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The level playing field for sustainable fishing at sea

Three years ago, on our way to Gambia, it was in the early morning when we entered the Senegalese waters and a Senegalese wooden fisher boat passed by.

The little, traditional fishers can always be seen around a wreck, because the big industrial fishing ships can not come that close to wrecks with their enormous gear.

Two skinny men, with worn out clothes on, asked us for water. So we gave them water and some bread. We felt that moment that they were already a night at sea, but still had no catch. And they were clearly determined not to come home without any fish.

Source: globalvoices.org the impact of China’s Fishing Policies on West Africa

Today, we heard a small news item on the radio: Europe does not want to extend the agreement with Senegal to fish in their waters, because there is no enforcement from the Senegalese government. In European words, the EU identified Senegal as a “non-cooperating country” in the fight against illegal fishing earlier this year, citing “failures in monitoring, control and surveillance systems” on Senegalese ships in extraterritorial waters as well as on foreign vessels in the port of Dakar, the capital. (source: Washington Post November 16, 2024).

It looks like Senegal is the bad guy, because they don’t do their duty.

What exactly is happening here? What if we look closer?

For many years the EU en Senegal have had a contract that allows the Europeans to fish in the Senegalese waters. Europe pays Senegal 8,5 million Euros per year and some 18 French and Spanish fishing ships fish in their waters. It means that the fishing waters are for these European fishers only.

Fishy business?

This seems to go against their own economy, because each 1 of the 25 Senegalese people depends on fishing: the fishers themselves, the salesmen, and the people processing fish. Why is the government selling it then? Well, let’s put it this way: it can’t be proven that all these millions go straight to the State. Or to put it differently: it could very well be skimmed by the top politicians network. Like it happens in so many poor countries.

Or level playing field?

Senegal has 15 million inhabitants, Europe has 30 times more. Indicating the economical power by its Gross Domestic Product, Senegal’s is 30 billion, the European Union ‘s is 20 trillion dollars. A difference of about 18,000 times. This is David against Goliath. This level playing field is completely out of balance. However, the European Union made this deal because they see it as part of the development policy. The European fishers fish according to a sustainable protocol, fishing only on fish the Senegalese don’t traditionally fish, so there should be fish the next year. Also they don’t fish their full quota. So it might work, if nobody else catches fish from the Senegalese waters.

Senegal’s fishing crisis, source: youtube/euronews

Therefore, the contract requirement is that the Senegalese government should also do the surveillance of their waters. That costs many millions a year. So they can’t. And they won’t, because, as told, 1 to 25 Senegalese inhabitants rely on the fishing, and you don’t jeopardise your compatriots.

Also, we saw many Chinese ships in Senegalese and Gambian waters. Greenpeace estimates that more than 400 Chinese fishing vessels are currently operating off the coast of West Africa. For Senegal it is simply not possible to start messing with China, a nation about 20,000 times stronger. Again, it is the level playing field.

Meanwhile, the Senegalese waters are empty now. Europe still points at Senegal to correct the illegals, such as China. Is this reasonable? Each 25th Senegalese man, woman and child need the fish.

Source: globalvoices.org, the impact of China’s Fishing Policies on West Africa

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12 quotes about sustainability

Some food for thoughts.

It starts with Peters favorite quote and it ends with some quotes we wrote down in earlier blogs.

The Earth doesnot belong to us. We belong to the Earth (Chief Seattle)

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now (Chinese proverb)

The Earth provides enough for everyones need. But not to everyones greed (Ghandi)

I want to know the guy that invented single use plastic.

We get one credit card per week in our body. How much do I take from my credit card to get it out again?

It costs about 1 year to get uranium for nuclear power quality, and it costs 20.000 years to get the radio activity back to a safe level.

The greatest threat to the Earth is the tought that someone else will save it. (Robert Swan)

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Climate Fresk

The climate change matter is quite difificult to understand. Especially the consequenses are rather diverse.

Now there is a game, called Climate Fresk. You can play with a group. This way you get more and more insight in the whole issue of climate change.

How Climate Fresk works: you need a facilitator and some people. The facilitator is trained and gives information about the climate and factors. Then he puts a stack of cards on the table, with captions like: “fossil fuels” and “temperature rises” and as a group you start to put them in causal order.

You can do it with your group of sailors. Playing it on the boat is perhaps too small, because you need a big table. But in your living room is fine. Or in the club, the classroom, wherever.

We played it. Everybody draws there own conclusions. What astonished me were the numerous effects on us, the human beings. Most of the nature will survive, like trees, insects, and fishes. No worries about the ecosystem, it is constantly adapting. but the adaptation will not be in favor of the mammals, and especially the humans. The effects on us are big, if not devastating.

Check https://climatefresk.org/world/

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The sea level also rises in Nuku Hiva

The Ya is now on anchor in the Taiohae Bay of Nuku Hiva, Marqueasas. Every day when you walk along the shore, the waves splash against the sea wall. Often some refreshing drops come in your face. Nice.

When will the waves run over the quai and flood into the Haiotae town?

But for how long?

Here some numbers and graphics gathered by NASA.

More and more exceedences in the hourly sea levels

According to the latest reports, in 2050 the temperature will be risen about 2.5 degrees. (source: Earthcharts.org). This means that the waves would inundate the road, just before first houses. But then there should be no further rising…

Check for more detalils the NASA report: https://sealevel.nasa.gov/internal_resources/527/Nuku%20Hiva_France_combined.pdf

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Cheaper wind turbines

Last blog told about smart turbines. But what about a cheap one? Then there is the Airloom. It is a bunch of blades running on a oval track.

The Airloom looks like low tech, and yes, in a sense, it is.

The blades are 10 meter in length, mounted to a rail 20 meters high. The blades have a profile to let the wind make a lift power to forward and the blades move along the cable. The cable propels the generator and voila: there is the electricity.

The Test

It is tested with a 15 kiloWatt setup in Wyoming, USA. This is a small scale test, just for a 15 kW maximum yield. When extrapolated to a larger scale, it looks promising.

Comparison to the conventional 3 blade turbine

The disadvantage of the Airloom compared to the conventional three blade turbine is clear: the Airloom is build low, and there is much less wind.

But, you can put much more blades, and many more fields closer to each other, that per square surface you will get more yield.

The advantage is the price. Now, the estimates are that a kilowatthour generated by an Airloom would cost $ 0,13, whilst a conventional 3 blade generates our energy for $0,35 or more.

You can put the Airlooms way closer to each other than you can do with the 3 blade turbines, without disturbing the wind flows.

The cheap price is possible because of:

  • the low technology. The Airloom blades and construction can be built from normal materials, while the conventional blades and construction must be built from high tech carbon.
  • The transport costs. An Airloom construction for 10 MW fits in one container, while the transport of a conventional turbine, with its enormous blades, is a specialized job, sometimes taking a planning of one year ahead.
  • The maintenance is cheap. The materials cost not much, and especially the labour doesnot require any special efforts. The conventional 3 blade turbines on the contrary, require extreme costs, or it even can not be repaired.
  • The estetics, on land. Not much people like the 100 to 150 high wind turbines, dominating the horizon for many miles, of complete provinces. Many counties in the Netherlands have the policy to permit the enormous windturbines, just out of the necessity of power. If the Airlooms were built in stead, it would save a lot of horizon pollution.
Check out more on: Crazy, or Genius?

Realization

Just now, there has been found a sponsor/investor to build a larger scale field. If this would work according to the expectations, it could be the future for windmills on land.

We will keep you posted.

You are interested to build a small one yourself? Check out here and see it running.

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Smarter windturbines

For more than two thousand years we use windmills, or windturbines. They all have a horizontal shaft, and nowadays they mostly have 3 blades.

These blades have a bended profile, so they make the wind bending and then slide along the profile. It is looks like the wings of an airplane and it works that way. The wind bends along the profile and that makes the wing go up, or the blade go round. They call this ‘lift’ power. It can work great, because, when the blade starts moving, it gets more wind by its own speed. The speed of the tip of a blade is always much higher than the true wind blowing.  And, more wind speed along that blade means: more lift power. So more electricity.

The wind is high, not low. If we check the windgenerators on yachts,  one often sees the windgenerator on a little pole astern of the ship.  That is so a pity! Windgenerators work when placed high, and free of turbulence. This is the first rule, an important condition.

Nowadays, windturbines are built even higher than 150 meter. The highest at this moment is even 270 meters (Maasvlakte turbine). One rotation with 4 Beaufort delivers the energy of one household!

These enormous windturbines are impressive, but expensive. .

In the vertical shaft windmill, all equipments and all forces are on the top of the mast.

With all forces in top of the mast, it means a heavy construction, with extrapolating costs on building and maintenance when you go higher.

Other disadvantages:
* the blades can not handle wind direction changes. The yield lowers and there will be extra forces on the mast top.
* in the downwind area of the strike of the enormous blades, the wind is disturbed. So you can’t place these turbines close to another, and you need a lot of space for a wind turbine field.

Vertical shaft

There are windturbines with a vertical shaft.

That would solve a lot of these problems:
* the forces are evenly spread over the complete mast, which is the shaft itself.
* Changes of wind direction have no influence at all.
*You can put the alternator low. maintenance costs are low.
* the downwind area of disturbance is very small, so you can put a lot of them in a dense area.
* The building and maintenance costs for maintenance will be relatively low, with nearly all moving and electric parts on the lowest level.

The principle of a vertical shaft. This windmill runs on the resistance, the drag, of the wind. Therefore, it runs slow.

But, there is a big ‘but’. First, these ones work not on lift, but generally on the resistance of the wind. Mr. Darrieus solved this a bit by inventing his windturbines

The profiles of the blades of a Darrieus windturbine resemble the shape of an airplane wing. When going the half rotation to the wind, there is a lift power. So the ‘but’ is a bit less. These windturbines spin faster than a ‘drag windmill’ but cannot reach the speed of a horizontal axis wind turbine.

The smart windmill is the double windmill

Already for some decades, there are experiments in Japan with a smart principle: you make a double windmill, where one spins on the rotor (anchor) of the motor, and the other counter rotates and make the stator spin, the motor itself.

It leads to this principle, shown here under.

This windmill generates enough for a Japanese household.

A next step is made by the Norwegian World Wide Wind, with the development of a double windturbine, light enough to float.

The World Wide Wind turbine uses the principle of the Darrieus mill.

This turbine should deal with  all disadvantages of the horizontal shaft windmill:

  • The construction is light and cheap; maintenance costs are low
  • No problems with wind direction changes
  • High density of turbines possible
  • They float so they can also be build in deeper seas
  • No need for hurricane stops, because the construction and profile make them self regulating

In  about five years we will know if this is true, because then they should be operational.

Because it is floating, it will go closer to the surface with strong winds, and therefore it gets less wind. It uses nature.

It is a question of taste, but when I would pass this wind turbine field at sea, the looks are way better than a field of the static, heavy horizontal shaft turbines built on big concrete platforms.
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Climate Change – Some Concrete Consequenses for Sailors

The rate of ocean warming has almost doubled since 2005. In addition, more than a fifth of the world’s ocean surface will experience a severe heat wave in 2023, reports the European climate service Copernicus. The oceans, which cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, are an important regulator of the Earth’s climate. This week tropical storms killed 300 people in Nepal and 30 in the USA.
Ocean sailors know that a seawater temperature of over 29 degrees Celsius is the main precondition for hurricanes. In August 2022, a record temperature of 29.2 degrees Celsius was measured in the coastal waters of the Balearic Islands.

Where did that lead for sailors? Here some films with the concrete consequenses of climate change this summer.

Hurricane winds in Ibiza and Formentera
Severe storms and rainfall Mallorca

A superyacht on anchor capsized and sank in a minute

The irony here is that some guests on board of the superyacht belong to the richest of the world, who also create a relative big part of the climate change.

The phenomenon already has a name: Medicane.

Some basic explanation

What can you do?

  • Live in a small house
  • Use public transport instead of a car (electric or not).
  • Reduce your consumption and start at the source: protect yourself from advertisements and ‘social’ media.
  • Vote for a political party that dares to make regulations at European level, that makes the polluter pay. And with the associated law enforcement.
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Another walk in Taioha’e, Nuku Hiva

Your responds were great last week, so here another walk in Taiohae, Nuku Hiva. Again Pori and his musical friends sing, Every Friday morning you can find them from 7:30 to 10:00 under the tree next to Celine Magasin. The song is about the life here, I understood. So that inspired to make this movie.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCjVBeDWWBk

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A vertebra’s recovery with the help of a sustainable solution

Two pictures, taken in a week time. Both taken by Jean Luc, who did an awful lot of care the last week. From reanchoring t the Ya to bring me up and down in his dinghy to shore. The last thing he did that so many times, but from now on Peter can do it alone. Lool at the last picture, to the right, with two paddles and our kayak on the background.

Peter last week, and now. Now with the kayak that he paddled himself, and then brought ashore. Progress by sustainability.

Peter, with his sore back and with his bungee belt on, can get the kayak himself from the Ya to this place, just on the side of the quai. With a line along the shore, with two wheels, with the use of the waves, and with some creativity.

Check it out here in this movie.

We bought this kayak because of its sustainability. Its length and its little weight and wind drag make it easy to make speed with only the paddles, so you don’t need an engine.

A dinghy would be way to heavy to hold. The engine would make the entry to the ramp impossible. Moving or lifting such thing would be way to much weight for a sore back. But this kayak has all you want: no engine, and so light that even with a freshly broken vertebra it is a handy thing.

A hurray for the kayak, for this sustainable solution!