Jul 24th, 2011 at 4:00PM:
Though everyone would agree that ice is king in Antarctica, the most powerful of natural elements, when it comes to the animal world the Leopard seal – 1,000 pounds of lightning fast muscle armed with a mouthful of sharp incisors – is the top of the food chain. While confident due to their size and position, they have been known to drag the occasional diver to the bottom of the ocean ...Click on a label to read posts from that part of the world.
bowermastersadventures posts
Chasing leopard seals in Antarctica
Jul 24th, 2011 at 4:00PM:
Though everyone would agree that ice is king in Antarctica, the most powerful of natural elements, when it comes to the animal world the Leopard seal – 1,000 pounds of lightning fast muscle armed with a mouthful of sharp incisors – is the top of the food chain. While confident due to their size and position, they have been known to drag the occasional diver to the bottom of the ocean ...Jellyfish return to the nation's coasts
Jun 28th, 2011 at 1:00PM: They're back!
And we're not talking hurricanes, though that season is officially underway.
And, no, this is not about sharks, since Discovery's dubious Shark Week doesn't start until the end of July.
No, it's time for the increasingly unpopular annual return of swarms of jellyfish to beaches around the world. Last year they made much of the western Mediterranean unswimmable. A couple of ...Maldives meltdown
Jun 26th, 2011 at 1:00PM: As political unrest swept through the Muslim nations of North Africa, even the remote island-nation of the Maldives was caught up in its own Arab Spring in the form of political protest and street clashes.
One major difference: Efforts in the Maldives were focused on pushing out a young, democratically elected president and replacing him with an aging despot.
President Mohammed Nasheed, 44, ...Rescue crews rush to aid naked Irish solo adventurer
Jun 25th, 2011 at 10:00AM: The headline was too horrid on so many fronts to pass up.
It turns out 29-year-old Irishman Keith Whelan, attempting to become the first of his nation to row solo across the Indian Ocean – despite as far as I can glean having little rowing experience, just naked ambition and a Twitter account – had been slapped by a big wave 128 miles off the coast of Australia, cracked his head on ...Sushi Wars
Jun 24th, 2011 at 1:00PM: The question arises with more and more frequency these days: To sushi or not to sushi?
There is a growing contingent of conscientious mariners and travelers out there who refuse to eat all seafood, arguing that sea life has been so injudiciously hammered in the past five decades that if it's going to survive we need to give it a true break. That path, of course, puts at risk the livelihoods of ...Bonnaroo goes green
Jun 23rd, 2011 at 3:00PM: It's possible that some of the biggest applause heard at last weekend's Bonnaroo extravaganza was not for Lil' Wayne or Mumford and Sons, Eminem or Dr. John, but for the phalanx of silver tankers that arrived once or twice a day slopping over with cool, fresh water to resupply the fest's communal fountain/shower.
Each time a line of the half-dozen shiny trucks entered through the campgrounds, ...Exploring Richard Branson's Virgin Oceanic
May 30th, 2011 at 3:00PM: The first time I met Richard Branson we were in the kitchen of a small bed and breakfast in the high-Arctic Inuit village of Clyde River. Taller and blonder than I expected, he was dressed in full cold-weather gear and had just flown in by private plane to join a dogsled expedition. Slightly bemused, he was struggling to figure out how to microwave a cup of tea.
I think of that scene whenever ...
Habits and a new path towards sustainable fishing
May 29th, 2011 at 5:00PM: Old habits die hard, especially when it comes to fishermen and their daily catch. With many species of fish around the globe hammered by overfishing, laws are being written and enforced to protect them, which sometimes means convincing indigenous fishermen to alter centuries-old traditions.
But changing fishing patterns that go back multiple generations can be a hard sell when it is the legends ...The Quileute tribe's quandry
May 28th, 2011 at 10:00AM: Every time it floods in New Orleans or a hurricane wipes out a mobile home park along the coast of Florida similar questions are asked: Why do people continue to put themselves in harm's way by living in – and often rebuilding in -- places clearly threatened by natural disaster?
A Native American community in the northwest corner of the country, popularized in the hit book and movie ...Fishing in the French Polynesian waters
May 27th, 2011 at 10:00AM: Fakarava Atoll, the Tuamotus, French Polynesia – Maru's 16-foot, plywood fishing boat, steered by one metal rod coming straight out of the floorboards in his left hand and accelerated by another rod held tightly in his right hand, hugs the eastern edge of Passe Garuae. One of only two passes accessing the atoll's thirty-six-by-twenty-one mile lagoon, twice day big water rushes either in or ...The coral reefs of Bora Bora
May 26th, 2011 at 6:00PM:
Bora Bora, Society Islands, French Polynesia – I dove in the beautiful lagoon that surrounds the tall island to have a first hand look at how the coral reef is doing in this South Pacific resort island. The report is not good.
Descending to ninety feet it was immediately clear that the reef has been hammered in the past few years. I've come here every year for the past decade and have ...Sea Shepherd boat "Steve Irwin" heads to Somalian pirate waters
May 19th, 2011 at 1:00PM: In a not-too-surprising move last week the Sea Shepherd took its ship the "Steve Irwin" – proudly waving its skull-and-crossbones pirate flag – straight into the heart of real pirate country.
While the Shepherd's are regarded among conservation groups as being rebels and outsiders, willing to go to nearly any lengths to protect whales, dolphins, baby seals, tuna and more, happy to ...A conversation with the founder of Swim to Empower
Apr 21st, 2011 at 2:00PM:
Named for the Greek for "freedom," Eleuthera is 110 miles long and just a mile at its widest. To the east is the occasionally wild Atlantic, to the west a shallow, almost-always-calm Caribbean Sea ... waters on both sides that literally beg to be swum.
Unless, of course, you don't know how to swim. Which is the case for 80 percent of the islanders. Taught to be scared of the ocean, even a ...The spread of Somalian pirates
Apr 20th, 2011 at 2:00PM: Should we be concerned by suggestions that terrorists are taking clues from the Somali pirates and considering hijacking ships across the Indian Ocean for reasons other than ransom?
Absolutely.
There is increasing evidence of links in Somalia between the mafia-like organizations that run most of the pirating and the Somali-based terrorist group Al-Shabaab, which controls most of southern and ...The future of Japanese fishing
Apr 19th, 2011 at 2:00PM: Given the hammering Japan's fishing towns took thanks to the earthquake/tsunami and the continued leaking of Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant it is legitimate to question the future of fish in the region.
Just like the fishermen in the Gulf after the BP spill, seafood providers across Japan are concerned about an inevitable public relations fall out even if its fish stays available and safe, ...The effect of Japan's tsunami on whaling
Apr 17th, 2011 at 4:00PM: In an ironic twist of fate, Japan's recent tsunami may have accomplished something conservationists have been fervently attempting for years: Driving a final nail into its pro-active whaling communities.
The first outsiders only recently reached the small town of Ayukawahama, which was crushed by thirty-foot waves. So was the headquarters of the biggest business in town, Ayukawa Whaling, one of ...Eleuthera Island, Bahamas - "Fishing is a Good Life Here"
Mar 29th, 2011 at 10:00AM:
French Leave, Eleuthera -- Under a cloud-studded sunrise at the end of the two-and-a-half-mile long beach I watch a 14-foot plywood boat back into the morning surf. A trio of Bahamian men readies it for a day of spearfishing along the near-reef that parallels the 110-mile long island. One will drive; another will watch and stack fish. The third – a lithe, fair-skinned black man with ...Southern ocean police report
Mar 27th, 2011 at 1:00PM: As Sea Shepherd predicted, when two of its boats made port in Hobart, Tasmania, over the weekend – on the heels of a just-completed and successful campaign against Japanese whalers – Australian police greeted them.
Armed with search warrants both the "Bob Barker" and "Steve Irwin" were scoured by the police with Sea Shepherd boss Paul Watson observing. No charges were made, nothing ...Post-Gulf Spill: The more things change, the more slippery they get
Mar 26th, 2011 at 1:00PM: A trio of news stories out of the Gulf remind that the more things change in the region -- whether natural disaster (hurricanes), manmade screw up (oil rig explosions) or government intervention (drilling bans) -- the more they stay the same.
Within weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank nearly one year ago the Obama Administration banned all new deepwater drilling. The ban ...It's time to end Indian Ocean "Adventures"
Mar 24th, 2011 at 1:00PM: With news that seven Danish sailors, including three children aged 12 to 16, had been captured by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean on Thursday, February, 24, it's time to reevaluate the legacy of four Americans shot to death by pirates in those same waters off eastern Africa just two days before the Danes issued their distress call.
In the obituaries of the four Americans killed aboard their ...
