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He's 74 years of age, he's sailed 265,000 nautical miles, he's circumnavigated the globe solo seven times, he's completed three BOC Challenges. He's been awarded the Blue Water Medal and inducted into the Newport Rhode Island Single Handed Hall of Fame. He's already in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest sailor to circumnavigate the world. Starting life afflicted with TB, he has overcome amazing challenges in his long life. You'd think he could rest on his glory now.
Japan's Minoru Saito is going to circumnavigate again, solo again, for the eighth time, and this time it'll be the 'wrong way' round. |
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By Nancy Knudsen, SAil-World Cruising Editor
Out there on the world's oceans, thousands of cruising sailors are enjoying life on the 'seventh continent', unconcerned by the vagaries of the world's economy, stock market crashes or bounces or interminable conversations about 'what happens next'. They are the lucky ones. |
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| Last month, the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Centre in Malaysia issued a red alert to ships "to be extra vigilant" while sailing through the Gulf of Aden following increased hijackings. The bureau specifically mentioned the Eastern and Northeastern coasts in Somali as the "high risk areas for attacks and hijacking," and advised vessels not making scheduled calls to ports in Somalia to keep "as far away as possible from the Somali coast". |
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An ill-fitting life jacket (or maybe lacking a crutch strap) and the weight of wet weather gear may have been the ultimate cause of the death of a sailor who lost his life when their yacht Time to Burn lost its keel off the coast of New Zealand.
Warren Clark told Marty Sharp of the Dominion Post that they both had trouble staying afloat after the incident because of the weight of their wet weather gear.
`I wanted to give up too. I kept on going because we were together.'
But after doing all he could to save his mate's life in the incident, Clark could only watch as he floated away, face down. |
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PORTS & SHIPS took a keen interest in the Borobodur Ship Expedition of 2003/04, particularly when the ship – a replica of an 800 AD Indonesian sailing ship called at South African ports and harbours while recreating the course of a journey from Indonesia to Ghana in West Africa.
Now we bring you news of another new adventure, a recreation of the world’s first recorded epic journey by sea – undertaken by the Phoenicians who sailed round Africa over 2,500 years ago. |
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On April 4, 2008, the luxury French yacht Le Ponant was crossing the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia when a swarm of speed boats surrounded the 32-cabin, three-masted vessel. A band of Somali pirates stormed the yacht, hijacking the vessel and taking all 30 of its crew members hostage.
A week of intense negotiations followed, ending with the release of the hostages to French military officials on April 11 in exchange for an undisclosed ransom. Shortly after the exchange, a team of French commandos tracked the pirates to a remote location in the Puntland, a breakaway region in northern Somalia. The commandos overtook them on an open stretch of desert road, attacking from helicopters and capturing six of them. |
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Russ George is the founder and current President of Planktos Science, a privately held San Francisco-based eco-restoration and ocean eco-technology company, whose mission is the restoration of damaged habitats. Here he offers a lucid and alarming account of the real problem for the survival of the world's oceans as we know them, and, literally blowing in the wind, an approach to a solution:
“I have read some of the many news reports on the ocean acidification and reef crisis that are presently extant. I beg to differ with the position that reducing our global carbon footprint will help save our ocean bathing beauties, the reefs. It's not that I don't fully support reducing our carbon footprint, I am rather more concerned about the role of the present deadly dose of anthropogenic CO2 already in the air on its way to our surface ocean waters. Those hundreds of billions of tonnes of anthropogenic CO2, the bulk of which we've prescribed and put en route in the past 75 years, are slowly dissolving into the surface ocean. |
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Maloy, Norway: More vessels in The Tall Ships' Races finished overnight and arrived in Maloy to a warm welcome with their national anthems played and flags raised. The small fishing town of Maloy is about to be doubled in size with the arrival of the fleet and everyone is involved in some way or other. Two cruise ships have been brought in to cater for the numbers of people expected, as the one hotel with its 48 rooms would not be able to cope!
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In every ocean there are gyres, ocean vortices caused by the rotation of the earth. The North Pacific Gyre contains the world's worst example of pollution. Here there is a vast floating soup of plastic bags and other goods which has collected over many years because the circular current and lack of wind drives floating debris into its centre.
In addition to this swirling vortex of trash - twice the size of Texas - the UN Environment Program estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter in every square mile of ocean. |
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| More than 150 yachts are in a marine 'traffic jam' on the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal, awaiting transit to the Pacific Ocean. Many have been told it will be 'weeks' - in one case two months - before they will be able to get through. This delay could put them in danger of meeting the cyclone (hurricane) season in the South Pacific. Manager of vessel transit operations for the Panama Canal, Abraham Saied, told YM that the peak time for canal transits is between February and April, but for reasons still being analysed the commercial traffic this year is much heavier than usual. |
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