On November 7th, two balsa rafts set out from Lima, Peru, bound for Easter Island on the Kon-Tiki 2 expedition. The voyage is both an homage to Thor Heyerdahl’s famous voyage on the raft Kon-Tiki in 1947 and a voyage to collect data on climate change, ocean currents, marine life and plastic pollution. The expedition will also attempt to sail back from Easter Island to Peru, which creates particular challenges for rafts capable of sailing primarily downwind.
The expedition is something of an anachronism. On one hand, it will be using the most up to date technology to monitor ocean conditions and levels of pollution, while, on the other, the rafts harken back to the largely discredited Thor Heyerdahl “westward drift” theory” of migration to Polynesia. The expedition has added the new twist that it will attempt to actively control the course of the rafts to allow them to make a return trip to South America. To do so, the new rafts feature adjustable “guara boards” to steer the craft. The intent is to sail the rafts far enough south to catch the westerly winds of the Roaring 40s and then catch the Humbolt current for the trip northward. Whether or not this course is possible on balsa rafts remains to be seen. Whether it is reasonable to assume that this course was ever sailed by ancient Polynesians seems far less likely.
A fisherman recently may or may not have caught a 
In the latter part of the 19th and the early 20th century, windjammer sailors in the nitrate and guano trades to Peru and Chile drank significant quantities of pisco when they arrived on the west coast of South America. Pisco is a brandy named after a southern Peruvian port. No doubt, most sailors drank it straight. These days the favored drink is the 
At the beginning of October, the 
Off the coast of Europe, offshore wind turbines with an installed capacity of over 6,600 MW generate enough electricity to power almost five million households. In the United States, the number of households powered by offshore wind is almost zero, though, with luck that, is about to change, if only slightly. The 
The first reports from accidents are often wrong. In the case of the capsizing of the whale-watching boat, Leviathan II, off Tofino on Vancouver Island with the loss of six passengers, the 
In early October, the headline in the Philadephia Inquirer was 
For several years now, we have posted about the so-called 
In 1998, the United States Naval Academy dropped celestial navigation from its curriculum. If a naval officer wished to know where he or she was, the officer simply had to read the display on a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver. Sextants, chronometers, and nautical almanacs became artifacts of another, less technological time. Now, a decade and a the Navy has had second thoughts. Recent concerns about potential cyber-attacks on global positioning satellite software and data, which could disable or spoof GPS navigation systems world-wide, has led the