Month: June 2010

Vac from the Sea!

Vac From The Sea from Fast Company

Wow, Electrolux really sucks! In a good way!

Watch this:

From Fast Company:

Hans Stråberg, the President and CEO of Electrolux, explains the reasoning behind Vac from the Sea:

Our oceans are filled with plastic waste. Yet on land, there is a shortage of recycled plastic. The supply of sustainable raw material, such as recycled plastic, is crucial for making sustainable appliances, and assisting consumers in making their homes greener. I therefore hope people will join us in raising awareness about the threat plastic poses to marine habitats, and the urgent need for taking better care of the plastic that already exists.

Whale of a Thank You Meg! (@powermobydick)

After nearly 60 always interesting and entertaining posts, Meg Guroff, the creator and curator of the amazing Power MobyDick, is taking some well deserved shore-leave from Sea-Fever’s Moby-Monday.

Meg’s got some exciting, new adventures underway, so she can’t be here every week.  But she has agreed to be a relief captain from time to time and we look forward to welcoming her back aboard as often as she can manage.

A new skipper will be taking over Moby-Monday and I’ll have an update on that soon.  And from time to time we’ll have some guest posts like Vassar senior english and art history major and New Bedford Whaling Museum intern, Evander Price’s great post today titled “Of Whales in Mountains…”

But today, I want to give a whale of a thank you to Meg for the incredible job that she’s done over the past year for Sea-Fever readers (including me)! Here’s something that Charlotte Cheshire created for one of her teachers which is cool and appropriate for Meg too!

Moby-Monday: Of Whales in Mountains…

This week’s guest Moby-Monday is by Evander Price, Senior English & Art History Major at Vassar College and former New Bedford Whaling Museum intern, along with a strong pull of the oar by Jeffrey Walker, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College.*

Petrified Whale by Evander Price

In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges.

Moby-Dick, Chapter 57, “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars”

High up in the Catskills, though not too high, and not too far off from the historic Mountain House, lie the petrified remains of perhaps the oldest beached whale on our planet.  He is composed of 350-million-year-old sandstone of the Catskill delta, and is surrounded by hemlocks.  No doubt he remembers the time when the Hudson River Valley was almost entirely hemlock, before the demands of the Industrial Revolution deforested the old growth trees.  While his mossy bulk has no doubt morphed considerably with the erosion of time, his toothy lower jaw corroborates his classification as an odontocete, and the prominence of his jaw further suggests that he is of some close relation to the physter macrocephalus, or the sperm whale.

It is discoveries like this that remind us readers of Melville that what might be taken for exaggeration or imaginative literary flourish is often pure fact.

*Credit to Jeffrey Walker, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College for all geological information, and for leading the hike to the petrified whale. Continue reading Moby-Monday: Of Whales in Mountains…

“A First Dream Called Ocean”

Here is an awesome looking trailer for a new short film by Alyssa Swanzey.  Her last name might sound familiar to many in the sail training/tall ships world as her dad is Gregg Swanzey, the long time executive director of the Schooner Ernestina who’s also been involved with a number of different programs.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Alyssa’s project is being funded through Kickstarter which is a really cool website that funds creative projects. One of the best things is that you can get in on the action and support a project that interests you and make an artist’s dream reality. Check it out and keep watch for the full version of Alyssa’s film too!

How long can you hold your breath and how deep do you dare to go?

From Guillaume Nery’s blog:

This video is a FICTION and an ARTISTIC PROJECT, I don’t claim to have reached the bottom of the hole (202m) without rope and fins, as the world record in no-fins discipline is 95m. We made this movie to show another approach in freediving videos. We wanted to express the strenght of the elements water-earth-air and the sensations of freedom, harmony, exploration.

All the shots were made on breath hold by Julie Gautier.

We directed and edited the movie ourself, Julie and me. Jerome Espla (Poisson Lune Productions) was the gradder of the clip (color corrections…).

The music is from ARCHIVE – you make me feel.

The camera is a Canon 5D mark II

Location: Dean’s Blue Hole, Long Island, Bahamas

FICTION and an ARTISTIC PROJECT, impressive just the same! Especially, since it was shot with a digital SLR!

Moby Monday — Remind you of anyone?


French designer Jean-Marie Massaud has proposed a helium "manned cloud"—a floating 20-room hotel—that bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain white sperm whale.

Cruising for days at 100 miles per hour “permits man to explore the world without a trace,” Massaud’s website states: “to experience spectacular and exotic places without being intrusive or exploitative.” So, pretty much what Ahab was going for—except for that last bit.

Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.

FotoFriday: The One Ton Tar Ball and more tragic BP oil spill photos

One Ton Tar Ball from BP Oil Spill

Wow! A one ton tar ball from the BP oil spill.

The troubling part is that they are actually showing us this. Imagine what we aren’t seeing! :(

Here’s a slide show from the official Deepwater Horizon Response Flickr account.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Long Time Coming! Welcome Home Sailor Stowe!

Reid Stowe by Beatrice de Gea for the NYTimes

This afternoon, after over three years at sea without coming ashore, Reid Stowe will return to his homeport of New York City. His story in today’s NY Times (A Record-Smashing Sea Journey, and Not for Its Speed – June 17, 2010) has a short (unembeddable :( ) video worth watching. Heck, he went to sea for over 1,100 days, least we can do is watch a 2 1/2 minute video about it.

I’ve met Reid on several occasions and written about this adventure a number of times; he definitely is an interesting guy who accomplished something extraordinary.

Welcome home and congratulations Reid! And please get a paint job underway on Schooner Anne, because she deserves it!