had enough and punched the two manual EPIRBs, calling to be taken off the boat. If so, she will be found, and should be safe.
Here’s another video of Abby, describing her plans:
I sure hope not, but this report is not good news:
Abby Sunderland, 16, who is attempting to become the youngest sailor ever to circumnavigate the globe, was feared lost at sea today after her crew lost contact with her boat….Casher told ABC News that he last spoke with the 16-year-old sailor around 6 a.m. PDT after she had been knocked down twice during the night because of strong winds.
One of those knock-downs, Casher said, ripped the radar off the boat. She had been speaking with Casher on a satellite telephone earlier because of engine problems and was in the process of fixing those problems when she told Casher she’d call right back.
She has not been heard from since, except for the distress signals.
Abby is approximately 500 miles north of the Antarctic Islands on her bid to become the youngest to circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat, solo.
People have a way of disappearing at sea, only to turn up eventually. But the Indian Ocean is a cold, remote place. Abby’s last blog post said she was preparing for some nasty weather:
The last few days have pretty busy out here. I’ve been in some rough weather for awhile with winds steady at 40-45 knots with higher gusts. With that front passing, the conditions were lighter today. It was a nice day today with some lighter winds which gave me a chance to patch everything up. Wild Eyes was great through everything but after a day with over 50 knots at times, I had quite a bit of work to do…
The wind is beginning to pick up. It is back up to 20 knots and I am expecting that by midnight tonight I could have 35-50 knots with gusts to 60 so I am off to sleep before it really picks up.
So the waiting begins. Keep your fingers crossed for Abby, and you can stay in touch with what is happening via her blog and her website.
Update: Blogger Pete Thomas is reporting that both Abby’s EPIRBs went off, and one is either attached to her life raft or survival suit. Sure hope it is the former, if she is in the water. he also spoke with Laurence Sunderland, who had been on the phone with Abby earlier to see how she was coping in the rough conditions. “Everything seemed to be under control,” Laurence Sunderland told Thomas. “But then our call dropped and a hour later the Coast Guard called.”
Here’s Abby, talking about the trip. Her father’s comments, starting at 2:23, are painful to hear.
If you had any doubts about the mismatch between BP CEO Tony Hayward‘s words and the reality of what is going on in the Gulf Of Mexico, the NRDC has made this video to set you straight. Sure, it uses pictures, music and words to crucify the guy. But doesn’t he, along with BP, deserve it?
When President Carter called for a 55 mph national speed limit in response to the 1970s Arab oil embargo there was a national outcry, and car manufacturers were not far from a decades-long binge on massive cars with powerful engines that could propel them nicely at speeds far in excess of the pokey 55 mph (recent research indicates that given an open road, Americans choose to cruise at 70 mph).
But with oil saturating the Gulf of Mexico, billions of American dollars a year going to nasty, hostile, dictatorships, and climate change slowly throttling the planet, I’ve been waiting for someone, somewhere, to make the case again for slowing down. And according to WIRED, someone has. And the new number is–drumroll–50 mph!
Everyone knows easing up on the accelerator can improve your fuel economy and reduce your emissions. But what kind of impact would it have on the environment if everyone had to slow down?
A potentially big one, as it turns out.
Dutch researchers say lowering the speed limit to 80 km/h (50 mph) would cut transportation-related CO2 emissions by 30 percent. Less drastic cuts in maximum speed would yield reductions of 8 to 21 percent, according to the study by CE Delft.
How?
Beyond significantly reducing the amount of fuel vehicles burn, a strictly enforced 50 mph speed limit would increase the time required to cover a given distance. That would lead many people facing long commutes to ditch cars in favor of other modes of transport, like rail. Longer term, the impact could prompt people to move closer to urban centers.
Okay, I’ll give it a shot. There’s no reason to rush anymore, anyhow, because we are still fully plugged in via our smartphones, even when we are stuck in a car (kidding, cyclists, kidding. Sort of…).
Despite the BP catastrophe, sailors turned out for the Race To The Coast this past weekend which took the fleet from Lake Pontchartrain to Gulfport. A friend of mine raced on a J30 and made this video. The fleet raced past lots of oil booms and barges, but at least saw some (healthy) dolphins. Looks like nice breeze and a great time.
WDCS, AWI and HSI have launched an animated online-tool to provide all the facts and figures the public needs to know about whaling. Whaling in the 21st Century and Before shows the total number of whales killed since 1946, the enormous success of the international ban on commercial whaling and continued whaling activities by Iceland, Norway and Japan.
The graphs show how whaling countries are manipulating the quotas, effectively blackmailing the international community. It sheds light on the ‘deal’ being proposed for adoption at the end of June.
Today is World Oceans Day. The right thing to do, I suppose, would be to write my own World Ocean’s Day post. But to be honest, I feel like devoting one annual day to Earth Day, or Oceans Day, is a pretty pathetic response to the magnitude of the damage our little comfort and consumer-obsessed species is doing to both the wet and dry parts of the planet every single day. So if an annual day makes anyone feel like they are somehow absolved from all their usual ocean-killing habits and priorities–because they gave up fish for lunch, or sent out a tweet–and no one really changes their behavior in a big way, then it is sort of pointless, isn’t it?
Every day should be Oceans Day, if you think about it, because it is our everyday actions that are the problem. And if we could somehow manage to think about the consequences of those actions every day, then that would be something revolutionary. But most people don’t. They acknowledge Oceans Day for a day (if that) and move on. And then when BP blows out a deepwater well and pumps an unimaginable amount of oil into one of he world’s most valuable and fragile ecosystems there is a paroxysm of anger and complaint.
But that outcry would only be exceeded by the blowback and outrage we would hear if, say, President Obama and Congress moved forward on a real carbon tax, or simply asked the nation to stop air conditioning its homes and offices at near-frigid temps in the summer, and tropical highs in the winter.
Our collective and cultural awareness, and willingness to make sacrifices in response, is just completely, completely out of synch with the actual demands of the problem.
Whew. That’s depressing, which is another reason I thought it best not to write about World Oceans Day (though somehow I just have).
Until this year, I felt uncomfortable when people tried to label me as an “advocate for the oceans”. It wasn’t a label I had chosen, and I felt it didn’t fit me. The Atlantic Ocean beat me up pretty badly in 2005-6, and I was still bearing a grudge. My relationship with the ocean could best be described as ambivalent. I regarded her as a tough taskmaster, who occasionally tried to kill me. Not the best basis for a happy relationship.
But this year two things have happened that have softened my attitude towards the vast blue bits of our planet.
First, there was TED Mission Blue. For two days I received a concentrated dose of all the bad news that I had heard about the oceans over the last few years, and it shocked me.
Sure, I already knew about plastic pollution, collapsing fish stocks, ocean acidification, dead zones and coastal habitat destruction. But like so many environmental messages, the drip-drip-drip of bad news hadn’t really hit me with the sense of urgency that I got at TED. Here were world-respected experts telling us that we need to take urgent action before the oceans are too damaged to recover.
Given that the oceans cover 70% of our planet, it suddenly made sense to me that if our oceans are in trouble, then so are we.
I know, I know. She sounds just like me. But she ends with this:
So on this Oceans Day, even if you have never spent a day at sea in your life, I beg you to do a blue deed for the day. Do something to help. Join an ocean conservation organisation. Make a donation. Post a tweet. Just do something. And then tell us about it at http://ecoheroes.me. Log a “water” deed and tell us what you did.
The ocean thanks you. And so do I.
I do too, particularly if you resolve to log a “water deed” every day of the year. Now that would start making a real difference. And if that’s what you are ready for, then this day, and this post, won’t have been a waste at all. And if you want to join a community of citizens who are taking action on the oceans, then Oceana is an excellent place to start.
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The Earthist Chronicles 