We hope to find some shelter from the wind under Graciosa, where we plan to carry out our final trawls. These will give Adam a useful comparison between island and open ocean waters. Then we will sail the remaining 25 miles down the east coast of Lanzarote to Arrecife, our final destination on this trip.
Read MoreAt six people, we’re a rather small crew for this boat, and our four-hour shifts make me feel like a newborn baby — constantly put to bed and soon awoken abruptly, given food and drink, and thrust from my cocoon of a hammock-bed into a precarious waterworld above, strapped to the ship by a safety leash. But the crew is healthy and able, the weather’s been gorgeous, playful-seeming dolphins dance along the boat during the day, and magical-seeming bioluminescence dances along at night, and there’s no sign of human life in any direction.
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The crew have settled well into the rhythm of life on board, with watchkeeping, rest, trawling, cooking, cleaning, and keeping Sea Dragon running smoothly. We have continued our twice daily trawls off the stern, and our scientist Adam is pleased with the results. He’s collecting enough data to keep him busy in the laboratory at Exeter University over the long winter months.
Read MoreThe latest estimate of plastics afloat in our seas and oceans is put at 5.25 trillion pieces, weighing in at 250,000 tonnes. That, coupled with the fact that over 260 marine related species are known to be ingesting plastics from our oceans, and well documented evidence on the impacts of this ingestion on a wide variety of marine animals including zooplankton, makes man’s legacy a dirty one. However, it is not too late! We can change things.
Read MoreSea Dragon slipped her mooring lines at 1230 this afternoon to start the latest Pangaea expedition, the Gyre to Gaia II, from Horta to Lanzarote in the Canaries. The distance is about 980 miles and should take us about 7 days.
Read MoreAnd this is what lies at the heart of Panagea Explorations, taking ordinary people out to sea, to witness and research the growing problem of marine plastic debris. And this is what lies at the heart of Selfridges’ exhibition also. A concept model of Sea Dragon is surrounded by five beautifully designed items, each of which are representations of the five ocean gyres, by artist duo Studio Swine.
Read MoreThis post originally appeared on the ONCA blog here. By Laura Coleman, Onca Director There are cycles to this planet. We learn about them in school. Rock, carbon, water and nitrogen; they all flow in beautiful circles. But there’s something else that flows too. Waste. More specifically plastic, in the […]
Read MoreOur oceans are full of plastic, and fragments of fishing nets, bottle lids, microbeads and cotton buds are some of the most dangerous things that lurk in the deep. Yesterday was the first in a series of events this summer run by Selfridges Project Ocean, the Zoological Society London and a host of other amazing partners in the Ultralounge at Selfridges, in an effort to rethink the stories we tell ourselves about plastic.
Read MoreNothing more shocking than feeling as if you are in the most remote part of the planet, and yet, seeing evidence of our footprint float by every day.
Read MoreAfter a great day of sailing and our last supper of our haute cuisine, we got – as a final touch – a little bird playing around in the last lights of the sunset. Now the sun made place again for the twilight that will slowly take us to our last ocean night with stars above us, leading the way, and lights underneath us in the water, carrying the boat back to land to Horta, Azores, Portugal.
Read MoreToday, due to the lack of wind and calm seas, we had a late afternoon swim call.
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Starting off as a joke, the Dutch/German cooking team decided to make Pfannekuchen, the European predecessor of globally popular pancakes. Not thinking of the consequences we started at around 9:30 AM with the cooking, giving us 2.5 h to make approx. 40 Pfannekuchen for the 13 hungry sailors. Needless to say, frying Pfannekuchen on a sailboat rolling with the swell and waves is quite a treat.
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