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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Around The Americas Update: Next Stop Boston!


Having successfully navigated the Northwest Passage, the Around the Americas Expedition has turned its way south. Having left Nova Scotia, Canada behind the next scheduled port of call set for the Ocean Watch and her crew is Boston, where they are expected to arrive on Friday.

It has been a pretty good few weeks for the crew, who have now gone from icy waters and heavy cold weather gear, to shorts and flip-flops under warm skies and lovely autumn days. The journey south, for now, remains mostly uneventful, although a new crew member has joined the team, at least for now. Ed Stern is a fisheries expert from the Marine Institute in St. John's and he gives us a rundown on his background as well as the general health of fisheries in North America in today's blog post.

Ed has joined the crew in support of the expedition's environmental efforts. As the Ocean Watch navigates its way around North and South America, something that has never been done before, the team is recording data on the health of the oceans, and that healthy will have a direct impact on our fisheries, and vice versa, as over fishing can cause its own set of issues.

In the weeks ahead, the crew will continue to head south towards the tip of South America, where they will make the treacherous crossing of the Beagle Channel before turning north and home. The expedition began in Seattle back in June and will end there again sometime in 2010, but in between, the ship will have crossed more than 24,000 miles of ocean, completing the first ever circumnavigation of the two continents.

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