Three of Britain’s best stand up paddleboarders met at West Wittering windsurf club this Friday, 29th January to launch the Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) 2010 Challenge, a Guinness World Record™ breaking attempt to cross the English Channel in June this year that also aims to raise at least £10,000 for SAS’s campaigns and celebrate the organisation’s 20th anniversary.
Matt Argyle (Chairman of the British Stand Up Paddle Association (BSUPA) and ranked 2nd in the UK for stand up paddleboarding), Claire Blacklock (UK women’s stand up paddleboard champion) and Simon Bassett (BSUPA head coach) will be joined in June by longboarding champion Elliot Dudley and UK stand up paddleboarding champion Jock Patterson for the crossing attempt, which could see them break a Guinness World Record™ along the way.
In the first event of its kind, the paddleboarders will set off from Dover and aim to arrive in Calais around five hours later, having completed the crossing of the world’s busiest shipping lane. The event will be taking place between 18th – 25th of June, with the paddlers waiting for the best tide and weather conditions in which to make the 21mile crossing. If the paddlers are successful they will be the first stand up paddleboard team to have ever crossed the English Channel, and could potentially break the record for the fastest paddleboard crossing as well.
The Guinness World Record™ for crossing the English Channel by paddleboard currently stands at five hours and nine minutes, and was set by US paddler Michael O’Shaughnessy in 2006. The event has been put together by SAS with the support of BSUPA, and the paddlers aim to raise at least £10,000 in sponsorship money to support SAS’s campaigns to protect surfers and waveriders, waves and beaches around the UK. If you would like sponsor the 2010 Challenge please go to www.justgiving.com/2010challenge and make a donation. You can also follow the paddlers’ training blog on
www.supglobal.com.
SAS Director Hugo Tagholm says, “We are delighted to have such a fantastic team of Britain’s best stand up paddleboard talent to make this world record attempt. The event will raise vital funds and awareness for our ongoing campaigns protecting the UK’s oceans, beaches and coastlines for everyone to enjoy. It’s also a great way to celebrate 20 years of successful SAS campaigning!”
Chairman of BSUPA Matt Argyle says, “This is a fantastic opportunity for BSUPA and stand up paddlers to raise money for SAS, an organisation that has made a demonstrable difference to the quality of the environment that all water sports enthusiasts rely on. All of the paddlers will be training hard take on this challenge and we hope to raise as much money as possible. “
Green Peace have bought a piece of land slap bang in the middle of the proposed third runway site at Heathrow. They’re not going to let the runway be built and they need your help.
peeler have got their own bit of the Airplot here, get yours by clicking here and then ask your local politicians to join you as a beneficial owner of the Airplot.
We’ve just launched our sale, the ‘non-peeler, peeler sale’. Basically we’re selling everything which is not branded with the peeler iron.
The ‘non-peeler, peeler sale’ is more than just a sale. We’ve just finalised our plans for 2010 and it’s all rather exciting! As from February/March 2010 we’ll only be stocking peeler products.
There’s 2 reasons for this:
1. We can closely monitor how planet friendly our products are, e.g. the carbon footprint on our own products will be easier to measure.
2. We want to push the peeler brand and sell the products we believe in 100%
So, help us shed our old skin and grab yourself a bargain with the non-peeler, peeler sale.
Click here to go to the main peeler website and find out more…
A rare surfing competition has been held in Hawaii as waves of 12m (40ft) pounded Oahu’s famous North Shore.
Thousands of people gathered on beaches and cliffs to watch the world’s greatest surfers tackle the waves.
It was only the eighth time in 25 years that the Eddie Aikau competition, named in honour of a celebrated Hawaiian surfer and lifeguard, was held.
The contest is only staged in the most extreme surf conditions and last took place in 2004.
‘Unbelievably dangerous’
Nine-times world champion Kelly Slater was the strongest starter, but first-time entrant Greg Long, 24, took a narrow lead over his older rival and won with a score of 323 to 313.
Greg Long celebrates on 8 December 2009
It really is about the wave and celebrating the ocean
Greg Long
In pictures: Monster surf contest
The victorious Californian – who took home a purse of $55,000 (£34,000) – said it was “a dream come true” to take part in the “biggest event of big waves in the world”.
Long said the camaraderie of the contest, known as the Eddie, “encapsulates everything that’s great about surfing”.
“It really is about the wave and celebrating the ocean. It’s what we do: go out there and ride big waves.”
A total of 28 surfers were invited to take part in the event at Waimea Bay, chosen by a poll of the surfing community.
Organisers had been watching weather and wave conditions in the seas around the US state and announced early on Tuesday morning local time that the competition would run.
Map
“We were all stoked out there, smiling, laughing and having a good time,” said competitor Jamie O’Brien.
“This is like a natural arena out here for this and it’s amazing to be a part of it,” he told the Honolulu Advertiser.
People travelled from around the world to the US state to watch the event.
Malika Dudley of CBC News told the BBC people were lining cliff tops and had climbed trees to watch the vast waves.
She said it was “unbelievably dangerous” to take part in the event – one surfer, Tom Carroll of Australia, had been injured – but that safety teams were in the water on jet skis in case of accidents.
Eddie Aikau, after whom the contest is named, was a legendary surfer who died in 1978 at the age of 31, after capsizing in a traditional voyaging canoe en route from Hawaii to Tahiti.
Origami is about more than creative napkin folding. And listening to music is about more than bulky speakers. A Chicago company calls it OrigAudio—A foldable, self-powered speaker made from recycled paper.
The speakers were No. 38 on Time magazine’s list of the 50 Best Inventions of 2009 (which also included products like the Dow Chemical solar shingle).
The speakers fuse “modern art, graphic design, music, and Asia’s ancient origami art form” to create 3-inch portable cubes, according to ZOLD, an eco-sales agency. They come in five designs, or you can create your own.
They’re only 1 watt, which makes an ear wonder how loud they’ll be. But the speakers will slip easily into your luggage, or laptop case, and sound “pretty good” for the price, according to a segment on the “Today” show.
A portion of sale proceeds go the nonprofit Music National Service which “supports and expands the use of music to address important civic and social needs.”
Latest news from Greenpeace about the UN climate summit.
The key thing to understand about the upcoming UN climate summit in Copenhagen is how massively, vitally, fate-of-the-earth-decidingly important brackets are to the whole process. Yes, [brackets]. If you grasp the brackets thing, then everything else is pretty much irrelevant detail.
Nevertheless, let’s do a little run-through before we get onto it.
The Copenhagen summit, also known as the Conference of the Parties 15 or COP15, or ‘the best moment we’ve ever had to actually, you know, sort it out’, is the fifteenth big meeting organised by the United Nations to discuss a global response to climate change.
Delegates from every country in the world will be trying to get a global agreement on how to address climate change. Well, some of them will be trying. Some of them might not actually be trying very hard.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is the diplomatic process which Copenhagen sits in. It stretches back to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, where countries first agreed the need to come up with a plan to tackle climate change. In 1997 we got the Kyoto protocol – the current global agreement to reduce carbon emissions. But if Kyoto is the UN climate equivalent of the film Terminator, Copenhagen would definitely be Terminator 2. Happens a few years later, more at stake, with a bigger budget and subtitled Judgement Day.
We’re getting to the brackets. Over the years, many different arguments and issues have played out through the UNFCCC process. Discussion, disagreement and debate leading up to this year’s meeting in Copenhagen has been particularly intense, because this year we’re supposed to agree what should happen when the Kyoto protocol runs out in 2012.
There’s a draft treaty which is 180 pages long and is probably best described as a bit dense. Anything that’s made it into the draft treaty has already been agreed – unless it’s in brackets. In which case there’s still some disagreement. There’s a lot of brackets in that document. Oh yes indeed.
So what’s going to be discussed, and what are the key [bracketed] areas of disagreement?
The biggest issue is cutting global emissions of greenhouse gases which cause climate change. Following the recommendations of the climate science community, we think that rich nations need to cut their emissions at least 40% by 2020, and nearly de-carbonise the global economy by 2050. The level of ambition from rich countries is currently lower than this. What’s currently on the table is a collective offer from the industralised world for a 10-17% cut in emissions on 1990 levels by 2020.
Secondly, there’s money, or discussion about ‘financing’. In Rio, it was agreed that different countries have different responsibilities when it comes to addressing climate change. This is because the richer part of the world has emitted more greenhouse gases – causing most of the climate problem. There’s agreement that we should offer financial assistance to the poorer parts of the world, who are unlikely to benefit from burning fossil fuels with the same level of freedom in the future, and who will suffer more from the impacts of climate change.
So the financing money will pay for a number of things: adaptation, which means changing the way a society functions to be able to cope with a changed climate (basically saving the lives of the most vulnerable); technology transfer, which is money to help poorer parts of the world take advantage of low-carbon technologies; and mitigation, helping poorer countries pay for their emissions cuts and for protecting forests.
There’s no real agreement over the amounts of money that should flow from the richer world to the poorer. The EU, including Britain, argues that there should be a global fund of €100 billion of which €22-50 billion should be public money. But there have been no proposals put forward since then from groups like the G8 or the Major Emitters Forum, or by other major economies like the US. We believe that given the likely impacts of climate change, and costs to the less-developed world, the amount needs to be an absolute minimum of €110 billion of public money a year.
This year, a lot of debate is centred on part of the process called Redd, or Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, to cut the fifth of human emissions which each year come from deforestation. It’s a new area of discussion but already a very complex one, with major disagreements over what the right way is to protect forests. Plenty of people want forests to be brought into a carbon trading scheme, while we believe that a simpler system for paying countries to preserve their forests is more likely to work. However it’s done, we need to have an end to deforestation in the tropics by 2015, and globally by 2020.
Being optimistic and assuming we get an agreement, probably the biggest question is what kind of agreement it ends up being. The best outcome is a legally binding treaty – which would mean that the countries signing up would have a legal requirement to tackle climate change and adopt the treaty measures.
But since the last interim meeting at Barcelona, where very little progress was made, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we might get a much more aspirational political statement – probably with plenty of rhetoric, and a nice picture of Obama holding hands with other heads of state. However, there are unlikely to be any actual powers to make countries live up to their commitments and ensure countries don’t roll back on their pledges in the event of a change of government in Washington, London, Tokyo and elsewhere.
The Cold Water Classic Series 2009 is over, after a grand-stand finale at 6-10ft 3rd Reef at Steamer Lane, Santa Cruz, California. This was the final event in the series, which pushes surf competitions to new limits by holding events in cold water locations around the planet that included Tasmania, Cape Town in South Africa, Thurso in Scotland, Vancouver Island in Canada and Steamer Lane in California.
The final event was won by Nate Yeomans and there was some incredible surfing all round and heavy dramas – like Jarrad Howse missing just 0.02 points to take the CWC Series bonus of $ 50,000. Competitors, organizers and the ASP have all expressed how stoked they are on the series, and O’Neill is already getting geared up for more cold water magic in 2010.
