Eleuthera Island, Bahamas: It’s not for everyone

by Jon Bowermaster on

Eleuthera, Bahamas – Before I came here it was hard to fathom the rationale for promoting an island with a negative (“Eleuthera, It’s Not For Everyone”). But after ten days spent roaming its 110-mile length and half-mile breadth up close, the official motto of the long, skinny, desert-dry island the slogan began to make sense.

It is a special place: Hot, dry, swept by strong winds, much of its 220-mile coastline surrounded by calf-deep, psychedelically blue waters, a limestone-and-coral rock at the edge of the 700-island Bahamian archipelago, plunged up from a shallow ocean floor.

Home to fishermen, both sportsmen and lobstermen, the nearby Grand Banks remain fertile, suffering more from poaching that overfishing, far more abundant than the rocky, desert-like land. To grow anything here – from mangos to tomatoes, arugula to yams — dirt must be imported.

Though locals insist that the island’s biggest economy, tourism, is doing okay, I spent many, many hours exploring long stretches of sandy beaches, whether on the Atlantic or Caribbean side, alone.

Its small towns, from Deep Creek to Gregory Town, James Cistern to Tarpum Bay, are quiet, simple. While multi-million dollar tourist homes – some owned by celebrities from the U.S., most by expatriate descendants of the escaping Englishmen who first colonized the place in the 18th century – line some of the beaches, people are so few, so spread out that much of the island has a deserted feel to it.

Remember … it’s not for everyone.The same could be said for much of the Bahamas, I guess, though plenty of bone-fishermen, tax-evaders (there’s no corporate, income, capitol gains or estate taxes here) and a few renowned drug dealers happily call the place home.

(Regarding the latter, more than a dozen sizable drug trafficking operations have been based in the Bahamas, including Colombian king pin Carlos Lehder whose cigarette boats ran cocaine through the islands for a couple decades. As recently as the 1980s its Prime Minister was alleged to have received more than $57 million in drug hush money.)

Curious about stories of drug dealers and pirates (Blackbeard was said to have buried several fortunes on Eleuthera’s Atlantic coast) I came to talk to fishermen and scientists, about the state of Caribbean fishing and the future of the island to be more self-sufficient.

The fishing grounds here seem to be in better shape than on many islands and seas I’ve visited around the globe during the past couple decades – especially its lobster trade, which sends jets big catches around the world every day. The island’s big fishing fleet of 200 to 300 boats is based out of the northern spit of Spanish Wells.

But with a barrel of imported fuel oil already costing over $100, I would think there should be a more urgent push to rein in the abundant wind and sun that washes the islands nearly 24/7/365. Solar panels are few and far between. Island life is as laid back here as anywhere on the planet … not always a good thing.

One history of colonial life here, for example, mentioned the downside of eating barracuda taken from these shallows. Doing so, said British residents in the early 20th century, would cause your hair and fingernails to drop off.

Hoping for some local knowledge just in case someone presented me with a fresh barracuda for dinner, I poked around at the elegant Haynes Library in the capitol town of Governor’s Harbor. Across the street the shallows were dotted by a trio of bone fishermen; the town’s boat ramp hosted a crude plywood table covered with the day’s catch speared off nearby reefs – jacks, grouper, crayfish.

I asked the very sweet librarians if they’d had experience with barracuda, and if they’d lost anything in the process.

“Oh no, I never heard that,” said the first, her co-workers shaking their heads in agreement.

“Barracuda. That’s a sweet meat,” said a second. “Watch out though. The young ones, the smaller ones, can be poisonous.”

“Hmmm, yes they can,” said a third. “I ate one once and for six weeks every time I ate fish, no matter what kind, my hands would go all tingly. Everything that was cold was hot, everything that was hot was cold, in my mouth and in my hands.”

I left them nodding their heads under the whirr of tall ceiling fans, my fingers, somehow, already tingling.

[flickr image via mfrascella]

Aleksander Doba successfully sea kayaks across the Atlantic

by Jon Bowermaster on

An obscure Pole named Aleksander Doba has pulled off a somewhat obscure first: Sea kayaking across the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean in 98 days, 23 hours, 42 minutes, the longest open ocean kayaking adventure ever.

Leaving quietly from Dakar on October 26 and spending much of the first two months fighting into relentless winds and currents which kept pushing him north, it seemed – if you followed the GPS tracker online – that the 64-year-old Doba was going in circles, or repeating some kind of weird figure-8 patterns.

A straight line from Dakar to his finishing point in Fortaleza, Brazil, would have been just less than 2,000 miles. Of course thanks to winds, storms, currents and the two hours he slept each night, there are no straight lines in ocean paddling. In the end he paddled a total of 3,352 miles (average speed: 1.4 miles per hour; average daily distance, 33.5 miles; longest day, 78.6 miles).

Doba is hardly a novice to the kind of physical strength and mental endurance necessary for long solo paddles. Though this time he embarked in a sophisticated, 23-foot kayak with monster roll bars and a pair of flotation cabins at either end – he had previously kayaked more than 40,000 miles, including a 2,600-mile trip around the Baltic Sea in 1999, a 3,300 mile journey from Poland to Norway in 2000 and a 1,200 mile circumnavigation of Lake Baikal last year.
A previous effort to cross the Atlantic, in 2004, lasted just two days thanks to an “unstable” boat. This time around it wasn’t until the middle of the expedition that he worried he might not be able to push the heavily-loaded kayak (1,200 pounds) all the way across, especially when in December he became mired in a series of storms that had him traveling in circles at the same time his automatic desalinator went down, meaning to create fresh water he had to hand pump four hours a day.

On January 8, he confessed to feeling like Sisyphus, who rolled the boulder uphill only to have it tumble backwards on top of him. “This is how I feel fighting the current.”

His expedition manager was his son, Chez, who stayed positive throughout that his old man would make it across. “He promised his wife he’s coming back. He’s not a man to break a promise, otherwise she will kill him.”

While Doba’s effort is the longest paddle yet, he now tops a short-list of other obscure long-distance paddle record holders (thanks to Canoe & Kayak):

In 1928 Franz Romer crossed the Atlantic from Portugal to Puerto Rico in a folding kayak dependent on just a compass, sextant and a barometer. After landing in St. Thomas and a brief sail over to San Juan Harbor in Puerto Rico, Romer again took to sea, bound for New York. Unfortunately, he missed a hurricane warning by one hour and steered straight into the storm. No trace of him was ever found.

In 1956 Hannes Lindemann spent 72 days paddling from the Canary Islands to the British Virgin Islands in a store-bought folding kayak, subsisting primarily on beer, evaporated milk, rainwater and speared fish. His mantra? “West … Never give up … Never give up.”

In 1987 Ed Gillet’s left from California heading for Hawaii; the crossing took him 63 days. Out of radio contact for eight weeks, he ran out of food, endured a 40-hour stretch of sleep deprivation and winds that nearly drove him north of Hawaii. He was described as being in a “hallucinatory state” when he arrived at Kahului Harbor on Maui.

Englishman Peter Bray was the first to paddle west to east across the Atlantic in 2001, without the tropical trade winds to ease his passage. His first attempt nearly cost him his life: Asleep after his first day at sea, he awoke to find his cockpit three-quarters filled with water and his pumping systems inoperable. Bray survived 32 hours submerged in 36-degree seas and spent the next four months learning to walk again. A year later, he launched again from St. John’s, Newfoundland, reaching Beldereg, Ireland, 75 days later.

In 2007 Australian “Adventurer of the Year” Andrew McAuley attempted the relatively short (1,000) crossing of the very wild Tasman Sea, from Tasmania to New Zealand. In 29 days he got to within one day – 30 miles – of Milford Sound, New Zealand where his wife and young son waited on the beach for him. He disappeared on that last day; his boat would be found, but never any sign of Andrew.

In late 2007 a pair of young Australians – James Castrission and Justin James – successfully crossed the Tasman Sea in a custom-built, double-kayak, in 62 days.

[flickr photo via jurvetson]

Another tourist season ends in Antarctica

by Jon Bowermaster on

Hopefully this will be my last update on the 2010-2011 Antarctic tourist season, which is winding down.

Upwards of 35,000 visitors have visited the Peninsula aboard more than 35 different ships. The majority left from Ushuaia, Argentina, and returned there without incident … with a couple notable exceptions … not bad statistics considering they were venturing into one of the more wild corners on the planet.

But each season those couple exceptions remind us just how treacherous the region can be, and just how remote. While tour operators don’t like to see press coverage of Antarctic accidents – tends to scare away potential business – I’m convinced that each accident is both wake-up call and educator for both the public and the industry.

A week ago a competently staffed, veteran icebreaker, “The Polar Star,” hit a rock off Detaille Island, several hundred miles down the Peninsula. Initial reports from the ship were that the incident was minor and a written report from the scene by expedition leader Kris Madden said that although there was a hole in the ship’s hull it was in “no immediate danger.”

But she went on: “It was pretty scary there for a few hours and looked like we would have to abandon ship. In all likelihood we will be transferred to a rescue ship in the area tonight.”Ultimately there was no midnight rescue and the “Polar Star” was able to motor to the South Shetland’s King George Island where – after completion of an underwater inspection — it was decided to offload its 80 passengers onto a trio of other tourist ships in the area. The ship, with crew and staff aboard, then motored across the Drake Passage back to Ushuaia. The rest of its Antarctic season has been canceled, suggesting the repairs will take some time.

Reporting-from-the-scene of these Antarctic incidents is always a bit sketchy. It’s far away, information passes through multi-channels, and the ship companies are not keen for the attention. What the “Polar Star” initially labeled a “breach” in the hull – a tear, a gash, a hole — caused by hitting an “uncharted” rock ultimately turned into something concerning enough that they felt safer offloading its passengers.

(It’s understandably hard to divine the extent of damage while at sea. I was on the scene when the “Explorer” sank off the tip of the Peninsula in November 2007 and the report from its crew was that ice had punched a “fist-sized” hole in the hull. A year later an exhaustive report stated it was more like a 10-foot long gash.)

One very good thing about the continued popularity of Antarctic tourism is that so far whenever one of these incidents has happened there have been other tourist ships within easy reach willing and happy to help.

When the “Clelia II” got in trouble in the Drake Passage in early December, for example – washed over by 35-40 foot waves — the “National Geographic Explorer” was able to change course, locate the disabled ship which had lost its communication system, “launch” it a satellite phone and standby while it recovered.

The aftermath of the “Clelia II”s experience – a railing broken off by the big seas was tossed through the bridge window and the subsequent flooding disabled its communications and forced it to slow its engines – hopefully gave pause to the entire industry.

While early reports from the South American press said the ship had lost an engine, the captain insisted he’d never lost control of the ship. Reports from the docks in Ushuaia after-the-fact suggest there was more damage to the boat than admitted at the time.

The “Clelia II” was not built for Antarctica. It is owned by one company (Helios Shipping, Paraeus, Greece) and its passengers booked by various travel companies (Travel Dynamics International, Overseas Adventure Travel, Wilderness Travel and others). As recently as a month before it went to Antarctica this past season it was doing “fall foliage” trips through the locks of the northern Great Lakes.

Prior to the December it had previous close calls. In September 2010 it lost power in one engine on its way to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and was grounded in calm waters; a year before, on December 26, 2009, it engine power and ran aground off Petermann Island on the Antarctic Peninsula.

The most disconcerting note about the “Clelia II” incident was sent me by “National Geographic Explorer” passenger Amy Gitnick who relayed what passengers were told by her expedition leader: “Apparently the ‘Clelia II’ has Iridium phones on a pre-paid plan and the plan ran out of minutes and so they needed another phone line to reactivate their account.”

Let’s be straight about this: The reason the “Explorer” risked its own 150 passengers and 100 crew in heavy seas mid-Drake Passage was because an Antarctic tourist ship loaded with its own passengers and crew had run out of minutes on its sat phone?

(I have three sat phones, which we use on expedition, and have been charging them and successfully subscribing to them for nearly 15 years.)

The experience of the “Clelia II” – which thankfully resulted only in some bruises for passengers, one injured crewman and some bad press – was, I believe, a wake-up call for Antarctic tourist operators.

For example, a new, 264-passenger luxury ship “Le Boreal,” which was to serve as Abercrombie & Kent’s Antarctic ship this season, canceled at least one planned trip to the Peninsula and spent weeks at the dock in Ushuaia fixing “wear and tear” (a little concerning given that the ship was only put in the water in June). Company spokesman said it had decided to cancel its trip to avoid the potential for problems arising in Antarctica.

If the company hadn’t seen those pictures of a disabled “Clelia II” getting hammered in the Drake I wonder if it might have been so reluctant, given that they were forced to refund a few hundred passengers.

Lindblad Expeditions, the most-veteran Antarctic tourist company, has been taking passengers to the Peninsula for more than 40 years. It provides cautionary words relevant to the “Clelia II’s” experience in its own sales tools.

In a 34-page downloadable brochure titled “6 Questions to Ask Before Choosing your Antarctic Travel Company” it recommends choosing an experienced captain and crew, a ship qualified ship for the conditions and a company that doesn’t just charter a ship but owns it.

(Regarding safety, as well as forward-scanning sonar, double-weather forecasting, an ice light and ice radar, the “National Geographic Explorer” carries, according to the literature, five satellite phones …which the masters of the “Clelia II” might note.)

The brochure is quietly critical of some of the company’s competitors: “More and more cruise lines have added Antarctica to their itineraries. And many tour operators, accustomed to voyaging in ‘tamer’ waters are leasing adventure ships to offer Antarctic voyages, too. Given the increasing numbers of reported ship mishaps in Antarctic waters, it is not hard to conclude too many guests and operators alike may be undertaking this too lightly.”

“We believe that having a ship you control, and a completely coordinated staff and crew is vital for safety reasons … A Cruise Director employed by a leasing travel company coordinating with a Captain and crew who work for a different owner simply cannot produce the teamwork that is the hallmark of our expeditions.”

Each season brings changes to the way tourist operations work along the Peninsula. There are new efforts underway to expand tourism onto the continent, by ship companies offering camping, climbing and diving options as part of their itineraries. To-date those have been considered off-limits for environmental and safety reasons. But demand is growing for the next new thing. Hopefully if those plans proceed there won’t be any operators who view the undertaking “too lightly.”

As of August 2011 new rules adopted by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) will prohibit boats carrying “heavy fuel” from visiting the Peninsula, which means the giant cruise boat traffic – the Princess Cruises, Regents Seven Seas and Crystal Cruises and others – will no longer be able to venture there.

The IMO is also putting pressure on for a mandatory polar code by 2012 that would regulate all ships operating in Arctic and Antarctic waters. The measure is aimed at preventing both tourist ship accidents and sinkings like that of the South Korean fishing trawler that went down in the Ross Sea last December. That crew was not as lucky as those aboard the “Polar Star” or the “Clelia II”; 23 fishermen drowned in the icy Southern Ocean.

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.

Japanese call off whale hunting season — end of Whale Wars?

by Jon Bowermaster on

Despite the seemingly good news from the Southern Ocean – that Japanese whalers have stopped hunting – activists and governments alike are waiting on formal word that they have truly stopped for the season.

There is concern the “suspension” could be some kind of stalling tactic or publicity stunt.

From Australia, Environment Minister Tony Burke, admits to hearing conflicting reports. “At this point, we do not have any statement from the Japanese government to us confirming that this season of whaling is at an end.”

The Japanese Fisheries Agency is only saying that whaling operations have been “suspended” since February 10 “to ensure the safety of the crew.”

For the moment the Sea Shepherd‘s “Bob Barker” is still trailing the Japanese processing ship, the “Nisshin Maru,” on a meandering route that has led both ships away from whaling grounds.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that this season the Japanese have taken very few whales, thanks largely to the constant harassment of the Shepherd’s. Traditionally the Fisheries Agency holds off until season’s end to announce exactly how many whales were taken in the name of science; this year’s goal was between 800 and 900. The best guess right now is that they’ve taken fewer than 100.Sea Shepherd spokesman Peter Hammarstedt, aboard the “Bob Barker,” explained the success the group has had this season: “Every day we prevent them from whaling we’re costing them millions of dollars in lost profit. And we speak the only language that these poachers understand, the language of profit and loss.”

Hammarstedt also reported that the Japanese ship had made a U-turn just before entering the Drake Passage, slowed and headed back to the west.

“The turnabout could mean one of two things,” said Hammarstedt. “First, they may be on a great circle route back to Japan, or second, they may be returning to the whaling grounds in the Ross Sea where the three Japanese harpoon vessels may be waiting to continue their illegal slaughter.”

From the Shepherd’s mother ship, the “Steve Irwin,” Captain Paul Watson was his typical bold self in reaction to the suspension of hunting: “The Japanese Fisheries Agency had no choice but to suspend whaling operations. Sea Shepherd had already enforced a suspension of operations by blocking all whaling operations since February 9th and blocking 75% of all whaling operations for the month of January. We will not allow the Japanese whalers to kill another whale down here in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.”

To celebrate its successes this season, Sea Shepherd’s website today announced a “10 percent off” sale on all its merchandise (beanies, hoodies, baby bibs, tank tops, tote bags and more) – a so-called “No Compromise Sale” – in gratitude to its loyal and growing list of supporters around the world.

[Flickr image via gsz]

Update from the shores of Louisiana

by Jon Bowermaster on

A trio of events happening simultaneously this week along the Gulf coast is stirring debate:

  1. The team responsible for paying out damages to Gulf spill victims is about to start writing checks to those who’ve proved they deserve it;
  2. NOAA has given its blessing to reopening a 4,200-square-mile area of the Gulf of Meico to fishing, near where the BP well exploded;
  3. and chemical researchers are still trying to draw attention to what they regard as fact, that the Gulf seafood bears toxic levels that are still too high for human consumption.

Like most things in Louisiana, the three are inextricably related: In order to write checks, Ken Feinberg – charged with doling out $20 billion of BP’s cash — needs to be able, as best he can, to ascertain the long-term impacts of the spill on the region. The researcher he hired has issued a report that suggests the impacts of the spill will be less severe than anticipated, on both fish and man. Yet there is a fervent crowd of scientists and environmentalists working in the region who contend the testing being done by the government is insufficient and that the seafood is still tainted. Amid that confusion the federal government (via NOAA) feels a need open closed fishing grounds in order to get fishermen back to work and stimulate the local economies.
As reported in the Times, marine biologist Wes Tunnell was hired by Feinberg, to guesstimate how long the Gulf and particularly its seafood would take to recover from the spill. His 39-page report was released yesterday. While admitting the report would not be the last word, Tunnell – a marine researcher and associate director of Texas A&M’s Harte Research Institute which focuses on the Gulf of Mexico – says the Gulf is undergoing a “strong recovery, with overall fish populations potentially back to pre-spill levels by the end of 2012.”

Criticism came fast. Ian MacDonald, a member of the National Wildlife Federation’s science advisory panel said, “This is not a scientific report, it’s an opinion.” LSU biological oceanographer James Cowan said, “He may be right, and I hope he’s right. But it doesn’t sit well with me. I think it’s too soon to just write it off.”

Nonetheless, Feinberg will use the Tunnell report to base his payouts.

The same day that Tunnell claimed repairing the Gulf was happening more quickly than expected, the federal government reopened fishing grounds off Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama which had first been closed immediately after the April 20 spill, then reopened in the fall and closed again on November 24 when a commercial shrimper found tar balls in his net.

After some investigation, NOAA decided those tar balls were unrelated to the BP spill, so opened the 4,200 square miles again to deepwater shrimping.

None of which sits well with those who still believe that human health has been adversely impacted by high levels of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in Gulf seafood and the impact of all that oil and dispersants that were released into both the water and air.

Citing stats from recent blood tests on Gulf residents and clean-up workers, which show high levels of a variety of “volatile solvents,” the Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster has organized a public forum in New Orleans. Led by Dr. Wilma Subra the hope of the forum is to air some of these differing takes and remind local residents that the impacts of the spill linger.

The forum can be streamed live at Fluxview, USA

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.