Well, our dear Kat is rather excited about what is to happen over the coming month. There is so much at stake.

Although there should be regular updates on the Greenpeace site, Kat will do her level best to provide us with a Tonmo exclusive, sending me updates as often as is humanly possible, that of course I'll post online ... with a little added reference to Neil Diamond (to be expected). In fact when I left the Warrior this eve I am pleased to announce that she was singing along to his all-time classic "I am, I said" .... rosey cheeked, happy, excited, and armed with plankton nets, pottles, formalin and alcohol (to collect a few octopus and squid whilst out and about in international waters). They cast anchor in little more than a few hours.

What an experience this will be for her! Make sure you pay your Greenpeace subscriptions; this is one massive, altruistic undertaking on their part!

I'd like to opt the rights for that comic book...
Congrats and best wishes go with her!

WAY cool! 8) :thumbsup:

... well, there they go. Matthew Jones (here at AUT) took this pic.

http://www.tonmo.com/phpBB/download.php?id=2523

Awesome! 8)

Well, she's alive and well, and here's the first wee update. Only a couple of days before the fun begins.
....................
Howdy, it's me! I'm not allowed to send (or receive) attachments (e.g. images) but that may change depending on the circumstances. There's nothing to send at the moment anyway - Roger Grace's camera equipment got re-routed to Korea, of all places, so we have to wait until it arrives tomorrow. [Ed, Roger is a very well known, acclaimed and respected underwater cameraman here in New Zealand].

We're just coming into Matauri Bay for a ceremonial wreath-throwing over the sunken Rainbow Warrior [her final resting place after French saboteurs blew her up in Auckland]. The weather's fine, swell is small (though we rolled a lot in the night) and the sun's out. I have had absolutely no stomach trouble so far, so I'm feeling optimistic for the trip.

Nothing terribly exciting to report yet, but I'll keep in touch once things start happening for real. Everyone on the boat loves Neil Diamond; it's so nice to be amongst such fellow appreciative admirers - you'd fit right in out here [ :wink: ].
:)
Kat
...............

I cant say that i approve of her friends, but hope she has fun/gets something done.....

Masterful stroke by the french that was.... :thumbsup: :cthulhu: :thumbsup:

Frenchmen sinking someone else's boat for a change--quel coup.

Well, the french EOD team did try to surrender the vessel to the germans first, but they couldn't find the title to the ship. I'm amazed they got the colours on the wires right. "Sacre bleau ! EEz it the red one or the white one?"

Hope Kat has a safe trip...those fishermen can get nasty (as I am sure she well knows)
I do wonder about her sanity..."everyone loves N. D. ????"

As was to be expected, most filthy and foul weather has been hit; we're in the midst of a stinking great mid-winter storm down here .... and you-know-who is in the midst of it out at sea.
............
Just thought you guys might be interested to know the conditions we are in today. 30-40 knot winds, rain, and 2m swell which doesn't sound big but is enough to break over the side occasionally, and, if you look out the front of the bridge, you can see only sky one minute and only sea the next. Those of us feeling slightly iffy are camped out in the bridge listening to Johnny Cash (captain's choice) and downing soda crackers like there's no tomorrow. It's actually not so bad when I can get my mind off it - reading or emailing is better than watching the bow pitch around - but it might be a long day.

Apparently (someone just said) we are rocking through about 90 degrees, meaning we heel over 45 degrees to starboard and then right back over 45 degrees to port. Well, we all knew this would be an adventure, and it's also apparently nothing compared to what they had on the Tasman on the way over from Australia.
Wheeee! :heee:

Kat
..................

[Ed, she'll be right. We did one survey aboard my tiny wee pea-green boat that had us spend ~ 2 hours heading offshore in 3-4 metre seas, and we lost the windscreen wiper 2 seconds into the journey when a wave broke over the bow. She handled that like a dream, both boat and Kat, so I think the soda crackers are just a precautionary measure. The winds have abated, but it's still rather wet, onland that is]

Give her our best when she next writes, Doc...mal de mer is no fun ! :mrgreen:
greg

Too weird, I've just finished watching a video on the original "Rainbow Warrior" and her transformation into a reef!

J

This just in
"unusual, uncalled for, and unexpected" (I don't know about the uncalled for...)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1119513.htm

No, it wasn't Kat that was hurt.

[Ed, one more: http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2925757a10,00.html]

"Orange roughy stocks were sustainable"


Since when can a fish that lives at depth until the ripe old age of 150, not breeding until 30 or 40 years old with low fecundity be part of a sustainable fishery???????????????? :shock:



J

Wow!!! What an adventure!!! Best wishes Kat!!!!

Carol

They play on the general publics knowledge of fish...that being that all fish are like salmon or cod, breeding easily and all over the place...sad.

Note to the obviously Greenpeace affiliated guy pictured in the story from the second link.... its called shampoo.....

“Don’t do drugs, because if you do drugs, you’re a hippie, and hippies suck.”
- Eric Cartman (Trey Parker) from South Park

:)

"Orange roughy stocks were sustainable"


Since when can a fish that lives at depth until the ripe old age of 150, not breeding until 30 or 40 years old with low fecundity be part of a sustainable fishery???????????????? :shock:



J

The fisheries "management" argument goes like this: it takes 3-4 years fishing to reduce orange roughy stocks on a seamount to 10- 20% of the original stock, then the vessels move on to target the next seamount(s). As there are over 500 seamounts that have been located to date within the NZ fishing zone, this will allow 100-120 years recovery period before the seamount is fished again....simple eh?

Clear as mud M, if there was a single fishing boat out there, and New Zealand 'seamounts' were true oceanographic features rising in excess of 1000 metres from the seabed (and not breaking the sea surface) - not the 100m as defined by NZ MFish (instead of being hills and knolls, most of our seamounts would be pimples, on internationally recognised scales that is).

All rather bizarre.

Of course you'd have to sample/fish the 'seamounts' in a haphazard manner to enable stocks to replenish (lateral migration; if in fact they do this, because we really don't know a lot about their biology/migratory behavior); serial depletion along 'seamount' chains serves only to wipe a fishery out, from the coast to the distal-most part of earth. Also, I don't really think those lovely little benign trawlers sit above one of these features for 3-4 years, smashing, smashing, pummeling, crashing and smashing (did I say smashing?) the seabed fauna (that is intuitively linked via some coupling to benthopelagic roughy stocks) with a declining CPUE.

I don't know what we're all worried about. :heee:

.
All rather bizarre.



I don't know what we're all worried about. :heee:

Dang it Dr O - those fishing people think its a really good conservation strategy and you go spoiling it by adding some facts. (Incidentally, some of those 'hills' are artifacts on the echo sounder caused by the vessel rolling as it undergoes a 180 degree turn to survey the next section - thats why they're all in a regular pattern) :bugout:

Lordy Lordy Lordy Be
Neil must have been blasting on the stereo last night when this one was sent.
..............

I got a squid I got a squid I got a squid I got a squid

.. guess what?! ...

Yep. We put the net in (ring net, Roger's is good but mashes stuff a bit) at about 2.5 knots at dawn this morning, and got the usual - big orange-eyed polychaete, some salps, some red mysids... and a CRANCHIID!! It's about 10 mm ML, eyes on stalks, arms very short (almost not discernible) and tentacles very long, teeny-tiny round fins - similar to the one on the poster but not quite the same, I think - the eyes are teardrop-shaped, not round. I haven't looked at it under the scope yet. But it's beautiful. :)

Will put the net in again at dusk this evening, weather permitting - it's full moon tonight so I think things might be a little deeper than they otherwise would be.
...................
Kat's in squid heaven right now. Sigh. Why am I here pushing paper?

Keep the home fires burning Dr. SOS !
give our best to the brave lady !
and hey, WK, have you gone right wing on us with Tony? :D

Great news! Thanks for pushing the paper to us, Steve-o! :)

Here she goes again.........
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Hi, gang!
After a week at sea (which you can read about on the blog), with some delays due to rough weather, we are finally getting near where we want to be. And last night the weather gods were so kind as to calm the raging seas long enough for me to drop a net in, at long last! Because there was still a little wind and swell, we gave it a go with a net designed to catch debris rather than animals - the mesh is coarser (about 1.5 mm) and a bit rougher, and a it's a sturdier construction in general - didn't want to risk blowing out the good net and losing the catcher-bucket on the first go! So we did two 10-minute tows, and pulled in a few krill, some brilliant blue copepods, a few startling deep-water fish (up to about 4 cm), a bluebottle jelly, a couple of isopods, some polychaetes and a few mangled salps, but no squid. There were a few mangled gelatinous masses in the folds of the net, but the abrasive mesh made them pretty well unidentifiable. This morning, though I got up to try again at dawn, this time with the magic fine-mesh ring net. Just as the sky was beginning to lighten in the east, we put it over the side, crossed our fingers, pulled it in, and... bingo! There, swimming around at the top of the sample (put into an acrylic cylinder for easier viewing) was a beautiful, tiny, perfect cranchiid squid! Its mantle is about 10 mm long, its eyes are out on stalks, and even now (that it has sadly perished), it is almost entirely transparent except for the digestive gland and eyes. When it calms down a bit (the weather was too good to last) I'll put it under the scope and do some sucker- and photophore-counting, and see whether I can give it a more definitive name. In the meantime, hopefully conditions will allow a few more tows at dusk this evening (that's one benefit of it getting dark by 5.30).
I'll keep you posted! I hope to have some pictures soon to send through to Steve, so he can post those as well. Also, if he tells you I'm green around the gills, it's all lies - I would like to state for the record that I have not yarfed ONCE, and that's more than I can say for some of the other crew. Who's a salty dog NOW, aharr?!
............

There's more about to happen, but I'll post no details. Can't afford to give anything away online ... you know ... just in case there are spies out there. :wink:

.... and here are a couple of pics of the baby squid in question (remember, difficult to photograph such small things on a moving (rolling) ship). These pics are taken by and courtesy of Roger Grace.

I'll not try an identification until I have the specimen before me; tricky things these cranchiids!

http://www.tonmo.com/phpBB/download.php?id=2549

http://www.tonmo.com/phpBB/download.php?id=2548

awwwwwwww cute!


BTW are you gonna make it down south for the NZMSS conference and symposium this year??? Should be interesting we got Dr Sylvia Earle speaking!!!!!


J

Awesome. Truly awesome. 8)

BTW are you gonna make it down south for the NZMSS conference and symposium this year??? Should be interesting we got Dr Sylvia Earle speaking!!!!!


Afraid not Jean, have 3 public speaking engagements here in Auckland & Tauranga over the same time period. It's feast or famine; afterwards things will wind down for a few weeks (until July).

That's too bad.............have fun speaking in Auck & Tauranga tho :twisted:

J

There's more ....
......

This morning's tows were fruitful! Funny, as it gets light, different animals dominate the tows, even if they only differ by 15 mins. The first one was mostly krill, although we got two largish portuguese man o'war (shudder), then came the really beautiful one (tell you about it in a minute) - again, mostly krill but with some polychaetes and other stuff - and then one with much less krill but about 30 pteropods (two kinds, brown ones (which is most of them) and some delicate pink ones).

But the middle tow... I emptied it into the acrylic cylinder and peered into it, disappointed not to see any squid at the top, and then I noticed a euphausiid dragging a little squid around (the [Ed] Custard!) - only about 5mm, I thought it was another cranchiid at first (like the one on the poster) but now that i look at it it might be an onychoteuthid. Anyway, more exciting was that I saw a little tiny orange one that looked like an octopus, so I decided in the interest of time to save the whole sample - and there were six of them!! Argonauta sp., I'm pretty sure, in perfect condition and all under 2 mm ML. You excited yet? :) I also saved some fish from the sample, and good specimens of the other interesting bugs - a few of what we think are Phronima, a couple polychaetes and some other stuff. I've also got the leftover sorted-through krill.

Roger discovered that he can take pics through the scope with his digital camera, so hopefully I can send you a better one of Leachia, and a few from today.

Getting better and better!!!

:D
..............

:D

http://www.greenpeace.org/international_en/news/details?item_id=493947

(+ VIDEO!!)

Remember last week when Greenpeace activists were "roughed up" by members of the Orange Roughy Management Company (ORMC) at a peaceful protest in Nelson, New Zealand? Their Chief Executive last week even denied that any of its members operated in International waters. Well it seems that someone was throwing us a bit of a red herring, because yesterday the Rainbow Warrior located three bottom trawlers on the high seas. One of them had connections to our old friends at the ORMC ...


The Rainbow Warrior located the Amaltal Voyager, Westbay, and Corsair around 350 miles off the coast of New Zealand on the Northwest Challenger Plateau. The plot thickens: it turns out that the Amaltal Fishing Company is a shareholder of the Orange Roughy Management Company (ORMC).

Despite their previous bravado, the bottom trawling industry doesn't seem to want to communicate. The occupants of the three ships haven't responded to our contact via radio - except occasionally with, shall we say, "impolite" hand gestures.

While our intrepid Greenpeace activists documented the fishing activities on the high seas in the face of an unexpectedly large swell and a little subsequent seasickness, a different type of Greenpeace delegation began talks at the UN to secure a moratorium on high seas bottom trawling. New Zealand will now be in the hot seat since all of the vessels revealed by the Rainbow Warrior were registered in New Zealand.


"The New Zealand Government has yet to say whether it will support or oppose a moratorium but they must be feeling the heat in New York at the moment," said Carmen Gravatt, Greenpeace New Zealand campaigner, from aboard the Rainbow Warrior.

Yesterday at a UN press conference delegates were treated to a rare broadcast from on board the Rainbow Warrior giving them a first hand look at the activists at work. Many scientists also made presentations at the conference - in fact over a thousand of them are supporting the call for a moratorium on bottom trawling because of the absolute devastation caused by this fishing technique. Many species have not even been described or discovered before they are fished out, while ancient corals and sponges are decimated, with little chance of recovery.

"There are only a small number of nations responsible for this environmental devastation," said Karen Sack, Greenpeace International Oceans Policy Advisor, at the UN. "While they reap rich rewards, the biodiversity of the least protected area of this planet is being wiped out. That is why the United Nations must impose an immediate moratorium on bottom trawling."

:popcorn:

Awesome video!! Gotta love those choppy NZ waters... and did I see Kat there leaning over the side? :rainbow: :yuck:

:kiwiflag:

There's a tremendous amount happening at sea right now, and Kat has been in the thick of it for an absolute eternity. Updates can be found on the Greenpeace website. Unfortunately the plankton-net tows haven't captured any larval squid in recent nights, but she's been collecting all sorts of other weird and wonderful items.

Squid are very patchy out there in the oceans of late, more so than ever this past year. It really has been quite frustrating. Doesn't look like there'll be good recruitment into squid stocks this year. We do allude to a cause in the egg mass paper.

The UN is supposed to makes its decision today, whether it calls for a moratorium on bottom trawling in international waters. Cross fingers!

... you can see Kat online (talking away, looking very serious, and she has every right to) by clicking the link on the following page

http://www.greenpeace.org/news/details?item_id=497076

Also (news alert):
"They already had the opinion of thousands of scientists and a coalition of environment and wildlife groups. Then we gave them a petition signed by over 6000 cyberactivists. If that wasn't enough, the Rainbow Warrior documented actual hard evidence of the destruction of protected species in the Tasman Sea and beamed it all the way to New York. But still, the UN has this week failed to seize a crucial opportunity to halt high-seas bottom trawling.


"They had a real opportunity to act and they failed," said Karen Sack of Greenpeace. "We need immediate action to save the deep sea from being bulldozed by fishing vessels from a handful of countries."

Several delegations blocked moves to prohibit high seas bottom trawling - the world's most destructive fishing practice - under pressure from fisheries ministries in their countries. Iceland and Japan were particularly vocal in opposition. The measure was replaced with a weak recommendation that nations "consider" an interim prohibition.

These discussions were all taking place at this week's UN meeting in New York which had the power to recommend an immediate halt on bottom trawling to the UN General Assembly. Greenpeace members were out in force distributing footage from the Rainbow Warrior showing the devastating effects of bottom trawling and ensuring that the opinions of our cyberactivists were visible even in the corridors.

It's not all bad though - governments from virtually every region of the world expressed support for a prohibition on bottom trawling. Particularly strong calls for action to halt bottom trawling were made by Norway, Thailand, Costa Rica, the Republic of Palau, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Of course, this is not the last you've heard on bottom trawling, we will be continuing our defence of the millions of rare, protected and undiscovered species in the deep sea, so stay tuned ..."
.....
It is not over yet!

You go Kat! :notworth:

Well, the Rainbow Warrior berths in Wellington today. We'll probably have :twisted: back online in a few days, although I expect it to take several days before her land-legs return. The weather has turned to custard down here, so the return right now is quite timely.

I'll have to clean the office up ... and of course, turn down Neil :?

Way to go Kat ! Nice to see someone so passionate about their ideals...very cool.

I'll have to clean the office up ... and of course, turn down Neil :?

What is this 'clean the office', what is this 'turn down Neil'?
I think I need to have a little lie down. I mean Kat can use a shovel and a GPS, so, she can find her desk. I don't see what you're worried about. :wink:

Am going to be set an (another) awful task for this...

Obviously you must mean Finn, the only true Neil. :P

We were hoping Kat could use the shovel on Neil D ! Oh well...to each his own... :D

Found this:--
www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2945658a7693,00.html
Unfortunately neither Kat nor the Fish looks very happy - (I like good news!)

My-Oh-My. Those are extreme words for Dr Don Robertson to use (NIWA); a very influential man; and very good to see. Congratulations Don!

One needn't worry about the nonsense Owen spouts; it's the sort of crap one has come to expect from him. There's another letter online where he invites members of TVNZ off to sea 'to experience the modern-day fishing industry working in harmony with nature and all of its forces', in response to an earlier telly piece I did. I must dig it out and repost here.

http://www.tonmo.com/phpBB/download.php?id=776

http://www.tonmo.com/phpBB/download.php?id=777

Hi, gang!! :arr:

The horrible rumors are true - I am back in the office. And I would like to state, for the record, contrary to certain middle-men who took liberties with my posts in my absence, that a certain carpet-chested person was not mentioned (nor inflicted upon anyone's ears) once during the entire blissful three-and-a-half weeks on board! Otherwise there would have been a lot more :yuck: .

So... the trip was fabulous. I can post the email updates I sent to people every couple days, if anyone wants to slog through them. I also dropped off my films for developing today, so hopefully there will be some hard evidence soon...

Small things like beverages staying upright on their own, and showers that don't move, and hallways that are wider than 24", are still pretty amazing. And don't even get me started on crossing the street... the cast should be off in about 6 weeks... ;)

Welcome back Kat!

J

So... the trip was fabulous. I can post the email updates I sent to people every couple days, if anyone wants to slog through them.

If you found it worth writing, it's probably worth reading. I find it difficult to believe that "slog" is an appropriate verb, :twisted:. Please share everything, or I'll be forced to bug you incessantly.

(I've been suffering horribly from withdrawal and nightmares of nautical disasters, you know. :()