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February 1, 2010 – Isla Riesco, Chile
By Dr. David Treadway with an introduction by Herb McCormick

The news today from Ocean Watch is brief. We remain anchored in a small inlet off the Strait of Magellan while gale-force winds rake the waters in the nearby Strait. Today’s crew log is written by Sailors for the Sea co-founder David Treadway, who is serving as Guest Educator for this leg of the voyage. David is the author of four books, including his latest, due out next month, entitled Home Before Dark: A Family Portrait of Cancer and Healing. Here’s David’s story:

Taking Soundings

As Ocean Watch voyages up the Strait of Magellan, we follow our course closely with charts that have been roughly and then meticulously compiled over hundreds of years. From Magellan himself, to Drake to Cook and countless others who measured the topography and the depths. The first sailors through these waters had no idea which channel might lead them to open water and which might end in a cul de sac. The main ships would constantly anchor and send long boats ahead to sound the depths and check the possibilities, looking for undersea rocks and shoals rising close to the surface in the sometimes twisted narrow channels that might lead to a safe harbor. The earliest technology for developing chart data was a lead line, a sketch pad, compass bearings, and the naked eye.

Ocean Watch is making her way up these channels, finally headed north toward home. Throughout the 18, 000 sea miles traveled from the top of the Northwest passage to the bottom of South America, the crew of OW also has been taking soundings but of a very different nature.

Part of what we are trying to map is the impact on the coastal communities that surround the Americas of climate change, over fishing, pollution, acidification, and coastal development. By countless hours of filming, measuring and interviewing – and simply observing with the naked eye – we are taking soundings of our shared ocean and its people. We want to add our visceral experience and observations to the slowly developing social awareness of how seriously threatened our oceans truly are and the already pervasive damage to communities and cultures that dot the endless coast line.

As Herb McCormick, the ship’s chronicler has said, “It’s not good news.” He has reported that the dramatic ice melting is rapidly changing all the rhythms of life in the Arctic: from the loss of hunting and fishing for the indigenous peoples to the polar bears swimming for their lives because their ice-floe homes have melted. Islands are literally disappearing, and significant levels of ocean acidification were registered in the Gulf of Alaska: one of the many signs that our oceans are slowly becoming carbonated.

The Arctic is truly the “canary in the mine shaft” as all these changes are headed our way. Already in OW’s stops throughout the east coast cities of North and South America there’s ample evidence of polluted run-off inundating the coastal waters, depleted fish stocks, and ruined wetland and bottom habitat. Even here in the desolate wilds of Tierra del Fuego the wilderness is being invaded by the influx of cruise ships, hikers and tourists, all of whom bring their human needs and waste.

We are recording our own soundings as thoroughly as possible and beginning to chart the treacherous passages we all face. The good news is that it isn’t all reefs, sunken ships, shoals, and impassable channels. For each hazard encountered, there are people in every coastal community trying to make a difference.

One of the best examples is the story reported by McCormick of the collaboration in Barrow, Alaska between local whale hunter and community leader, Harry Brower and marine scientist, Craig George. Working together, they reassessed the population of the bowhead whale based on Harry’s vast local knowledge of whale patterns and behavior that the scientists in the lower 48 simply hadn’t understood. This was one good demonstration of what might happen if scientific knowledge is informed by the “ground truth“ derived from learning from those who have lived near and fished these waters for centuries. As Ocean Watch moved through the Arctic and down the coasts of North and South America, there have been many examples of scientists, environmentalists, local fisherman and boaters beginning to band together to sound the alarm about the living sea and changing the awareness and habits of those who use it.

Along with our co-sponsor, the Pacific Science Center, Sailors for the Sea, which is urging sailors to become ocean stewards, is only one example of activist groups ranging from Surfrider, Oceana, SEA, and the “Save the Bay” organizations among hundreds of groups that are committed to the protection of the oceans and beginning to effectively coordinate their efforts.

Aside from the difficulty of the voyage itself, here’s the main challenge of our expedition. We have accumulated an enormous amount of data (our soundings) through thousands of measurements and pictures, hours of film and pages written. But our job is just beginning. The British Admiralty had to assess centuries of ship’s soundings and charts to create a vast collection of reliable charts. We, too, have to distill our information into panoramic charts that show how the oceans as a whole are in peril as well as close up details about how local communities are banding together to fight these challenges.

We know this: People need more than doom and gloom warnings about environmental threats. Yes, we need to understand the risks to our oceans and ourselves, but more importantly we need to know what we can do and that what we do will matter. What all of us need is inspiration and a belief that each of us, bound together by our shared vulnerability, can contribute to change.

As a brief visitor on Ocean Watch, I am inspired by the commitment, courage, and competence of the four crew members who have dedicated more than a year of their lives circumnavigating the Americas. Schrader, Thoreson, McCormick, and Logan have already sailed collectively over 500,000 miles in their lives. They’re not here for the sailing or the adventure. They are doing what they do best in order to contribute to our knowledge and challenge us to change. They’ve bet their lives that committed individuals working together can make a difference.

They are taking soundings of our fragile Isle of Americas. In the months and years to come, they will utilize scientific reports, photo exhibits, books, talks, films and programs for school children to provide a compendium of charts that will help us appreciate the ineffable beauty of the sea and navigate the multiple threats to our beloved ocean.

-Dr. David Treadway with an introduction by Herb McCormick and photographs by David Thoreson

*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

*To add a comment to this story click on the comment link below the post title. Please direct your messages for the crew to crew@aroundtheamericas.org instead of submitting them here. Thanks for following the Around the Americas Expedition.

Open the above photos in a full-screen slideshow in Flickr

January 30, 2010 – Isla Carlos III, Chile
By Dr. Ned Cabot with an introduction by Herb McCormick

On Saturday, winding their way through the labyrinth of Chilean canals, the crew of Ocean Watch set sail for the first time in the famed Straits of Magellan, so named for the intrepid Portuguese navigator whose expedition for the riches of the Far East led to the first circumnavigation of the planet. By day’s end, they were anchored in a protected enclave called Bahia Mussel on Isla Carlos III, some eighty miles east of the mouth of the Strait.

Since leaving the Falkland Islands, the regular crew has enjoyed the expertise of one of the most experienced offshore sailors to join the expedition since leaving Seattle. Dr. Ned Cabot is a board member of Sailors for the Sea, and he is also the skipper of the J/46, Cielita, which he’s sailed across the Atlantic, to Newfoundland and Greenland, and as far north as 80º N. As well as crewing aboard Ocean Watch, Ned has also taken charge of the scientific duties for this leg of the voyage. Today he takes the helm of the crew log to report on what he’s learned thus far.

A Report from Sailors for the Sea Board Member Dr. Ned Cabot

I should start by pointing out that I am only a pseudo-scientist. I am a surgeon by training with only a very limited knowledge of oceanography and meteorology and geology and all that sort of thing. I know a lot about human biology, but I am not trained in environmental science. Having said that, however, I am an experienced sailor and an active conservationist, and I serve on the Board of Directors of Sailors for the Sea, an environmental education organization concerned about the health of our oceans and a sponsoring organization of the Around the Americas Project. As such, I have signed on for one three-week leg of the journey as a crewmember aboard Ocean Watch and as a visiting scientist to help with the collection of data that is part of our mission as the ship circumnavigates both American continents.

One of my duties is to record cloud observations twice a day. These observations are timed to coincide with the passage overhead of NASA CERES Terra and Aqua satellites that take pictures from above the clouds covering the Earth as they orbit our planet. We are given the exact time that each satellite will pass overhead, and we record information about the clouds as they appear from below. This information is then relayed to the NASA S’COOL Program so they can compare what the satellites see with what we see down here from the ocean. We also record and report information about air temperature, relative humidity, and barometric pressure, as well as our exact location by GPS at the time of each observation.

When we are stationary, such as when we are at anchor, we are also interested in recording sounds in the ocean with an acoustical device called a hydrophone. And we are trying to examine particulates in the atmosphere by means of a Microtops Sunphotometer.

And there is a lot of other scientific gear on our boat, such as the SeaKeepers system that continuously takes water samples for analysis, and a special camera that takes thousands of pictures a day in a 360 degree circle around the boat. It’s pretty neat stuff. The data we are collecting is being sent to the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington and various other institutions for analysis and will eventually contribute to research to be published in scientific papers.

Of course, I’ve also been making some observations of my own. We are presently at the very bottom of South America. We sailed around Cape Horn at the southern tip of the continent, and now we are sailing up the Beagle Channel, named for the boat that Charles Darwin was aboard when he formulated his famous theory of evolution. This is an incredibly beautiful place, with high mountains rising out of the sea and huge glaciers tumbling down and breaking off. It appears that many of the glaciers are melting faster than they are growing, so they are receding and their melt will likely contribute to the rise of the oceans.

The weather down here is pretty severe, even in the summer, which in the southern hemisphere occurs the same months as our winter up north. Cape Horn is at 56 degrees south latitude, which is about equivalent to the middle of Labrador and the middle of  British Columbia in Canada up north. But down here the weather is generally more severe than at the same latitudes in the north because of the impact of the Southern Ocean that circles the globe to the north of Antarctica, and the only place on earth where land masses or continents do not slow down the wind, and is known for its high winds and big waves.

So the trees down here are generally very small and often nonexistent. The winds are very strong, and the weather changes very rapidly. The water is very cold, around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, so the air is usually pretty cold too, sometimes just above freezing even in the summer. We’ve actually experienced several snow flurries, usually followed by a brief hailstorm.

And the geology of this region is fascinating. I wish I knew more about it. There is a ridge of high mountains that runs along much of the west side of South America. Further north this mountain range is known as the Andes. Down here in Chile it is known as the Cordillera. On its west side, where we are, the mountains attract a lot of moisture from the winds coming off the Pacific Ocean. This causes a lot of precipitation on this side of the mountain range in the form of rain and snow. And many thousands of years of snow have given rise to the glaciers, huge rivers of slow-moving ice that pour down the mountain valleys and sometimes reach the sea, sometimes creating icebergs and often creating spectacular waterfalls. You can see how the glaciers have carved out the valleys, scraping the sides and leaving behind huge ridges of gravel and stones called moraines. They are really something to behold. And where the glaciers have receded, which they are doing at an alarming rate due to global warming, they leave behind what is called a terminal moraine. When approaching a glacier in our boat, these terminal moraines can pose a real threat because they may be under the surface of the water, with deep water on either side but a shallow bar that might cause our boat to go aground (hit bottom).

In addition, we have been making our own observations concerning the flora and fauna of this region. On numerous occasions we’ve had Peale’s dolphins jumping clean out of the water nearby and swimming next to the boat in our bow wake. And we’ve sailed through a pod of humpback whales, including one of their babies, feeding near the surface – not to mention a number of South American fur seals that often appear quite close to the boat.

There are lots of sea birds to identify. We’ve seen Magallenic cormorants, several pairs of kelp geese, Turkey vultures, giant southern petrels, Magallenic penguins, black browed albatross, and one royal albatross, with a wing span of some 350 cm (over 11 feet!). Hiking ashore, we’ve identified a number of trees and plants, such as the evergreen beech, the firebush, and the holly-leafed barberry. We’ve also been learning some about the native tribes that used to inhabit these islands, such as the Yamana, also known as Yahgan, who are now almost entirely extinct. We were privileged to visit a very special place in the woods called Ukika where the descendents of the Yahgans have hung woodcarvings from the trees that represent the spirits of their deceased ancestors.

So science is an important component of this Around the Americas Project. Along with our other sponsoring organization, the Pacific Science Center, we want to call attention to some of the problems facing our oceans and how we all might help to make them healthier. We are thinking of the Americas as one giant island, populated by many different peoples but surrounded by ocean: the Arctic Ocean in the north, the Atlantic Ocean on the east, the Southern Ocean in the south, and the Pacific Ocean in the west. We must remember that more than two thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered with ocean, and the oceans control our climate and affect our lives on land in a whole host of ways.

So our oceans play a critical environmental role and must be better understood. And they must be protected from pollution and from being over fished and from acidification due to the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Mankind can and does have a major impact on our oceans. We must make ourselves better stewards of the ocean environment.

So that’s why Ocean Watch, and all those involved with this Around the Americas Project, both on the ship and on shore, have undertaken this exciting scientific and historic voyage. We are trying to make a difference.

-Ned Cabot, M.D. with an introduction by Herb McCormick and photographs by David Thoreson

*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

*To add a comment to this story click on the comment link below the post title. Please direct your messages for the crew to crew@aroundtheamericas.org instead of submitting them here. Thanks for following the Around the Americas Expedition.

January 26, 2010 – Puerto Williams, Chile
By Dr. David Treadway

Ocean Watch’s current crew includes Sailors for the Sea co-founder David Treadway, a veteran offshore sailor who’s cruised his Luders 33, Crow, to far horizons. David was aboard the boat for the recent rounding of Cape Horn, and has written the following story recording his impressions. Here’s David:

The cloud-enshrouded mountainous island loomed above as we sailed by on gray ominous seas. We were rounding Cape Horn, the wild dream and nightmare of generations of sailors. All of us on Ocean Watch were feeling a surge of pride and relief. We bowed our heads in reverent silence for the hardy sailors who have gone before us, those who made it and those who didn’t. And we celebrated with exuberant high fives, early morning beers shared with the Southern Ocean, and dramatic pictures of swooping albatross, the rugged cliffs and jagged rocks.

Then, emerging out of the haze around the edge of the island, a moving city came plowing toward us: one of the many cruise ships that now ply these waters providing the magic and wonder of Cabo de Hornos to thousands of people a week. This was a big one, probably 2,500 of our fellow adventurers preserving their memories with a snap of the finger just like us.

The sight of the cruise ship made some of us groan with dismay. It seemed somehow invasive. Our special moment of accomplishment after 18,000 miles of hard sailing felt diminished. I imagined it might be like climbing Everest and discovering at the summit tourists disembarking from a recently built tramway.

Mark Schrader, our captain, recalled that – when he came to this part of the world just twenty seven years ago – the Patagonian town of Puerto Williams turned out in their Sunday best to visit him on the boat. The village had seen only a couple of hearty sailors before. Now the southernmost town in the world had a burgeoning tourist industry.

David Rockefeller, the founder of Sailors for the Sea and temporary crew member, had spoken of the complexity of preserving nature and wilderness while opening access to more than the privileged few. How can we expect people to truly appreciate the delicate nature of our planet if we don’t encourage people to experience it directly? Not every one has the time, the skills, or the resources to adventure at sea the “hard way.” Yet the influx of people and ships potentially brings pollution and even destruction of fragile ecosystems.

We on Ocean Watch conceived this circumnavigation of the Americas to draw attention to how our oceans and peoples are woven together, from Herschel Island in the Northwest Passage to Herschel Island near Cape Horn. As David Rockefeller has called it, “One island, one ocean – the Isle of Americas.” Our oceans and our lands are at risk from over fishing, acidification, sea level rise, and coastal pollution. Most critically, the threat to our oceans imperils our very survival.

I am concerned as an educator about how we train ourselves and our children to treasure Planet Home and participate in nature without destroying it.

As the two Cape Horn ships passed, starboard to starboard, exchanging salvos of flashbulbs, our crew acknowledged the inevitable march of “progress” and our shared humanity with those on the ship who wanted their own taste of the “wild.” While appreciating that this new industry brings jobs to an historically impoverished part of the world, we worried that tourists were swamping the very wilderness they were coming to see. Just as the spreading population of the rest of the Americas has impacted its natural climate and ecosystems, this small patch of wilderness is being irrevocably changed by its new visitors.

As we left the Horn and the cruise ship in our wake, we hoped that all of us – sailors and passengers alike – would protect these ferocious and fragile islands and their surrounding waters.

- Dr. David Treadway with an introduction by Herb McCormick and a photograph by David Thoreson

*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

*To add a comment to this story click on the comment link below the post title. Please direct messages for the crew to crew@aroundtheamericas.org instead of submitting them here. Thanks for following the Around the Americas Expedition.