Dispatches from the pirate riddled Gulf of Aden

by Grant Martin on

Regular contributor and adventurer extraordinaire Jon Bowermaster just started an interesting series on passage through the Gulf of Aden over at his personal blog. The body of water connecting the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean has seen a disturbing increase in pirate traffic this year, the most notable of which involved an American crew that retook their ship and killed three Somalians in the process.

To date, much of an outsider’s knowledge of that dangerous passage is limited to the factual data supplied by news outlets. Maps, news stories, facts and figures. Few have written about the experience first hand, which is what Dennis Cornejo over at jonbowermaster.com has started to do.

Late last week, Cornejo and his ship left from Tanzania headed north, complete with razor wire, water cannons, a six member special forces team and no lack of anxiety for the week long trip. Over the course of the next few days he’ll be checking back in with Jon and the rest of the world to update his progress. Take a look at the entire series over at Jon’s blog, or check out Bowermaster’s Adventures right here at Gadling.

Bowermaster’s Adventures — Snorkeling through the Maldives

by Jon Bowermaster on

Swimming along the coral edge of what transplanted marine biologist Anke Hofmeister calls her “home reef” the line dividing the shallows and deep blue is exact. To our left in the brightly sunlit coral, hundreds of shiny reef fish dart and feed; in the dark blue, just to our right, which descends straight down a dramatic hundred foot wall, swim the Maldivian big guys – jackfish, tuna and red snapper, each over one hundred pounds. An occasional spotted eagle ray elegantly flaps its way past in the dark blue below the surface of a calm Indian Ocean.

During a mile-long swim paralleling the beach we spy an incredibly beautiful and vast variety of wrasses, clown, surgeon and parrot fish. A dusky moray eel peeks out of its coral hideaway. A solitary hawksbill turtle flippers past. And a square-headed porcupine fish attempts to hide itself deep inside a rock crevice. As Anke dives to tickle an anemone hugged tight to the coral, a nasty titan triggerfish nips at her; they can be aggressive little buggers and when they bite literally take a chunk of flesh. The shallow, sandy floor running to the beach is heavy with gray-beige coral, colorful clams and even a few handsome sea cucumbers (black with red dots).

The relative health of the coral is somewhat remarkable because recent history here hasn’t been particularly kind to it. In 1998, thanks to shifting ocean patterns associated with El Niño, sea temperatures rose above 32 degrees C for more than two weeks badly “bleaching” the coral (the killing of the symbiotic algae that lives within the coral and gives it color). Between seventy and ninety percent of all the reefs surrounding the Maldives 26 atolls are estimated to have died as a result. Slowly they are trying to come back.

%Gallery-13360%
While that temperature rise was considered a fluke, today after our swim I ask Anke to guess at the water temps now. “Around 31 degrees C (88 degrees F),” she says, though she not guessing since she’s worked and swum here nearly daily for the past four years. “For this time of year, that seems to be normal now. In two more months it will be colder, down to 27, 28 degrees.”

In 1998 scientists were astonished that the water temperatures could rise so high, so fast. Now they are worried it may one day become the norm. With approximately 80 per cent of the 1,192 coral islets that make up the island nation just three feet or less above sea level, making it the world’s lowest country, the temperature of the ocean is very important. If the temperatures stay high and the coral continues to suffer and die, there goes another barrier protecting these already fragile, at-risk islands.

While warming and rising seas and coral die-offs are everyday concerns throughout the Maldives, as Anke and I walk back down the beach another environmental worry is evident: Many of the beautiful white sand beaches are narrowing, on some islands quite dramatically. It’s estimated that fifty percent of the inhabited islands and forty five percent of those with resorts only are suffering from some degree of coastal erosion.

Some of the beach loss is due to man. Continued development demands more sand for cement (though much of the sand used for building in the Maldives today comes from Sri Lanka or India). Increased wave action due to more boat traffic takes a toll. But a major blame is placed on the tsunami of 2004, which sucked massive amounts of sand off the beaches, and it never returned.

When you fly above the Maldives it’s easy to see there is no one shape characterizing the outline of the exterior of the atolls or the hundreds of islands sheltered inside them. Strong tides and powerful currents shape each, there is no one pattern thus no single way to reduce or limit the erosion. On different islands different attempts have been made to save the beaches, including building of seawalls or jetties, dredging and pumping. In some cases it is working, in others not.

On one hand it’s easy to think of these coral atolls and the islands they protect as tough and impervious, imagining that they’ve been here a long time and will be here for a longer time to come. But a short swim and a simple walk on a beautiful, hot, hot day quickly reminds just how fragile, how vulnerable they can be.

Bowermaster’s Adventures — The Maldives and carbon effects

by Jon Bowermaster on

The call to Friday prayers on Eydhafushi are spread island-wide by plastic loudspeakers affixed to poles and buildings scattered around the Maldivian sand-spit, home to three thousand. When it comes I’m floating a quarter mile offshore and it wakes me from a heat (90 degrees F) and calm-sea reverie; a reminder that here, near where the Arabian Sea melds into the Indian Ocean, we are in an all-Muslim nation. (I was reminded last night too, with a chuckle, when the man in matching linen who brought me a bottle of chilled rose and bragged about it’s ‘fruity’ taste admitted his lips had never touched alcohol.)

Earlier in the morning, before the day’s heat arrived, I’d walked a nearby jungled island, crows and rails darting among the pandanas and palms, camouflaged lizards and introduced rabbits scooting across the sandy paths. The foliage was dense and green, the island far more substantial than most in the Maldives, which are typically little more than sand and sea rubble piled up on coral. Given that even a substantial island here rises just six feet above sea level, as much as anywhere in the world the Maldives are threatened by rising sea levels.

A fisherman I met early this morning shared what I expect will be a drumbeat of anecdotal reports I hear during the next couple weeks of small islands that used to be habitable at least for day fishermen have already disappeared under rising seas.

It’s been a big past few months politically and environmentally in the Maldives, thanks largely to last November’s election of Mohammed Nasheed as president. A human rights activist who had been imprisoned and tortured by the man he ousted, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Nasheed – the first democratically elected president in the nation’s history – has quickly turned into a vocal leader, especially among island nations, on the environmental issues facing his 1,200 island country.
One of his first pronouncements upon election was that he was going to start setting aside money for and start looking at land to buy to move his people, to get them out of harm’s way if sea levels in fact rise as expected. He began diverting a portion of the country’s billion-dollar annual tourist revenue into a new homeland account, an insurance policy against climate change. “It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,” said Nasheed, also known as Anni.

Yesterday Nasheed was on an atoll near to where I float, assuring its five hundred people that he would at least help them find an island nearby where they could start growing crops. He also assured them he would grow its school to extend to 11th and 12th grades. Just three weeks ago, in an op-ed piece written for The Observer, he announced that by 2020 the Maldives would be carbon neutral.

At 41, Nasheed is a rising star in Asia, where he has been compared to Nelson Mandela. Before taking office the new president asked Maldivians to move forward without rancor or retribution – an astonishing call, given that Nasheed had gone to jail 23 times, been tortured and spent 18 months in solitary confinement. The Gayoom “sultanate” was an iron-fisted regime that ran the police, army and courts, and which banned rival parties. Public flogging, banishment to island gulags and torture were routinely used to suppress dissent and the fledging pro-democracy movement. Gayoom was “elected” president six times in 30 years – but never faced an opponent. However, public pressure grew and last year he conceded that democracy was inevitable.

One good thing Gayoom helped implement was a booming, high-end resort economy; as a result the Maldives are the richest country in South Asia, with average incomes reaching $4,600 a year. Corrupt officials, unfortunately, skimmed much of that wealth, off; official figures show almost half of Maldivians earn less than $1 a day.

To make his environmental pledges come to reality, there will have to be sacrifices. To raise cash, his government will sell off state assets, reduce the cabinet and turn the presidential palace into the country’s first university.

“It’s desperate,” the president says. “We are a 100% Islamic country and democracy came from within. Do you want to lose that because we were denied the money to deal with the poverty created by the dictatorship?” Like so many young, out-of-the-good-old-boy leaders taking reins around the world, the Maldives has quickly and forcefully jumped on the bandwagon. It should be fun to watch.

Inexperinced Captain Blamed for Antarctic Cruise Ship Sinking

by Kraig Becker on

Back in November of 2007 a cruise ship, called the Explorer, owned and operated by GAP Adventures, a well known and respected adventure travel operator, went down in the Southern Ocean. Fortunately, none of the 154 people on board were killed, or even injured for that matter, and rescue ships were on the scene within hours. But many were left to wonder how such an accident could happen.

Eighteen months after the incident occurred, the Liberian Maritime Bureau has released its report, citing an “inexperienced and over confident” captain as the biggest reason the ship went down. According to this story in the U.K.’s Independent, investigators feel that if it weren’t for the unusually calm weather at the time, this could have easily become the worst disaster in Antarctic history.

The report also sheds more details on the accident, saying that the captain of the ship ran his vessel into what is described as a “wall of ice”, traveling at a high rate of speed, seriously misjudging the thickness of that ice. The collision tore a ten foot long cut in the hull of the vessel, much larger than was previously reported, sending it to the bottom of the ocean.
The captain of the Explorer is a Swede by the name of Bengt Wiman. It was not Wiman’s first trip into the Antarctic waters, as he had made the journey many times before as a first mate. This was, however, his first trip in command of his own ship, and that inexperience seems to have shown through. The report also cites him for manuvering in the icefield after dark as well.

Frequent Gadling contributor Jon Bowermaster has posted his thoughts on the subject in a blog post on his site. He was aboard one of the first rescue ships that came to the aid of the Explorer. Bowermaster tells us that ship itself was also part of the problem, as the Explorer was more than 40 years old, and had reportedly failed inspections on more than one occasion in the past. There are some indications that its hull integrity was compromised due to corrosion in several areas, which may have also led to the ship’s rapid demise.

The report underscores a growing sentiment that Antarctic tourism may be a disaster waiting to happen. There have long been concerns about the impact of tourism on the fragile environment there. But the sinking of the Explorer, along with two more ships running aground this year, has many concerned.

Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Grytviken, South Georgia

by Jon Bowermaster on


In the whaling museum here the most fascinating thing to me – after the touch-me-feel-me penguin skin – are the trophies and sports uniforms worn by the different South Georgia whaling station teams which competed against each other in rugby, track and field, ski jumping and more during the heyday of whale killing here.

Grytviken was South Georgia’s first whaling station/factory, set up by Norwegian explorer C.A. Larsen in 1904. Initially only blubber was taken and the carcass discarded resulting in beaches of bones along the coastline which I can still see lying in the shallows off what remains of its main dock. By 1912, seven whaling stations had been established and South Georgia became known as the southern capital of whaling.

That heyday was during the early 1900s, when a variety of whales (blue, fin, sei, humpback and southern right whales) were abundant in South Georgia’s waters during the austral summers, feeding on the massive quantities of krill found on the edge of the island’s continental shelf.

By the late 1920s such shore-based whaling factories on the island declined due the scarcity of whales around the island, followed by a boom in whaling on the high seas. The stations on South Georgia then became home base for repair, maintenance and storage. It was the uncontrolled whaling on the high seas followed – up to two hundred miles off shore – and led to significant reductions in populations of exploited whale species.
Whales were harpooned with an explosive grenade, inflated with air and marked with a flag, radar reflectors, and latterly radios. A catcher would then tow them to a factory ship or shore station. The whale was hauled to the flensing plan. The blubber was removed and boiled under pressure to extract the oil. Meat and bone were separated and boiled. The results were dried and ground down for stock food and fertilizer. Baleen whale oil was the basis of edible, pharmaceutical, cosmetic and chemical products. It was also an important source of glycerol to manufacture explosives.

Between 1904 and 1965 some 175,250 whales were processed at South Georgia shore stations. In the whole of the Antarctica region a low estimate suggests one and a half million animals were taken between 1904 and 1978. Probably the largest whale ever recorded was processed here at Grytviken in 1912, more than one hundred feet long, weighing in at nearly two hundred tons. This intensive hunting reduced the Southern Ocean stock, once the largest in the world, to less than ten percent of their original numbers and some species to less than one percent.

It wasn’t until 1974 that the International Whaling Convention agreed to protect the few remaining species in the Southern Ocean, and whaling here was mostly stopped in 1978. Paul Watson and his Sea Shepard – now Animal Planet heroes apparently, though that has happened this season while I’ve been in Antarctica – are still attempting to dissuade the Japanese from their annual hunt. Today. On occasion, you can spy whales close to shore at South Georgia, as they make a slow recovery, in particular southern right whales and humpbacks.

THE BOSS IS BURIED HERE

On top of the sense of history left at this beach by its whaling history, Grytviken is famous in Southern Ocean lore too for being the burial site of Ernest Henry Shackleton.

In 1921 – six years after successfully rescuing his men off Elephant Island, thanks to the help of the Chilean naval vessel “Yelcho” – he sailed south for what was to be his third Antarctic expedition. Its vague intention was to survey the coastline and carry out somewhat ill-defined science. You get the sense he was just itching to get back down south.

This time out his sailing ship, “The Quest” barely made it to Grytviken and in the early hours of January 5, 1922, he suffered a fatal heart attack here. His body was on its way back to England when the ship carrying him home stopped off in Uruguay and learned that his widow wished her husband be buried on South Georgia. His grave is still the focus of the Whaler’s Cemetery at the end of the beach.

It is tradition to toast “the Boss” – no, not the bard of New Jersey! – with a shot of rum poured onto his grave, which I happily did. Unlike the rest of those buried in the small, white picket-lined cemetery, Shackelton is interned with his head pointing south, towards Antarctica.