Let’s see how long it takes you all to correctly identify this object.  Comment with your answer below…

Teahupoo, Tahiti is widely known throughout the world of surfing as having the most powerful break on the planet.  There are certainly larger waves found breaking at other places in the world, but none that break with such impact and ferocity as found at Teahupoo.

On Aug 27th 2011 during the Billabong Pro waiting period is what many are calling the biggest and gnarliest Teahupoo ever ridden.

Chris Bryan was fortunate enough to be there working for Billabong on a day that will go down in the history of big wave surfing. The French Navy labeled this day a double code red prohibiting and threatening to arrest anyone that entered the water.

Kelly Slater described the day by saying “witnessing this was a draining feeling being terrified for other people’s lives all day long, it’s life or death. Letting go of that rope one time can change your life and not many people will ever experience that in their life.”

All images where shot by Chris Bryan using the Phantom HD Gold camera. To see more of Chris’ work check out his website. WWW.CHRISBRYANFILMS.COM

Music: Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun’ by M83.

WHAT?!

First of all, any seaman, military or commercial, can tell you there is no heckler known as the “Filipino Monkey“. Rather it’s a phrase that’s been uttered anonymously by thousands of mariners for decades. This harassing radio call with racial origins is made over the radio when a sailor hears the distinct accent of a Filipino mariner on the VHF radio.

Why you may ask?

Mostly out of boredom but also for the simple reason that it is sure to get a heated response.

It also happens to be the bane of every Watch Officer’s existence; a joke that is no longer funny but refuses to die. Tim’s Times gave us the details behind this heckle back in September 2008:

The two tone alarm has gone again and this time it’s a pan pan from La Coruna Radio, other side of the Bay of Biscay. You wouldn’t mind so much if it was just the official users of VHF and MF radio that you had to contend with, but oh no there is every manner of animal sound, and jungle noise on the VHF from people who should not be on the radio, let alone a ship. One moron was calling out, “Gorilla from Manila, and Filipino monkey” my watchman who is from Manila laughed and said that it is often Indian’s who call this out to provoke a response from Filipinos, who say “Indian I can’t see you, but I can smell you”. So childish and these guys are in charge of ships, frightening, and these days it is all being recorded, so you must be dealing with stupidity, says a lot for the profession….

Boing Boing tells us;

Indeed, the voice in the audio sounds different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser, USS Port Royal over a radio from a small open boat in the video released by Iranian authorities. He is shown in a radio exchange at one point asking the U.S. warship to change from the common bridge-to-bridge channel 16 to another channel, perhaps to speak to the Navy without being interrupted…

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

And the Monkey has stamina.

“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

Initially I was shocked that a Navy ship, or any ship, could not have known the taunt was a joke. This is seamanship 101. I clearly remember having the taunt whispered in my ear by an upperclassmen during my plebe year that the Naval Academy and by the time I received my officers license I had heard it hundreds of time. How could the officers of the cruiser Port Royal not know this was a common joke? I’m admitting still confused but after hearing the audio file I must say it doesn’t sound like the typical ‘Filipino Monkey’ taunt.

I’ll give the last comment to the cruise ship captain quoted by the Navy Times since it’s both accurate and contains good advice to mariners:

“It was just a gut feeling, something the merchants did. Guys would get bored, one guy hears it, comes back a year later and does it for himself,”

The former skipper noted that he warned his crew about hecklers when preparing to transit Hormuz. “I tell them they’ll hear things on there that will be insulting,” he said. “You tell your people that you’ll hear things that are strange, insulting, aggravating, but you need to maintain a professional posture.”

A civilian mariner with experience in that region said the Filipino Monkey phenomenon is worldwide, and has been going on for years.

“They come on and say ‘Filipino Monkey’ in a strange voice. They might say it two or three times. You’re standing watch on bridge and you’re monitoring Channel 16 and all of a sudden it comes over the radio. It can happen anytime. It’s been a joke out there for years.”

While it happens all over the world, it’s more likely to occur around the Strait of Hormuz because there is so much shipping traffic, he said.

You can watch the Iranian video at EagleSpeak.

I was walking along the seawall at the US Naval Academy last night when I saw the slightly lit shape of a huge sailboat moving silently and easily amongst a flotilla of yachts anchored in Annapolis Harbor.  They didn’t appear to be boats left over from the Annapolis Sailboat Show the week before, their decks were cluttered with gear and didn’t have the shiny look of a new boat.  Annapolis is a popular Fall stopover point for sailors from the Northeast who aim to sail their boats south to the Caribbean for the winter, or to points beyond.

Back in 1998, my parents had been anchored off that very seawall before heading south for Norfolk and the start of the Caribbean 1500, a rather laid back ocean race from the Chesapeake Bay to the Virgin Islands.   The trip south in 1998 however, was by no means laid back.  The remnants of Hurricane Mitch blew across the fleet, and at least one boat was lost.  During the storm, my parents and crew hove-to for the night and made it to the Islands with no issues.  10 years, 50,000 miles, and countless adventures later, Calypso eventually returned to her home waters on east coast of the United States.

Although more than twice as long, and with a more modern design, this dark hull sliding through the water in Annapolis was similar in many ways to Calypso.   From a quarter-mile away it was clear she was built for one purpose, to explore the far corners of our planet via the high seas.

She reminded me of the Seamaster, a boat once sailed by New Zealand explorer and famed ocean yacht racer Sir Peter Blake.  In 2001, while sailing up the Amazon River on an environmental expedition, he was attacked and murdered by robbers.  Peter Blake had been a hero of mine since I was kid.  For someone who had never gone faster than 8 knots on a sailboat, watching him and his crew in the 1989 Whitbread Round-the-World Race blaze through  the Southern Ocean on the 90-foot Steinlager II was nothing short of incredible.

This morning, through my apartment window facing Back Creek, two huge masts came into view and quickly spun around.  This huge, aluminum hulled beast that I had seen last night was stopping by the fuel dock a block away from my door.  Megayachts and shiny raceboats were a pretty familiar sight, and the wow factor has worn off over the years, but this boat was definitely unique.  It had a mostly plumb bow, a bare aluminum hull, and deck hardware that looked like it came off a tugboat.  This boat was built to go places, and I knew I had to go down there to see what the story was behind this yacht with the words PANGAEA painted on her bow.

As I walked up to PANGAEA, I met a number of young adults who spoke heavily accented English and were busy refueling and filling the yacht’s water tanks.  Apparently there was an air bubble somewhere in their fuel system that was turning this rather simple routine into an all-day affair of filling up and emptying out jerry cans.

Unbeknownst to me, the skipper of PANGAEA was directing operations from her beam and he was the first person I met.

“Who is Mike Horn?” I asked him.

The name was in huge letters on the both masts and I figured there had to be a connection…

“That’s me,” he responded.

I had no idea who I had just met, but I soon found out that I was talking to one of the most accomplished explorers on our planet.

Over the course of his life, Mike has racked up more adventures than any 1000 people that I know.  He is the Dos Equis guy, if you had to pick a real-life version.

Mary Buckheit, a former writer for ESPN, who is now Mike Horn’s Communications and Media Relations Director, was there this morning to give me the scoop on this rugged looking, South African-accented, individual whom I had just met.  In an article she wrote for ESPN earlier this year, she described Mike:

Mike Horn horn after solo-traversing the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole. He arrived at a village called Kugaaruk, (otherwise known as Pelly Bay), a small Inuit village situated on the west coast of Simpson Peninsula on the mainland of Canada. Mike progressed at an average of about 15kms a day, battling against temperatures ranging somewhere between -40°C and -60°C

He once walked out the front door of a camp on the equator, and 18 months later, after the circumvolution of the globe at latitude zero on foot, bicycle, canoe and sail, he entered through the back door.

He speaks fluent Afrikaans, English, Spanish, German, French, Russian and Dutch … in a mellifluous Cape Town accent.

When he was 28, he had a huge party to give away his house, his car and all of his belongings before up and moving to a foreign country — sight unseen — on a standby ticket.

His blood smells like cologne.

He walked across Siberia for one and a half years. Alone.

His hands feel like rich, brown suede.

A tow truck once hauled away his illegally parked U-Haul from a Dunkin Donuts. He saw it being yanked from the car park and tore after it on foot. He caught up, scaled the truck’s cab, threw open the door and — amid an extempore scuffle — accidentally broke the driver’s arm. An ambulance and cruisers arrived. Cops seized Horn immediately and threw him against the wall. After only a few minutes of questioning, the sheriff felt inclined to release Horn (and his vehicle) ungrudgingly and citation-free. The squad then provided a police escort through the city to Horn’s awaiting plane for an on-time departure.

Hearing this story, and looking at the boat before me, I knew that I had definitely made the right call by coming down to the fuel dock.  I was crossing paths with a very unique person.  An individual filled with stories only those who live on the bleeding edge of life can truly understand or appreciate.

He should be dead.  I mean, anyone who begins stories with, “when I was walking through the Congo on my way to Somalia” is either lying to you, or the story is just never told because they disappeared along the way, never to be seen again.   The days of exploration are over, this kind of shit just doesn’t happen anymore.

Fortunately for the teenagers on board PANGAEA, there are still real life adventures to be had, and Mike Horn is still alive to lead them.  In fact, PANGAEA had just arrived in Annapolis after completing a traverse of the Northwest Passage from the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and is on her way to Florida to explore the Everglades before an expedition next year far up the Amazon River.

On board PANGAEA, Mike is leading the Young Explorers Program (YEP), an ongoing sailing expedition around the world that exposes teenagers to real-life, harsh environment adventures, while at the same time giving them a personal view and the ability to act on important environmental issues around our planet.   Since 2008, Mike has taken the Young Explorers on nine expeditions which included notable stops in Monaco, the Arctic and Nunavut Canada, New Zealand, Antarctica, Mongolia, South Africa and Borneo.

Sounds cool right?

Guess what else… it’s completely free for all participants.

This is no vacation however…

If chosen to participate in this program, youngsters can expect long days filled with watch standing, cooking, cleaning, navigating, and learning how to maintain this traveling classroom at sea.  The theme of the YEP is to promote exploration, learning, and to provide teens with the tools necessary for follow-on action.  While part of this program, projects are undertaken within the areas of Ecology and Conservation, Water and Sanitation, or Social Community involvement.

After tens of thousands of ocean miles, very little has been able to slow this boat down, or Mike Horn for that matter.  Fortunately for me however, a pesky air bubble was all it took to keep them in Annapolis for a few extra hours.

PANGAEA has three more expeditions ahead of her before the end of 2012 including stops in the Florida Everglades, the Gulf of Mexico, Patagonia, Brazil, and back to East Africa. Interested 15-20-year-olds may still apply via Mike’s website at www.mikehorn.com.

Some of you may remember a cartoon which appeared during World War I, a drawing showing an inquisitive stranger talking with the gateman at a railway crossing. The gate was painted with the usual black and white stripes, and lying on the river beyond the tracks was a steamer painted with similar markings. The stranger asked, “Why do they paint the stripes on the gate?” And the gateman answered, “Oh, that’s to make them more visible.”

And then the stranger asked, “Well, why do they paint the stripes on the vessel out there?” And the gateman replied, “Oh, that’s to make the ship less visible.”

-Everett Warner [paraphrased from his lecture notes]

A ships in costume, gCaptain brings you Razzle Dazzle; history’s most unusually painted ship. What is Razzle Dazzle? GoTouring.com tells us;

During World War I, the British and Americans faced a serious threat from German U-boats. All attempts to camouflage ships at sea had failed, as the appearance of the sea and sky are always changing.  Any color scheme that was concealing in one situation was conspicuous in others. A British artist and naval officer, Norman Wilkinson, promoted a new camouflage scheme that was derived from the artistic fashions of the time, particularly cubism. Instead of trying to conceal the ship, it simply broke up its lines and made it more difficult for the U-boat captain to determine the ship’s course. The British called this camouflage scheme “Dazzle Painting.” The Americans called it “Razzle Dazzle.”

Artists were enlisted to draw up the camouflage designs. Early in the war, designs were drawn for individual ships, with each ship having its own distinctive pattern. As the war progressed, standard patterns were devised and applied to large numbers of ships. Even the great passenger liners were camouflaged for the duration of the War.

It is unfortunate that there are no color photographs of these WWI ships. People who witnessed convoys of dazzle painted ships reported that the scene was quite dramatic. Imagine sailing across the North Atlantic surrounded by dozens of brightly painted ships, each in different colors and patterns. If you compare the colored drawing with the black and white photograph of the ship “War Clover”, you can get an idea of how much we are missing. Read More…

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The problem confronting a submarine, once his prey has been sighted, resolves itself solely into estimating course and speed of the target, in order to determine how the approach to torpedo fire position should be made. The “dazzle” system of painting is based on this one consideration and that is, of rendering the problem confronting a submarine more difficult, confusing him as to how his approach shall be made and thereby adding in some degree to the safety of the vessel attacked.

U.S. Admiral William S. Sims (1917)

Camopedia has this amazing information on the World War I design team assigned to the project;

ONE METHOD camoufleurs might have used (but did not, apparently) to generate a large number of unique dazzle schemes is the stencil method.

It is indebted to American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921), sometimes called “the father of camouflage,” who (circa 1909) devised a clever, easy way for individuals to design their own camouflage, using cut-out silhouettes.

Whatever the surrounding, said Thayer, a person “has only to cut out a stencil of the soldier, ship, cannon or whatever figure he wishes to conceal, and look through this stencil from the viewpoint under consideration, to learn just what costume from that viewpoint would most tend to conceal this figure.” However, the purpose of dazzle camouflage was confusion, not concealment, so, in the examples below, we have used the silhouette as a mask with which to “find” valuable dazzle designs in an abstract, geometric plan. In studies of human vision, Gestalt psychologists and others have investigated embedded figures or “puzzle pictures” (Wolfgang Köhler called them “camouflaged figures”) in which a simple shape has been adroitly hidden within a larger, more complex surrounding.

In pre-computer days, one could make arbitrary compositions in art by overlapping “systems” on layers of tracing paper, viewed on a light table. Today, it is ever so easy to do the same thing (and much more) by using the “layers” function in software such as Adobe Photoshop. This could have been useful as a way to generate dazzle designs, had all that been available in World War I.

If you are looking for more information on this topic be sure to read things magazine‘s extensive ship camouflage links section.

Does this make you wanna protect the ocean?  Or are you too distracted right now to have an opinion…

The Surfrider Foundation is a 27 year old organization that organizes surfers and ocean lovers and unites them in the fight to save the Earth’s oceans from pollution and destruction.

Via Unofficial Networks

For over four years now, Google has been driving around the world’s roads to bring you 360-degree street-level imagery. The project is called street view and covers most US roads and top destinations overseas but, until this week, street view has only covered, well… streets. Today the official Google blog announces an ambitious plan to photograph, in 360-degree splendor, the world’s waterways starting with the Amazon river. They tell us:

A few members of our Brazil and U.S. Street View and Google Earth Outreach teams are currently in the Amazon rainforest using our Street View technology to capture images of the river, surrounding forests and adjacent river communities. In partnership with the Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon (FAS), the local non-profit conservation organization that invited us to the area, we’re training some of FAS’s representatives on the imagery collection process and leaving some of our equipment behind for them to continue the work. By teaching locals how to operate these tools, they can continue sharing their points of view, culture and ways of life with audiences across the globe.

We’ll pedal the Street View trike along the narrow dirt paths of the Amazon villages and maneuver it up close to where civilization meets the rainforest. We’ll also mount it onto a boat to take photographs as the boat floats down the river. Continue Reading… (with photographs HERE)

No word on how long the project will take to complete (years maybe?) but gCaptain hopes the Google Maps team’s next project is on waterways closer to home and we look forward to the day when all the world’s rivers are panoramically photographed and accessible, not only via Google Maps, but also integrated into our ECDIS chart display systems.

The 100-foot long History Supreme was built over a 3-year period with 100,000 kilograms of solid gold and platinum accents including a her hull which is completely wrapped in gold.  The $4.8 BILLION price tag also included meteoric stone wall fixtures and petrified dinosaur bone from a T-Rex.

To put this in perspective, each foot of this yacht cost $48,000,000 to build.

Blingmasters from Stuart Hughes of Liverpool were commissioned for this unbelievable project.

The master stateroom

The glass atrium / dining room

The aft deck. 

All images © Giovanni De Sandre www.giovannidesandre.com

***UPDATE***  There’s no freakin’ way this boat was built with 100,000 kgs of gold and platinum.  If anyone wants to say otherwise feel free, but you better send us some solid proof.  First off, tell us how the heck you get your hands on 100,000 kgs of gold and platinum…

WASHINGTON – To complement its existing safety inspection regime for foreign-flagged vessels operating in U.S. waters, the U.S. Coast Guard Friday announced an additional layer of risk-based safety oversight for mobile offshore drilling units (MODUs) as part of an ongoing review of marine safety policies following the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, fire, and subsequent oil spill.

Currently, U.S.- and foreign-flagged MODUs operating in U.S. waters undergo annual examinations to verify compliance with domestic laws, regulations and international conventions – ensuring that a vessel’s major systems are in compliance and that crew training and performance, such as lifesaving and firefighting drills, meet all applicable standards.

When an examination reveals questionable equipment, systems, or crew competency issues onboard a MODU, the Coast Guard expands the examination as necessary to determine whether a deficiency exists, a process that may require additional tests, inspections or crew drills deemed necessary at the discretion of Coast Guard inspectors. The Coast Guard documents any deficiencies and mandates they be corrected; depending on the severity of the deficiencies, the Coast Guard may curtail vessel operations as appropriate until the deficiencies are corrected.

With today’s announcement, Coast Guard marine inspectors will add an additional, risk-based layer of inspection for foreign-flagged MODUs operating on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf –determine the risk they pose by examining accident history, past discrepancies, flag state performance and classification society performance to identify those vessels requiring additional oversight. Risk based targeting allows for more frequent examinations of the highest risk MODUs and efficient use of Coast Guard resources.

“We continue to work to increase the level of safety oversight on the outer continental shelf and find ways to better prevent an event like we saw on board the Deepwater Horizon last year,” said Rear Adm. Kevin Cook, director of Prevention Policy for the U.S. Coast Guard. “This additional, risk-based inspection process – coupled with the inspection program already in place – will ensure that flag states, owners, operators and other stakeholders are held accountable for the operations and conditions on board their MODUs.”

The new system is based on a current Coast Guard safety and environmental protection targeting matrix that has been successful at identifying high-risk foreign vessels of all kinds for more than 10 years. In 2010, the Coast Guard screened 76,372 foreign vessel arrivals and conducted more than 9,900 examinations to ensure the safety and security of the nation’s ports and waterways.

The policy letter outlining the new risk-based inspection program can be viewed here.