But at the height of the austral summer season — December-February — more people congregate in the protected harbor here at the former ‘Camp A’ of the British Antarctic Survey than anywhere else for many thousands of miles, if temporarily. (The next most populated place in Antarctica would be the American base at McMurdo, home to 1,200 scientists and support crew during the summer months, but located on the opposite side of the continent.)

Whale Tail

The former refuge hut has been turned into a mini-museum and gift shop, demanding a mostly volunteer staff to run it and keep the small island relatively tidy (it is surrounded by breeding Gentoo penguins, everywhere …) for the tourist boats that arrive, often twice a day.

When we go ashore at Goudier Island we find an all-women staff of four plus a visiting guide from one of the tourist ships who’s spending ten days here helping out. The two men are here temporarily, installing video cameras around the hut so the penguin colonies can be monitored remotely during the eight months no humans live here.

I had a slightly selfish interest for pulling into Lockroy; a pair of kayaks I’d asked to be dropped off by the National Geographic Explorer had been stashed alongside the residents’ Quonset hut a few weeks ago. We find them, bright red and yellow polyeurethane wrapped in plastic badly deteriorated by the ozone-free sun that shines brightly here during the summer thanks to the still-present hole in the atmosphere that grows over the deep, deep south this time of year.

The even-more-temporary residents of Lockroy are those that arrive by private sailboat, a growing phenomenon, seeking well-known shelter from Antarctica’s fiercest winds. Twenty years ago, it would be rare to see a sailboat here, maybe one or two during a complete summer season. Today there are almost always five or six boats at anchor in this bay alone.

Skip Novak, the owner of the Pelagic Australis that I’ve chartered, has been coming to the Peninsula by small boat since 1988 and is one of a the charter members in a very small (3 or 4?) club of pioneers. He is on board with us and regales us nightly with stories of those early days when they used to tap into the fuel deposits left behind at abandoned science bases, debauched nights in Ushuaia’s lone strip club (the Tropicana, still there) at trip’s end and the always odd and colorful characters who initially came here in small boats against the advice of virtually everyone.

We anchor at Lockroy for three nights, filming in the iceberg-studded bays nearby, diving under icebergs and photographing the whalebones left on the sea floor by rapacious oil barons of a century ago. During those days a half-dozen sailboats anchor nearby:

An Italian couple on their private boat pull in, crewed by a staff of six sailors. The report from its skipper, who used to work for Skip, is that they are already bored by the penguins and ice and will most likely cut an anticipated 30 day trip short by two weeks. A Brit in a plastic sailboat carrying four friends comes and goes from the anchorage on day trips. Daily they return with a slightly fearful look in their eye and worried tone in their details; their boat is certainly not cut out for bashing through ice and this season there is a lot of still-frozen sea ice out there in the passes.

Another small plastic boat, the Paradise, operates out of Ushuaia and specializes in bringing (mostly French) climbers to the Peninsula. In my 20 years coming to this part of the world, on top of the general tourist boom the biggest change has been that the adventuring crowd has finally found ways of getting here. The result is lots of skiers and climbers are chartering small boats and spending their days exploring new peaks and routes. While most of the biggest mountains along the Peninsula have been previously climbed (the tallest is Mt. Francais, at nearly 9,256 feet) there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of smaller ones no one has ever stood atop or ski traversed.

But the number of sailboats we see is down from a few years ago; then we pulled into Lockroy and there were ten boats. Similarly general tourist visits are down; four years ago Lockroy had a record 18,000 visitors by cruise boats, this year they anticipate 13,000. The record high for visitors to the Peninsula was more than 35,000 in 2008; this year it will be just over 20,000. Global economic woes are an explanation for the drop, as is the elimination of most of the giant cruise boat visits thanks to a change in law ruling out the heavy fuels they use from operating along the Peninsula.

One boat we’re keeping our eyes out for left Ushuaia a couple days before we did, stacked with nine British special forces soldiers down here for “drills.” We’d run into a similar group a few years ago — similarly 8 men and 1 woman — and they’d welcomed us into various anchorages along the Peninsula with bagpipes, proper British tea and good Scotch.

More traditionally for Antarctica we meet up with a handful of boats being run by second-generation sailors, who have inherited a passion for the place by essentially growing up here … both a job and lineage no one could have imagined just fifty years ago when the international treaty that governs the continent was written. The word “tourism” is never mentioned in that original agreement.

The reality is that no quarter hour looks alike. Or can be predicted, no matter how many months or years you’ve spent here.

We spent the night in a small, protected bay about 400 miles down the coastline of the Antarctic Peninsula. The tricky thing about sailing a small yacht here (the aluminum-hulled Pelagic Australis is 74 feet) is that there are very few truly protected anchorages; it reminds me often of the coast of Maine, with its thousands of small islands, where finding safe haven is often similarly dodgy.  Here the combination of rapidly changing winds and weather mean that even when you’ve securely tied off bow and stern to rocks with a pair of heavy metal lines at each end, there is no certainty that you’ll really be safe through the night.

The biggest threat, of course, is ice. A big wind comes up, a seemingly protected bay can fill with icebergs big and small, and any sailboat can be locked in within an hour, unable to move until the ice blows out again. Which might be an hour, or days.

(While most of the private boats that sail to Antarctica are aluminum or steel-hulled, as it becomes an increasingly popular destination for adventurous yachties, the greater number of plastic, even the occasional fiberglass boat, show up here, more greatly threatened by sharp-edged ice.)

This morning we are lucky; there’s no ice in the bay when we awake. We are even luckier to spend the entire day just half a mile from where we slept, hiking, sailing and filming the rare beauty of Antarctica as it changes, seemingly by the minute.

Steel gray skies turn bright blue. High white clouds skid across the horizon, then disappear. Brash ice — small bits of broken-up sea ice — turn the ocean surface into what resembles a giant frozen margarita.  One by one a handful of icebergs the size of small houses float into the bay, pause, circle, then continue on, pushed slowly to the north by winds and current.

From up high looking down, whether perched on the spreader 30 feet above the Pelagic’s deck, or standing atop one of the 100 foot tall glaciers rimming the shallow U-shaped Skontorp Cove — named for Edvard Skontorp, described as an “outstanding” Norwegian whale gunner — the scene is otherworldly: Ice moving in and out, winds picking up then calming, high clouds casting shadows on the sunlit, black Southern Ocean.

Since the rain that haunted us the first few days of this exploration have stopped, on a day like this it’s easy to be reminded of how privileged we are to see this remote corner of the planet. Its also a good reminder of just how relevant the them of change — the subject of the film we’re shooting here, Wild Antarctica 3D — is to this place. Ice comes and goes, sea and air temperatures change, species are threatened, and every day the changing weather is the primary topic of conversation.

Mid-afternoon I jump in a Zodiac with Graham Charles, my Kiwi friend who knows this coastline as well as anyone, and we take a long, slow ride along the glacier’s edge.

We purposely stay a safe distance away from the towering ice. Those who know Antarctic best are the ones who respect its threats most, including its 29-degree waters but particularly its ice. Only the foolhardy pull cowboy acts here — like lingering too close to glacier walls or attempting to thread through tempting arches carved in icebergs — given the harsh penalty to be paid if you misjudge.

It is a warmish day, just above freezing, and the sun has been heating up the exterior of the glacier all day, making it more vulnerable to calving. When big chunks fall off it into the sea it’s like bags of cement being tossed in, sending waves and spray rolling. When a section of wall collapses it’s like a mini-tsunami.

Just as we pass a particularly sculptured wall, sure enough, a 30-foot wide section atop the glacier wall gives out a few warning groans and then drops into the ocean. It slides at first, then seems to explode. Watching over our shoulders, the engine on full throttle, six-foot waves chase us but do not catch up. Skidding the boat onto smooth waters we put it in neutral and watch as Antarctica continues to change all around us.

Today is one of those days down here that you wish you could be sitting by some kind of warm fire, whether in the comfort of your living room or a preferably a bonfire. At eight this morning it is thirty-four degrees and raining, conditions which began yesterday and promise to be with us for at least two more. Thanks to satellite imagery we are able to track the weather up to five days in advance, more or less; at the very least we know when high and low pressure systems are on the way and from what direction to expect the winds.

Wet Penguins

Loading into a hypalon Zodiac — Graham Charles, an old friend of mine and great Kiwi explorer, Skip Novak, a longtime sail racer and owner of the “Pelagic Australis” that sailed us to Antarctica and myself — round the southwestern edge of Enterprise Island to have a look at the art show of grounded icebergs that gather in the relatively shallow waters each summer season.

We are not disappointed. Twenty and thirty foot tall icebergs litter the alley. One has a pair of small arches carved through it by wind and waves. Another has a sheer wall, like smooth granite, rising straight out of the cold sea. Another is ridged by undulations carved into its underside over many years before it rolled onto its side.

Graham, who has kayaked the length of the Peninsula and works every season as an expedition leader aboard one of the 30+ tourist ships that come south each season, is almost apologetic for the rain and gray. “It’s so unusual these days to see so many back to back days without sun. We’ve gotten spoiled by weeks recently where there’s been nothing but blue sky and glassy seas.”

Skip, who first sailed to Antarctica in the early 1980s and is one of a small handful of charter boat captains whose boats have returned each season since, agrees. “But even when you say that, I think back to conditions twenty years ago when we had far more wind. And back then, every morning you’d wake up to snow on the boat, which we almost never see now. It’s simply too warm to snow.”

Perhaps the most beautiful part of Antarctica, even on a gray, misty day, is just how much it changes from year to year. I’ve been to this corner of Enterprise more than a dozen times and the ice that surrounds it changes every 15 minutes. Sometimes by the light glancing off it or, like today, the mist that envelops it, or the wind and waves moving it up and down, from side to side, threatening to flip it onto its side.

Without question the biggest change to come to the Peninsula in my 20 years of experience down here is the weather. Today during the austral summer, November to February, each year is warmer and wetter. It’s not just my imagination: Data collected at the various science bases along this stretch of the continent detail that air and sea temperatures have risen dramatically in the past 40 years. During the summer, average temps have risen up 5 to 10 degrees F; year round, the average temps along the Peninsula, including during its long, cold, dark winters, have raised by up to 18 degrees.

The warmer conditions are relevant to us because they deliver more precipitation, i.e. rain. Our hope is that this will be a summer filled with many clear days, in large part because we’re trying to capture Antarctica in 3D … and we don’t want the audience to come away thinking the place is only gray, misty and wet.

Conditions have been making filming tricky during these early days of our exploration. A drop of snow or salty sea spray on the 18” mirror or one of two camera lenses on the Epic 3D rig means lots of stopping and starting, stopping and starting. The result is long days and lots of waiting.

But the delays are worth it. The beauty down here is that when the sun does shine it’s like watching a Disney film on hallucinogens, surrounded everywhere you look by ice in its thousands of forms.

From 1904 to 1931 this bay was home to one of the Southern Ocean’s boomtowns. As many as 15 big processing boats and another 35 “catcher” boats worked this beach at one time, most from Norway and the U.K.

With a sun rare for this island south of the South Shetlands lighting up the beach we moved up and down it not with giant tools for skinning whales but giant cameras for documenting the falling down boomtown. Rusting tanks that once held whale oil, collapsed dormitories that once housed men and wooden whaleboats buried up to their gunnels by blown sand are the subject. It is rare today that a whale ventures into the caldera, but just before entering through Neptune’s Bellows a trio of humpbacks had blown in the near-distance.

One thing we know for certain is that the sun won’t last. My hope is to make a landing the next day on the exterior of the island, at a beach known as Baily Head. Though it is just around the corner from the interior of the caldera, and we could hike to it in two hours, the preference would be to land by Zodiac on its steep beach.

How steep? It typically shuts out three of four attempts … and those are in big robust, hard-bottomed Zodiacs, not the more pliable nine-footer we will use.

Dump the Zodiac as we landed here, and there goes the film, on Day 2.

It’s the confidence of my Kiwi compatriot Graham Charles, who knows the coastline of the Peninsula as well as anyone, that is our ace in the hole. Sent to scout the beach just after 7 a.m. he returned with a thumbs up — or maybe it was a shrug of the shoulders, it’s hard to tell when we’re all dressed in six layers — but his message was that right now, it was calm enough to land. The worst case was that we could land by shore and have to hike ourselves and gear to the other side to get off the island.

One, then two and three runs were made with success and during the next two hours as we assembled the 3D camera in a growing wind on the cusp of the beach, observed by several thousand chinstrap penguins, the seas rose quickly and were soon crashing onto the shore. If we’d arrived an hour later, we’d have never been able to land.

The reason to make the effort to reach Baily Head are those thousands of chinstraps that trudge up and down in a continuous file ten to twenty abreast from high in the amphitheater behind to plunge into the cold Southern Ocean for a day of feeding. They line up on the beach, assess the surf, count the sets and then — often hesitantly, sometimes with a stutter step — dive or are swept in.

Landing for them can be even trickier; from a distance you can see them coming — 40 to 100 at a time, porpoising out of the sea, headed for the beach — and then surfing, or being slammed, onto the black sand.

Leaning into the sensitive camera to keep it upright, wrapping it in space blankets and plastic sheeting to protect it from the wet, we watch the scene for several hours in the admittedly freezing wet and cold — 32 degrees with a wet blowing wind and cold spray off the ocean.

The hike with gear to the top of the 500-foot ridge in the now-grassy and muddy bowl that is home to nearly 200,000 birds was easier than we expected and after shooting atop the beautiful ridge for several more hours, by five p.m. we were clambering down the backside towards a small black sand beach.

As we hiked down, a single file line of dutiful penguins, their bellies stuffed with fish and krill, headed back to their nests, most now featuring two fuzzy gray chicks.

Everyone from Sir Francis Drake, for whom the windy passage is named, to Captain Bligh, who fought into the winds for 100 days before giving in, turning around and sailing to Tahiti the long way, no one in their right mind has looked forward to these seas.

Pelagic / Chilean Base

I’ve crossed the Drake a couple dozen times now and include myself on the long list of those who live with a mild and constant dread of the place. Whether leaving from the southern Chilean ports of Punta Arenas or Puerto Williams, or Ushuaia in Argentina — from which most of the 30-odd tourist ships that carry visitors to the Antarctic Peninsula each austral summer leave from — in the days leading up to each of the crossings my fingers are tightly locked for many days in advance, praying for calm seas.

This time out was no different. We were set to leave aboard the 74-foot “Pelagic Australis” from a dock lined with expedition yachts on January 2 and the five-day outlook was for incredibly light winds and … calm seas. If that luck held, it looked like we’d make what we anticipated to be a three-day crossing in good time, with little turbulence.

Unfortunately our luck did not hold. Delayed waiting for an underwater housing for our 3D cameras, which never arrived and as far as I know is still stuck in customs in Buenos Aires, we finally sailed away from Ushuaia at midday on January 4 in 45 mile per hour gusts. Just minutes later they closed the port due to strong winds.

That luck — bad luck — managed to hang in for the next four days, as we were bucked by strong easterly winds pushing us far off our hoped-for course of due south to Deception Island. Instead we were forced to tack far to the east to avoid sailing directly into the wind, taking us slightly out of our way to the eastern edge of the South Shetland Islands. When we finally turned the corner around the Shetlands at King George Island, we had to lower the sails and motor face-on into a pounding wind and sea, making less than four miles an hour.

At 7 a.m. on the 8th we finally sailed into the caldera of Deception Island, wearied by a trip that had taken about 24 hours longer than it should have.

I had chartered the “Pelagic Australis” four years ago for a similar exploration; the crew this time around has some overlap: my friends and expedition partners Sean Farrell and Graham Charles were with me then, as was Skip Novak, who owns the “Pelagic.” But the camera crew has changed, to include 3D experts Ken Corben, Bob Cranston and Johnny Friday.

During the four days of bashing our way across the Drake it was easy to lose focus on why we were headed to the Antarctic Peninsula in the first place. But as a rare sun came out over Whaler’s Bay at Deception Island — lighting up the long, black volcanic sand beach that a century ago was home to one of the most efficient whaling operations the world has ever known — it was easy to put the seasick pills away, crawl out of our bunks and start pulling camera gear out of the holds below.

“Wild Antarctica 3D” is my first entry into the growing genre. The film industry, pushed by coalitions of heavyweight broadcasters and theater owners around the world, are gambling that 3D’s time has finally arrived and are demanding more and more high-level content. For me, being able to bring the Antarctic Peninsula, which I’ve been visiting the past two decades, initially into theaters in museums and science institutions all the better. I can already see penguins and icebergs jumping off the screen and into people’s laps.

Like much of my writing and filmmaking about Antarctica in recent years this film will ultimately be about Antarctica’s ice, specifically how it is changing.

Despite that the southern continent is covered in some places by nearly three miles of ice, along the Peninsula each summer for the past four decades its ice edges have been being degraded thanks to warming air and sea temperatures. Stepping onto the rare, sunshine-filled beach at Deception Island we were reminded that many things change here, and fast.

Indian film director Shekhar Kapur, Photo: Scott Needham/Six Senses

Most of its 800 residents had gathered at the shoreline to greet visitors from a nearby island. While they focused on a first-of-a-kind beach cleanup along the rocky coast, accompanied by a drum band and dancing, I took a small walking tour looking for something the Maldives doesn’t have much of: drinking water.

(A late morning visit to its elementary school provided another interesting glimpse into island life. While most of the students raised their hands and said they knew how to swim, virtually none had ever worn a mask and snorkel, so had no idea of the rich life that surrounded their island home.)

It was quickly evident from the jury-rigged plumbing systems fitted to the exteriors of most of the one-story cement homes that the options for delivering clean water were few. Some homes had barrels for collecting rainwater; others had wells dug into the rocky island terrain. Most of them, they admitted, leaked.
100 Ways to Conserve Water

A recent news story from another Maldivian island group exemplified the problem, reporting that a dozen islands had nearly run out of water completely. Everyone on the island also admitted that if it weren’t for the arrival of the weekly cargo boat, and its bottles of water in plastic, they wouldn’t last a week on what they had in storage.

“I am very upset with the government because we need water,” 42-year-old Jameela Aboobakuru from Gaafaru had explained to the Maldives Bug. “We ran out of water, so we borrowed water from our brother. When he ran out of water we started buying bottled water imported from Male.”

She said her 12-member family was spending $22 a day to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking, on a combined daily income of just $26.

“She said her 12-member family was spending $22 a day to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking, on a combined daily income of just $26.”

That means 85 percent of their income was going to buy fresh water.

The response from the government in Male was that it was installing water makers in a boat that could travel from island to island to help out in such emergencies.

Just two days before my walk around Kunahadhoo, the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu had actually declared a state of emergency due to a severe shortage of fresh water. Officials in that Indian Ocean island group were reporting that some parts of the country had only two days of water left. Its tiny island of Nukulaelae reported it had just 60 liters of drinking water left for 330 people.

Like the Maldives, Tuvalu relies almost exclusively on rainwater collected from the roofs of homes and government buildings to supply a population of 10,000.

“Like the Maldives, Tuvalu relies almost exclusively on rainwater collected from the roofs of homes and government buildings to supply a population of 10,000.”

Speaking at the WaterWoMen conference I was attending on the neighboring island in Laamu Atoll, Dr. Jacqueline Chan, president of Water Charity, which helps communities around the world find clean water and sanitation, reminded us all that the lack of clean water was certainly not a problem faced by the Maldives or Tuvalu alone.

“There are 884 million people in the world without access to safe water,” she said. “That’s the equivalent of the populations of the U.S., Vietnam, Germany, the U.K., Kuwait, Russia, Thailand, France, Italy and Qatar combined. “If all those countries had no water, would we do something? Or just stand by and watch?”

In a lively debate that concluded the day, Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age) was specific in his prediction about the planet’s future when it comes to clean water: “Long before we run out of water, we’ll go to war over it.

“Nature loves cockroaches and algae as much as it does people, and it’s possible only they will survive.”

Photo: Flip Nicklin

Production of “Wild Antarctica 3D” begins when we sail away from Ushuaia, Argentina, on New Year’s Day aboard the 74-foot sailboat “Pelagic Australis.” This new film, slated for museum and theatrical release in spring 2013, will focus on the big changes being experienced along the length of the Peninsula by its wildlife, the ocean and land as warmer seas and air temperature continue to impact its ice.

And in Antarctica, as we’ve seen many times before, it is all about the ice.

The new film is the result of a filmmaking partnership of Giant Screen Films/D3D Cinema, DQBD Films and OCEANS 8 Films. Experienced cold weather videographers and divers Ken Corben and Bob Cranston will do much of the heavy lifting — shooting both above and below sea level (29 degrees F) — as we sail along the Peninsula.

Photo: Fiona Stewart

Our first stop will be Deception Island, then onto the Gerlache Strait and Argentine Islands. Highlights will be a two-day stop at the U.S. science base at Palmer Station and a rendezvous with the “National Geographic Explorer.”

Follow our expedition at jonbowermaster.com, Facebook and Twitter.

I was desperate for some cooling off, having spent the morning wrestling with something I thought I’d mastered long ago: how to breathe.

The lessons had taken place in a pool behind one of the guesthouses at the new Six Senses Laamu resort, where I’d joined a dozen superstar water athletes from around the world—surfers, kite boarders and windsurfers—for a unique conference of ocean doers and thinkers, dubbed WaterWoMen.
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The morning test was actually less about learning how to breathe and more about practicing how not to.

Our supervisor stood waist-deep in the pool, the Indian Ocean serving as backdrop, as we dunked our heads. Stopwatch in hand, German free diver extraordinaire Anna von Boetticher was serious about the task and admitted to being a little daunted by the water talent in the pool with her…even though she is an elite as well: one of the world’s best at holding her breath and going deep.

While we were experimenting in the relative safety of a four-foot-deep, suburban-variety chlorinated pool, Anna has dived to record depths of more than 200 feet with one breath wearing just a pair of oversized swim fins and a mask.

“…Anna has dived to record depths of more than 200 feet with one breath wearing just a pair of oversized swim fins and a mask.”

The goal of the four-day conference was to connect water-doers with water-thinkers and see where their lives and experiences overlapped and what they might learn from each other’s experiences.

While intellectual surfing may sound a bit presumptuous, that’s exactly what went on between sessions in the pool and ocean.

Talks held under the shade of palms took on some of the trickiest questions facing the ocean today: how to protect more of it, how to provide clean drinking water for island nations and how to preserve and regrow damaged fisheries and reefs.
100 Ways to Conserve Water

To my right in the swimming pool, taking deep breaths and then hanging by fingertips to its edge, was one of the best-known big-wave surfers in the world. This was a guy who had on many occasions been washing machined by 60-foot waves, having to fight to get back to the surface for a life-saving breath before being hammered again by thousands of pounds of crashing water.

It made sense that he’d lower his pride to hang out in a swimming pool to pick up some pointers on how to stay under longer. I think we were both surprised that his initial try lasted barely two minutes. Others in the pool were keeping their heads under nearly five minutes (and admittedly nearly passing out). It became quickly clear that thinking about holding your breath under water only made it more difficult.
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My skimpy personal best was just under three minutes; if you’d asked before the lessons began, I would have guessed I’d make it 30 seconds, tops.

“It’s all about the first breath you take,” said Anna, “and then relaxing. You can think about anything you want while you’re underwater except when you are going to get your next breath. Think about your girlfriend, or climbing a mountain, or the book you are reading. Whatever you do, don’t think about how desperate you are for a breath.

“When you are about to give up, don’t. Stay under.

“And when you come up to the surface, don’t gasp and suck in air. Be calm, relaxed.” She explained that when she comes up from record free dive attempts— formally known as competitive apnea—she has to take off her mask, smile and wave with one hand, beauty-contest-style, to show judges she’s made the dive successfully and is not suffering from hypoxia and about to pass out.

“You can think about anything you want while you’re underwater except when you are going to get your next breath.”

During the morning pool session, to my left was 20-year-old Bethany Hamilton, recently in the media as the subject of Soul Surfer, the feature film about her being bitten by a shark off the coast of Hawaii and losing her arm when she was 13. Somewhat shyly, she had agreed to subject herself to Anna’s testing (she’d just come in from a dive and would later in the day try kite surfing for the first time). Her first attempt was just over two minutes, her second three and a half.

“It’s not as hard as everyone thinks,” said Anna, congratulating her. “Holding your breath is mostly about learning how to breathe.”

Anna’s big take-away came at the end of the session when debunking the Baywatch image of saving near-drowning victims by pumping violently on their chests and blowing spittle into their mouths.

She demonstrated the preferred method—the most efficient at actually saving people, she said—which involves light blowing on the cheeks and a little slap.

Of course if that doesn’t work, she admitted—and it had happened to her recently, on the way up from a record attempt to nearly 600 feet below— then move quickly to the chest pumping and spit swapping.

Photo: Cat Vinton/Six Senses

In attendance were not just some of the world’s top water athletes (surfers, windsurfers, free divers, kite boarders) but also some of the planet’s more thoughtful thinkers on ocean issues.

On the athlete side were surfers Layne Beachley and Buzzy Kerbox, windsurfers Levi Silver and Keith Teboul, kite surfers Mark Shinn and Alex Caizergues, and extreme wake boarder Duncan Zuur.

The slightly less active contingent included biologist and oceanographer Dr. Callum Roberts; aquatic filmmaker and third-generation ocean lover Fabien Cousteau; director of the IUCN’s Global Marine Program, Carl Gustaf Lundin; Bollywood producer/director Shekhar Kapur; executive producer of the film The End of the Line, Chris Gorell Barnes; and Water Charity cofounders, Dr. Jacqueline Chan and Averill Strasser.
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The conference was also a coming out party for the resort, located on this remote Maldivian atoll just 100 miles north of the equator. The Maldives is perhaps the perfect place for such a meeting since warming sea temperatures have put its coral reefs at risk, thus endangering both its local population and the tourism industry that is its economic base. The event was prudently also a fundraiser for a trio of ocean nonprofits:

The Blue Marine Foundation (www.bluemarinefoundation.com), a recent initiative created by Barnes pushing for ten percent of the world’s ocean to be placed into marine reserves by 2020 (today less than one percent is protected);

Plant A Fish (www.plantafish.org), Fabien Cousteau’s hands-on marine education and restoration effort to “re-plant” aquatic plants and animals in environmentally stressed areas by engaging local communities around the globe through schools, businesses and government agencies;

and Water Charity (www.watercharity.org), which is focused on providing safe drinking water, effective sanitation and health education to those most in need via the most cost-effective and efficient means.

One of the key subjects discussed whenever marine folk gather is how to better protect the ocean at the edges of our coastlines. The statistics are simple and seemingly ridiculous: More than 12 percent of the Earth’s land is protected, whether as park, reserve, preserve or sanctuary. Of the ocean, which covers nearly 72 percent of the planet, far less than 1 percent is formally protected.

“Lundin liked the example of Malaysians, who, after catching a boat poaching in its waters, sink it within 24 hours.”

The Maldives is proudly home to the new, 1,200-kilometer-square Baa Atoll World Biosphere Reserve. And at one of the gathering’s frank talks about Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), Callum Roberts, whose Unnatural History of the Sea is perhaps the best book out there about how man has so badly treated the ocean over the past 500 years, launched the discussion and was most direct: “So-called paper MPAs won’t work,” he said, referring to all the talking and thinking about protecting parts of the ocean that goes on without actually doing anything. “Establishing them, then enforcing the boundaries is key.”

“And only local protection works,” he continued. “Bringing in environmental groups or government agencies from outside won’t work. Local people have to protect their own waters.”

Calling MPAs “barometers” of the ocean, he said he was thankful for the newly announced set aside of the Baa Atoll—one of 26 big atolls that make up the Maldives, which include more than 800 individual islands or smaller atolls—because the Indian Ocean that surrounds the island state has been badly impacted by development stress, overfishing, pollution and, particularly, the impacts of climate change.

Chris Gorrell Barnes, whose Blue Marine Foundation—created as a follow up to the success of the End of the Line—was among several instrumental in getting the Baa Atoll approved as an official UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, excalimed, “What we need now is not more science, but money. The biggest challenge is how to fund marine reserves, especially in bad economic times,” said Barnes.

Working with the IUCN, an MPA five times the size of the one in the Maldives has been set up in the Chagos Islands. “But in order to get that accomplished,” said Barnes, “we had to raise outside money to help the U.K. government, which is a prosperous First World nation. Imagine how difficult it is for countries in the developing world to find money to protect the ocean.”

Roberts chimed in that the money needed to protect even 30 percent of the ocean was not that much, in the big picture. “That would cost just over $14 billion,” he said, “or about the amount spent on beauty care products each year.”

Carl Gustaf Lundin, who oversees marine and polar programs for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which is responsible for helping create MPAs around the globe, suggested that $14 billion was paltry compared to the $70 billion spent by countries around the world to subsidize fishermen. “The big question for MPAs, including here in the Maldives, is how do you subsidize people not to fish?”

He dove off Laamu earlier in the morning and had seen just five big fish in a stretcher where “I should have seen 50.”

“We have to do better at teaching people that a live manta ray, which helps bring millions of tourist dollars to the Maldives, is a far better deal than killing and selling its gills to China for a few hundred dollars.

“But the time to act is now,” he continued,” since we’ve only got 10 percent of the fish left.”
Save the Bluefin Tuna

“We have helped many areas in India gain protection, but enforcement then becomes a low priority. The reality is that you have to hang a few people high from time to time, as example, to help with enforcement,” he said. He agreed with Roberts that enforcement was key to making MPAs work.

The IUCN keeps a list of scofflaw vessels around the globe, including the names of ships and their captains, but Lundin liked the example of Malaysians, who, after catching a boat poaching in its waters, sink it within 24 hours.

“‘Warm and fuzzy’ doesn’t always work,” he said. “For MPAs to work, enforcement must be swift and effective.”