Twitter provided the news that Plastiki, the catamaran made from recycled materials, has tied up in Apia harbor, capital of Western Samoa. The Plastiki is midway through a voyage from San Francisco to Sydney. US Ambassador to Samoa, David Huebner has the whole story.
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center has forecast an unusually active Atlantic hurricane season this year. Forecasters are calling for 14 to 23 named storms in the 2010 hurricane season. An average year would only see 11 named storms (with top winds of 39 mph or higher) in the Atlantic Basin.
Key factors in the formation of Atlantic hurricanes are warm water — temps are now four degrees Fahrenheit above average — and reduced wind shear in the upper atmosphere. Last year strong wind shear from El Nino in the Pacific quashed Atlantic hurricane formation.
Click here for the full forecast from NOAA.
Here’s an update from the Weather Underground for more context.
Hurricane Ike, 2008 -- NOAA
Sydney is set to welcome Jessica Watson today when she completes her solo circumnavigation. The 16-year-old set out from Sydney 210 days ago aboard a 34-foot Sparkman & Stevens sloop called Ella’s Pink Lady. Along the 23,000-mile route northeast to the Line Islands and then south around the great capes, Watson faced 12-meter waves, crushing loneliness and six knockdowns.
Jessica Watson midway through the voyage
All appears to be well now, as Sydney harbor authorities prepare to deal with thousands of spectators who will witness Watson’s return. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Watson is due to tie up at the Operahouse later today.
Jessica Watson is the latest in a series of young sailors to circumnavigate the globe. Last year 17-year-old Zac Sunderland was briefly the youngest person to complete a solo round-the-world voyage, before Mike Perham took that honor just six weeks later. This summer Abby Sunderland (Zac’s little sister) may take the title, but it probably won’t be for long. Thirteen-year-old Laura Dekker has announced a bid to become the youngest solo circumnavigator; see The Deep for more. To retrace Jessica’s voyage see her website.
Update: Home Safe
Despite rough conditions in the Tasman Sea, Watson sailed through the Sydney Heads at 1.55 pm (Aussie east coast time) on Saturday to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, nonstop and unassisted.
Sydney turned out a grand welcome with tens of thousands of spectators and even the Prime Minister in attendance. See News Channel 10 for full coverage.
Just a couple of updates from the Plastiki crew. The vessel recently made landfall at Christmas Island, Kiribati, about 230 kilometers north of the Equator and almost 7000 kms from their destination of Sydney.
The vessel and crew appear to be in good shape, although crew member Dave T. was clearly stoked to be ashore. Check the waves breaking in the background of the video below.
Meanwhile, Dave R. has been snapping pics of this mid-Pacific atoll and Captain Jo Royle granted an email interview to the New York Times about life onboard a small boat with five blokes.
If you’re wondering how to get to Christmas Island, Kiribati, you might need your own boat. It’s a long way from anywhere.
Yes, you can surf in and around New York. Although you’d probably get just much satisfaction out of banging your head against a wall.
Here’s a quick overview of the breaks and conditions.
There are some good spots in Northern New Jersey from Manesquan and Spring Lake right up to Sandy Hook, at the mouth of New York harbor. The spots in NJ work best on a SW or West wind.
Long Island has plenty of spots to surf from Breezy Point all the way out to Montauk. Long Island works best when the wind is from the North or NW, which is offshore for most of the island.
Swell from Hanna, JM riding
The easiest spot to get to without a car is Rockaway Beach. Get out a subway map, and trace the A line to its end — that’s Rockaway.
The other spot you can get to without a car is Long Beach. If you take the Long Island Railroad from Penn Station, you can get to Long Beach in about an hour. There are a bunch of good surf spots from Lido Beach, in the east, all the way down to Atlantic Beach, on the western edge of Long Beach. There are also more surf shops in Long Beach than anywhere else near NYC.
During the summer, surfing in Long Beach is relegated to Laurelton and Lincoln Boulevards from 9 am until 6 pm. There is a $5 beach access fee for nonresidents (although LIRR summer excursions include the beach fee in RT fare). Lido Beach allows surfing outside of designated swimming areas. The trip from Penn Station to Long Beach takes approximately 50 minutes.
The other great summer beach deal is the Long Island Railroad’s RT rides to Jones Beach and Robert Moses State Park, which include bus connections from the train to the water. Both are beautiful beaches and both have designated surf spots. Sometimes the bus drivers give you a bit of flack about the boards, but if you arrive when it’s not too crowded and ask nicely, they usually let you go. Train schedules and fare information can be found in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Website, in the section about the LIRR.
Water temperatures in the New York/New Jersey area range from 38F in the winter to 78F in late summer. During August and most of September, a pair of trunks and a rashguard is all that’s needed. Late spring and early fall are comfortable in a shortie or springsuit. April, May, June, October and November are surfed in a fullsuits — a 4/3 or a good 3/2. The winter months require a 6/4 or a 5/3 hooded suit, with booties and gloves.
With the booming popularity of the sport, the number of surf shops has grown in the metro area. Here’s an updated listing of New York Surf Shops:
Conditions here in New York are fickle — they change very quickly. For instance, on Monday and Tuesday of this week there was a nice head-high swell that was breaking best in NJ, because the winds were strong SW. I thought I would catch it at Lido on Wednesday when the winds were predicted to go NW, but by Wednesday morning the swell had died. So you have to watch the weather carefully and be ready to drop everything when the waves are good, because it won’t last. Good luck.
The Plastiki, the catamaran made out of recycled plastic, set sail from San Francisco Bay 10 days ago. After four years of preparation, the 60-foot catamaran finally cast off her lines at a Sausalito pier, passed below the Golden Gate Bridge, and made for open ocean on Saturday, March 20. Currently the boat is off Baja and starting to bear away west with the trade winds.
The Plastiki on a shake-down cruise near San Francisco.
As almost every article about the expedition has noted, the boat’s flotation pontoons are made from over 12,000 plastic bottles. The most innovative part of the craft, however, is a new polymer called srPET. Self-reinforced polyethylene terephthalate, or srPET, is fabric-like derivative of the plastic used to make water bottles. In the Plastiki it is a key element in the frame of the vessel. It has characteristics similar to fiberglass, but unlike fiberglass, srPET can be recycled.
As expedition leader, David de Rothschild has said, he wants to use the vessel to underline the idea that “waste is a design flaw,” as reported in Outside Magazine in December of 2009.
While Mr. Rothschild was lining up sponsors for the voyage and experimenting with polymers, a Southern California scientist named Marcus Eriksen built a 30-foot catamaran from 15,000 plastic bottles, a deck of lashed-together sailboat masts and a cabin from an old Cessna. With crewmember Joel Paschal, Eriksen sailed the vessel, known as the Junk Raft, from Long Beach, California to Hawai’i in the summer of 2008.
The Junk Raft
Like Plastiki’s voyage, the Junk Raft’s crossing was meant to call attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. One of the key sponsors of the Junk Raft’s voyage was the Algalita Foundation, set up by Captain Charles Moore, who first crossed the GPGP during a voyage in 1997. Here’s the record of the Junk Raft’s voyage through the Garbage Patch in 2008.
The Plastiki will sail further than the Junk Raft — all the way to Sydney. Albeit slowly; the average cruising speed of the Plastiki is only 3.5 knots — equivalent to a brisk walking pace. The vessel and her crew of six is entering the tropics now and will make for the Line Islands, a chain of low coral atolls straddling the Equator. If all goes well, the catamaran will enter Sydney harbor in June. Meanwhile you can follow the voyage on the Plastiki’s website.
On the morning of February 27, 2010 residents of Santiago were thrown from their beds as an 8.8 tremblor rocked the Chilean capitol. The epicenter of the earthquake was later placed about five miles west of Curanipe, Chile, or about 200 miles southwest of Santiago. Tsunami warnings were posted as far away as New Zealand, although most of the damage was limited to a region within a radius extending 300 miles from the epicenter.
The Chilean tsunami spared Hawaii and Japan, but it devastated coastal towns like San Juan Bautista village on remote Robinson Crusoe Island, the port of Talcahuano, Vichato and Pelluhue, just up the road from Curanipe. Revised estimates now put the death toll from the quake at about 500.
As bad as that earthquake was, a more lethal and lasting threat to the region is the unchecked development of the Chilean coast.
This is another example of one of Chile's greatest national resources.
Chile has pursued pro-business, pro-development policies since Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973-1990). The country’s economy largely depends upon its natural resources. Chile, for example, is the world’s largest exporter of copper. Non-mineral exports include paper and wood products, fresh fruit, processed food, seafood, and wine.
Often overlooked in this rush to development are the lasting effects of environmental damage. That’s the topic of All Points South, a documentary film released last year by Save the Waves and Patagonia. The short film tells the story of how surfers and fishermen in Southern Chile joined forces to fight pollution caused by paper plants in the region, and how consumers can help by making better choices when buying paper. A copy of the short can also be seen on YouTube.
In case you missed Brendon Bosworth’s article about a 6,800-mile trek from South Africa to Angola in the February 2010 issue of Surfer, you can get a feel for that epic surf mission from this video, posted on the venerable South African surf magazine ZigZag.
Angola – Empty lefts! from Zag Tv on Vimeo.
What was notable about Bosworth’s piece in Surfer was the writer’s awareness of history and social issues. Usually, these ugly facts are ignored by travel magazines. So it was surprising to read Bosworth’s explanation of the profit motive in war: “Generals on both side benefitted from selling diamonds on the black market, whilst the bullish trade in arms provided major kickbacks for all involved.”
Kudos to Bosworth and Surfer for running the story and to photographer Alan Van Gysen’s lucid documentation of the same.
There were 796 of these Lancaster bombers in the first wave
Last week’s New Yorker had an excellent article by George Packer about Dresden and how history is revised. For those of you who haven’t read Slaughterhouse-Five, Dresden is a Medieval city in eastern Germany’s Elbe River valley, that was burned to the ground on the night of February 13, 1945 by 2600 tons of high explosives and incendiary devices dropped from Allied bombers.
Days later, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of information, denounced the “Anglo-American air gangsters” and the raid that he said killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The press picked up on the claim and even Vonnegut wrote that the bombing of Dresden was worse than Hiroshima.
Then in 2004, Frederick Taylor wrote what Packer called the definitive history of the bombing: Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945
The rest of Packer’s article went on to describe the rebuilding of Dresden and the ways in which a city comes to grips with its past.
All this reminded us of Australian Surfing Life’s now classic video, Hitler’s Surf Trip Ruined, which is a bit of truly inspired revisionism.
It’s funny how memory works.
The surf photography workshop conducted by noted lensman Art Brewer in Rincon, Puerto Rico has sold out. The Action Surf Photography workshop produced in conjunction with New York’s School of Visual Arts is scheduled for March 6-14. Fourteen students will pay $2,500 each (airfare not included) to get tips from one of the most-published surf photographers in the business. Brewer has 31 SURFER covers to his credit and has been a longtime staff photographer for the magazine. Brewer has also contributed to Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Esquire and Playboy as well as collecting an impressive roster of corporate clients during his 30-year-plus career.
Rip, slash and snap
SVA’s Arts Abroad program also runs photo workshops in Florence, Barcelona and the south of France. “Due to the overwhelming response, we will be planning more events in the future,” reads a statement on the SVA site.
