Since people have responded so positively to my diaries about the stuff we're doing at Oceana to protect the oceans, I'm gonna try to post a little more frequently...
One neat thing you might be interested in is a journey that my colleague Sandy Mayson is undertaking right now. Recently we had an incredibly generous gift given to us -- a 71-foot (!) catamaran. (That's a big catamaran.) We fitted her out, christened her Ranger, and launched her at a ceremony in California last month.
Ranger is now in the starting legs of an trip that will eventually cover 11,000 miles -- from California, south through the Panama Canal, north again to Florida and the Sargasso Sea, and then across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. All along the way her crew will be documenting threats to ocean wildlife and habitat.
More on the flip...
Anyway, Sandy is going along with them for the first few weeks of the trip; and, armed with a digital camera, computer and satellite phone, she's blogging her experience on our Scoop blog, the Oceana Network. It blows my mind how we can use technology to let her share the experience of what it's like to take such a trip.
(This is actually the second time we've done something like this -- last year, one of our scientists, Jon Warrenchuk, participated in a NOAA expedition that used the Alvin submersible to dive on undersea mountains called "seamounts" off Alaska, and he blogged that expedition. For those of us who are complete science-geek fanboys, it was insanely cool...)
So if you're interested in following Sandy's journey, here's the link:
Sandy's Ranger journal
And feel free to leave comments and start your own Diaries while you're there -- we're working hard to build an online community for the oceans that's every bit as vibrant as dKos is for politics!