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Friday 26 October 2012

St Tropez to Cascais


Well the 2nd leg of the race, from St Tropez to Cascais has started(ish).

Although we are only doing the main leg from Portugal to Barbados, there were/are/were feeder races to Cascais. We missed the first leg due to tedious things, such as, not knowing about it and having to go to work.

But, some keener more competitive types have been organised enough and the race from St Tropez to Cascais left yesterday. Early.

I know it's a bit odd to start a race early, but the plan from the race organisers was to miss the poor weather forecast for the Gulf of Lyon, and hope to have the fleet past the Balearics before the gales piled in.

It hasn't worked.

However, in a move that has restored my faith race organising committees for classic yachts, they have diverted the fleet to Barcelona to sit out the poor weather and re-start once the weather improves.

We start from Lisbon (38 N) in the winter. The weather might be nasty. The Canaries are close. They're beautiful. They're cheap. Bad weather and a good race committee could be a good combination.

 


 

Just Fishing



Another suggestion to tackle the boredom is to try our hand at fishing. A friend's daughter kept the boat in fish last year using para cord and tuna lures:

Larger image"Take 100 meters of para cord x2 then buy 10 good quality Tuna lures, most importand it is not fishing line as you will never be able to pull it in. There quite a few books on trolling fishing but they all refer to rods, you are better to keep them on VERY heavy plastic reels and just tie the actual reel to the stern and then put a slip knot in the cord so the fish can bite then takle up the slack before the hooks bite in. Use gloves at all times. It is unlikely you will get Tuna away from the Azores coast but once deep ocen you can get anything..... Best speed to go with a lure out is 5 to 9 knots"

My only fishing experience was using static lines off a reef in the Maldives where we caught some large groupers for the resort. Anyone else got any fishy tales to share?

James reckons nobody ever catches fish off the continental shelf and that ties in with my knowledge of ocean productivity - once depths exceed 200m, there is reduced source of sediments to stir into the water column to add the nutrients required for the algal plankton, on which the rest of the free-water food chain is built. Nonetheless, schools of opportunistic roaming pelagic species can be found, such as nomadic sharks and tuna.

Did you know that tuna are actually slightly warm-bodied? They can maintain a body temperature 5 to 10 degrees warmer than the water and so assist them achieving higher metabolic rates and allowing sustained fast swimming.

Monday 22 October 2012

More litter?

As implied yesterday, we must make decisions on board as to how we manage our own waste. Croix des Gardes has holding tanks for sewerage and we shall take care not to discharge near reefs or shores. The nutrients contribute to agal blooms which smother delicate reefs.

The litter is a quandary. James advocates throwing heavy items overboard in the deep ocean, however I am more sceptical. An article from Greenpeace highlights the issues of litter on the deep ocean floor.


More research has shown that our first stop, Barbados, is taking a very very proactive approach to protect their own environment and are building a waste disposal unit that will convert waste to energy. There are facilities to recycle other items such as glass and cans but these are still often not transported to the facilities and so are going into landfill. Nonetheless, we should try to deliver our sorted waste to the other side!

St Tropez Race 2

Preparations for the 2012 Panerai Transit Classique include two feeder races for competitors. The first was from Dournanez in Brest back in July. The second, and more challenging, feeder race is due to start on Saturday 25th October and will take the boats that have spent the summer in the Mediterranean from St Torpez, out past Gibraltar and up to Lisbon. You can follow the action here.

Sunday 21 October 2012

What Lies Beneath...

One of my personal aims for this voyage, as a diver and advocate of marine conservation, is to see first hand the effect we are having on our oceans. The world's seas are beautiful things, glistening endlessly to the horizon and seemingly unchanging of the millenia. However, very few people make the effort to see what lies beneath the surface.
Covering 70% of the surface of our planet, the seas offer as diverse ecosystems as on land, and hold more orders of life than the surface. Our voyage will take us from our own temperate waters, across one of the largest and least explored areas of ocean and finally arriving in tropical coral-filled seas. I hope to be able to share some of the wonders of each of these in this blog and raise awareness of the pressures we are placing on these delicate ecosystems.

An obvious area of conservation concern is non-sustainable fishing. This impacts consumers ashore who find that their favourite supper decreases in size and increases in cost, but few take the trouble to research the impact the fishing has on other non-target species (by-catch) or on the sea floor - scallop dredging and bottom trawling has been compared to getting a helicopter on land the drag a chain river an entire forested park, destroying all the trees and life there, in the hope of netting a couple of cows.

Of equal or even greater concern is a far more insidious threat - plastics. As species, we have come to rely on these in our daily lives and our disposable consumer society means that more and more plastic is going into the garbage. On land, plastic bags are an eyesore, but when these hit the water they become a death trap. Turtles and marine mammals mistake these for their favourite food - jellyfish - and then die a slow death as the plastics clog up their insides. The same goes for balloons, and the Marine Conservation Society is attempting to educate people and reduce the number of balloon releases as well as organising regular beach cleaning events.


Plastics also enter the sea through sewerage outflows - if you flush a cotton bud down the loo have you thought about what happens to the plastic stem? Cigarette buts are also problematic - the filters are made of plastic foam and loiter for decades before being broken up. Boats and careless beach visitors also contribute to the litter in our oceans as they tip their waste in the waters. Out of sight, out of mind, eh? I dived recently off the Pembroke coast in a marine conservation area and even here the seabed was littered with plastic bottles and aluminium beer cans. What a dump!

Other nations are even less scrupulous when it comes to waste disposal. Many developing nations see the oceans as a bottomless dumping ground and general refuse is abandonned in the sea. In tropical areas, the extra nutrients encourage rapid plant and algal growth which then smothers the slow growing corals and irreversibly destroys the reefs. Floating plastics persist and travel vast distances on ocean currents - there are islands in the Pacific which are 10ft deep in plastic litter which causes entanglement in seals and birds. At home, RSPB volunteers regularly patrol seabird colonies to try to cut free choking and tangled birds.

Link to join donate to MCS

What can we do? Use plastic responsibly and take care where you dispose of it. Try to avoid single use plastic bags from supermarkets and never put anything in a toilet that isn't tissue or something that's come out of you. Ensure plastic litter is put in a bin when you are out and about, even inland, as waste in rivers eventually reaches the sea. And support overseas conservation groups who are trying to make a difference in other nations.


On board, we will be using a large amount of pre-packaged foods on our crossing. I have tried to provision using foods stored in glass, tins or paper packaging. Our options for litter are to store this on board or tip over the side. Much as I hate to think of our tins and bottles lying on the deep ocean seabed for years, this seems to be the better option as recycling facilities in the Caribbean are limited and waste from vessels arriving in port is often just taken a few miles offshore and dumped in bulk there causing a worse environmental issue. Our plastics will be crushed and stored on board and we will try to ensure these are disposed of as best we can on arrival.