Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch this short film.

Val and Pete have been swimming together every morning for the past seventeen years. Once a year they have a race, two laps up and back.

Writer & Director: Owen Trevor
Producer: Lucas Jenner

*It’s not a documentary, and I don’t care that it is not.

If you’ve got stories you think might be right for the site, I don’t mind throwing them up as quick links, though. email me at blam @ this website address.

Talk soon,

Brian

From Margalit Fox, for the NYT, an obituary on the passing of John Fairfax, exemplary explorer and waterman:

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.

In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.)

…

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.

…

In recent years, Mr. Fairfax made his living playing baccarat, the card game also favored by James Bond.

Baccarat is equal parts skill and chance. It lets the player wield consummate mastery while consigning him simultaneously to the caprices of fate.

Margalit, forgive me for placing so many of your passages here. Your work, it is too good to resist showing to others.

Here’s my pick. Check out the rest.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jiro Ono is the proprietor of an unassuming, small 10-seat sushi bar in a Tokyo subway station. He’s also the finest sushi chef the world knows of right now*, as the only with 3 michelin stars and recognition as a national treasure by the Japanese government. Magnolia films is teaming up with Foodspotting to give away passes to screenings in NY, LA and SF. Here’s more info on the film and the giveaway.

*Some said that when Michelin did their tour through Japan, the private restaurants helmed by true masters refused to be rated.

How did they know it was there?

After drilling for two decades through more than two miles of antarctic ice, Russian scientists are on the verge of entering a vast, dark lake that hasn’t been touched by light for more than 20 million years.

Scientists are enormously excited about what life-forms might be found there but are equally worried about contaminating the lake with drilling fluids and bacteria, and the potentially explosive “de-gassing” of a body of water that has especially high concentrationsof oxygen and nitrogen.

Vostok, which is about the size of New Jersey, is the world’s third-largest lake by volume of water. Priscu said the gas in the lake makes it like a can of carbonated soda: Open it under high pressure, and it will spurt out.

He said the doomsday scenario for the Russian breakthrough would be if the suddenly released water pushed its way past machinery to block it and shot up the borehole, which is six to eight inches in diameter at the top. The result, he said, could be an enormous geyser that could empty a quarter of the lake. Priscu said he didn’t expect that to happen, but if it did, the sudden addition of substantial water vapor to the antarctic atmosphere could change the continent’s weather in unpredictable ways.

]]> http://thescuttlefish.com/2012/02/after-two-decades-of-drilling-theyll-reach-lake-vostok/feed/ 1 http://thescuttlefish.com/2012/01/dolphins-and-whales-playing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dolphins-and-whales-playing http://thescuttlefish.com/2012/01/dolphins-and-whales-playing/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:19:17 +0000 brian lam http://thescuttlefish.com/?p=15904

Click here to view the embedded video.

For the first time, scientists have recorded dolphins playing with whales–the whales are letting the dolphins slide down their backs.

*AMNH via boingboing*

Click here to view the embedded video.

My friend John Konrad, one of the youngest unlimited class captains, wrote a post on how to remove ships that have been grounded. This video, from his longer post, shows how the Phoenix was pulled from a South African beach when the tide was right. Often, more drastic measures are required, though.

These incredible Greenland sharks can survive for more than 200 years at depths of up to 600 metres under Arctic ice. Bigger than the notorious great white, they grow to 23-feet long and are so fearsome they have even been known to eat polar bears.

It should be added that it is entirely possible that the sharks just eat carcasses of polar bears. Dunno.

*DailyMail*

The Costa Concordia cruise ship ran aground last Friday offshore Tuscany, Italy. So far, a few dozen are unaccounted for, and at least 6 have been pronounced dead so far.The most striking photo I have seen so far is of the hull, gouged by rock.

(And these underwater photos.)

The most striking video is of the Italian Navy’s Commander DeFalco shouting at Admiral Schettino to reboard his ship and do a proper head count. Some say the Admiral is screwed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have never trusted cruise ships, the most monstrously artificial way to voyage. It’s not about safety as much as superstition. And safety, I guess.

I’ve never seen a worse wave look better.

*flickr via sealust*

Ben Shattuck writes about the history and lore of men being chewed on and swallowed by Whales. He finds a lot of fiction, but he also finds some fact.

The famous Quaker captain Edmund Gardner’s entanglement with a whale paints the clearest picture of what might happen — he was photographed post-attack, his left hand, fingerless and gnarled, centered in the shot. Gardner and his crew were off the coast of Peru in 1839. They lowered for a sperm whale. Gardner, as captain, was the boat header. After the whale was harpooned, he switched places with the boat steerer to kill the whale with a lance. The whale turned on the boat, and bit the bow. An article in Our Flag – a mid-19th-century publication out of New Bedford — lightly describes the whale biting the bow as it might “the best part of an apple-tart in the munch of a hungry school-boy.” His crew retrieved him, put him in the bottom of the boat, and thought he was dead. But he croaked out that he wanted to go to a doctor in Peru, where he convalesced.

My friend Chris tipped me off to a pretty incredible story about Eastwood from when he was only 21 years old: the guy survived a plane crash at sea and swam a few miles to shore off the coast of Point Reyes, California, in freezing cold water that is a major breeding ground for great white sharks.

Are you feeling lucky, Clint?

Eastwood was stationed at Fort Ord as a lifeguard in 1951, and hopped on a Douglas AD-1 military aircraft for a ride from Seattle to Sacramento.  An AD-1 is a two-seater, so it was just Eastwood and the plane’s pilot, Anderson.

The most in-depth telling of the story is in the book Clint Eastwood: A Biography by author Richard Schickel. Because the book is only partially available on Google Books, I can’t find many details about the captain, or the circumstances that precipitated the plane going down.

It was some type of technical malfunction that caused the pilot to perform a crash landing at sea, a few miles off the coast of Point Reyes. It was October, and the water in Northern California in October is quite cold, usually in the mid-50s. Anderson and Eastwood climbed out onto the wing of the plane, but it was clearing going to sink. With the plane going down, the pair jumped off and started swimming towards the shoreline, with the current pulling them north. They promised to try to stay together.

Here are a few excerpts from Eastwood himself from the biography:

And then it started getting dark, and I lost him. I didn’t know whether he was alive or where the hell he was. And I wasn’t about to start yelling, because it wastes a lot of energy. I went through jellyfish schools and all kinds of things, and they became fluorescent at night. It was like some science-fiction deal. By this time, you know, your mind is–talking about hallucinating…

Eastwood swam through a kelp bed, where the phosphorous was glowing brightly, which allowed him to see the shoreline, and the whitewater of crashing waves. He spotted an area where it didn’t appear to be too rocky.

I kind of worked my way into that–just partly luck, because everywhere the water was very rough. And I got into this spot and had a really rough time climbing out.

He made it to the beach, and kept hallucinating that he saw Anderson in the water behind him. A few times he rushed back into the water to grab rocks that he thought was the other survivor.

He climbed out of the cove and saw in the distance a bright light. He walked towards it, barefoot and freezing cold, went across a lagoon, jumped a fence, and got to a building owned by RCA that transmitted radiograms.

He was picked up and brought to the Coast Guard station up further, where he reunited with Anderson, who had also survived.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran the story with the headline “Swimming Teacher Paddled 2 Miles After Plane Crash.”

That’s pretty remarkable. October can see some fairly sizeable swells, and Point Reyes is a large landmass that typically takes a large brunt of any and all swells. It’s hard to gauge from the account exactly where he came to shore, but there’s no question in my mind that many people would not have survived that swim. Clint was a confident swimmer, a lifeguard and a swim instructor at a military base. A less confident swimmer probably would not have made it that far, in the dark and the cold, alone.

*book sources Clint Eastwood: A Biography, Clint: The Life and Legend. Image from picgifs.com. Thanks to Chris Mulchay for the tip.

]]> http://thescuttlefish.com/2012/01/clint-eastwood-actually-is-a-bad-ass-in-real-life/feed/ 15 http://thescuttlefish.com/2012/01/by-the-way-happy-new-year/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=by-the-way-happy-new-year http://thescuttlefish.com/2012/01/by-the-way-happy-new-year/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:40:39 +0000 Mark Lukach http://thescuttlefish.com/?p=15843 Yeah it’s almost 2 weeks late but this is a nice little video to set the tone for 2012. May all your adventures be so carefree and tan.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A new volcanic island has appeared in the Red Sea almost overnight. The eruption was first reported by local fishermen in mid-December 2011, 40 miles off the coast of Yemen.

*Nasa via Gizmodo*

On Saturday morning, January 7, a drunk driver hit and killed a 53 year old woman as she was walking down the street with her dog. The dog was also struck by the car, and took off in a panic after the accident.

As was later pieced together, the dog, named Barney, ran off into the Gulf of Mexico, and just started swimming. He eventually came across a fisherman who was on a kayak far from shore…and who had a GoPro mounted to the front of his kayak. The video shows how the fisherman rescued the dog, paddled him back to shore, and was able to get him to a vet. According to the fisherman’s speculation, the dog probably swam around 1/2 a mile. He is OK, and the drunk driver has been arrested.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*via the abc story on the car crash

The most spirited and visually arresting video about the ocean today comes from Korduroy.tv, born from the blood, sweat and tears of Cyrus Sutton and company (hello Reis!). They’re fund raising to launch a new version of the site, but they’re not just asking for handouts. They’re giving away some really great limited edition gear for the people who kick in a few bucks. I just got a cool handplane and t shirt designed by Ed from Quality Peoples. Here’s how you can do the same.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this project, the following overall objectives were set before design or construction began:

• The capsule must be capable of housing at least one (1) hamster when fully submersed
• The capsule must be built of materials derived from common household objects
• The capsule must be re-deployable
• The life and well being of the hamster must not be compromised in any way

*Hamster Submarine via Boing Boing*