Blue Planet Odyssey - Round the World Sailing Event 2014

The Blue Planet Odyssey is a round the world sailing event aiming to raise awareness of the global effects of climate change. The event is spearheaded by Jimmy Cornell, founder of the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) and organiser of several other successful international sailing rallies including five round the world events.

Blue Planet Odyssey Route Map

Blue Planet Odyssey will have starts in every continent and its route will call at some of the most threatened islands in every ocean: Tuvalu, Tokelau, Tuamotus, San Blas, Maldives, Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall, and Andaman Islands. The rally will also highlight the effects of climate change on the Arctic icecap, the Great Barrier Reef, and nature reserves such as the Galapagos Islands.

Community projects
At every stop at those endangered places, the sailors will take part in community projects such as building wind and solar powered desalination plants. Participants with specialist skills will take part in local projects and carry out essential repair and maintenance work.

Science and education
The Blue Planet Odyssey will have both a scientific and educational set of objectives. As the routes will pass through some of the least travelled parts of the oceans, opportunities exist for oceanographic institutes and research centers to leverage the unique potential of small vessels moving at one within their environment to make observations, collect specimens, and transmit first-hand environmental data to recipients ashore.

For example, in an earlier trans-Atlantic voyage, a university set up a small lab on a sailboat, trained two teenage crew members to collect daily plankton samples throughout the voyage and perform initial triages on them. When the specimens were shipped back to the university, they provided an invaluable snapshot of the state of the current Atlantic eco-system. When concerns arose that oil from the Gulf Oil Spill would flow into the Atlantic, the data collected by that sailboat was an invaluable contribution to setting up a pre-spill baseline for scientific comparative purposes.

In another project, badges are being worn by crews on cruising vessels to track levels of radioactivity that are then forwarded to document evolving conditions in the Pacific.

With oceanographic institutes and research centers to help design and guide the efforts of our Blue Planet Odyssey participants, whether it is taking seawater samples and making measurements to test for acidification, pollution, the depletion of the plankton population, changes in temperature and salinity to compare to previous data, or many other possibilities, this voyage can make an enormous contribution to our better understanding of the changing climate.

In addition to offering scientific discovery opportunities, the event will also seek to enrich the educational experiences worldwide of students and children at all levels. Books and educational material will be delivered to places en route and local schools will be offered the opportunity to be twinned with schools in the country of origin of the participants. Using satellite transmissions, the internet, and social media, plans are underway to allow various schools to track in real time the progress of participating vessels and form relationships with participating crews. Documentaries will share the experiences of the Blue Planet Odyssey and the peoples and places they visit with educational audiences around the world.

Route
Participants in this global event will be able to start and finish from a port on their own continent, with a first start in London followed by starts on both coasts of North American (New York and Miami, Vancouver, San Francisco and San Diego), a South American start from Rio de Janeiro, an African start from Cape Town, an Australian start from Sydney and an Asian start from Shanghai.

Blue Planet Odyssey will sail westabout around the world along the classic trade wind route via the Panama Canal and Torres Strait. For those who prefer to sail a more challenging route, there will be the option of a northern route via the Northwest Passage or a southern route via Easter Island.
European participants will start from London in summer 2014 and after crossing the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean will continue to Panama and the Pacific Ocean. The event will be joined at certain points by participants who have started from New York, Miami, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Sydney and Shanghai.

Detours will be made along the main route to call at every one of the endangered islands: the San Blas Islands will be visited en route to Panama, while the Galapagos and Tuamotus will be stops on the route to Tahiti. Tokelau and Tuvalu will be incorporated into a detour from Tonga to Samoa and on to Vanuatu. The Andaman and Maldive Islands will be visited during the crossing of the North Indian Ocean, while the Marshall Islands, Kiribati and Micronesia will be stopovers on the westbound route from Hawaii.

For more information and news on Blue Planet Odyssey, visit www.blueplanetodyssey.com or email info@blueplanetodyssey.com.