Winter 1709

Around the end of the Little Ice Age, Europe experienced this awful winter that was recognized as the worst experienced and can be accepted as that because of the living knowledge of the time and place. This article gives us a good description and plenty of data and some suggestive ideas.

The default explanation for the Little Ice Age has been a drop in solar output. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable with that explanation is that we lack good global confirmation. In fact one gets the sense that the rest of the globe was simply unaffected and that the European chill resulted from a confluence of bad luck in the year’s weather.

We had both Vesuvius and Fuji banging away, but they are really insufficient. The unusual impact of the southern winds is notable only inasmuch as their expected effect failed to materialize.

Once again, we have no knowledge of the activity of the Alaskan volcanoes that could well have the capacity to impact northern climate. And that really says it all. We have blank spots in the global record book that needs to be extracted somehow. We need to properly determine the ejection history of all active volcanoes around the world, even if it is to eliminate their influence.

A more important observation is that the reported temperatures are not particularly dangerous. Cold yes, but certainly well within our working comfort level for all of Europe. It was mostly an inconvenience to most that lived through it. The temperatures quoted are comparable to the continental weather of the Midwest every year. They are not comparable to those of Northern Alberta.

Another observation is that the rebound was rapid over the next two decades. This is the mirror of the present day reversal been experienced. Whatever confluence of atmospheric dynamics takes place, it seems recoil immediately toward the equilibrium position.

1709: The year that Europe froze

07 February 2009 by Stephanie Pain

People across Europe awoke on 6 January 1709 to find the temperature had plummeted. A three-week freeze was followed by a brief thaw - and then the mercury plunged again and stayed there. From Scandinavia in the north to Italy in the south, and from Russia in the east to the west coast of France, everything turned to ice. The sea froze. Lakes and rivers froze, and the soil froze to a depth of a metre or more. Livestock died from cold in their barns, chicken's combs froze and fell off, trees exploded and travellers froze to death on the roads. It was the coldest winter in 500 years.

IN ENGLAND they called the winter of 1709 the Great Frost. In France it entered legend as Le Grand Hiver, three months of deadly cold that ushered in a year of famine and food riots. In Scandinavia the Baltic froze so thoroughly that people could walk across the ice as late as April. In Switzerland hungry wolves crept into villages. Venetians skidded across their frozen lagoon, while off Italy's west coast, sailors aboard English men-of-war died from the cold. "I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the Memory of Man," wrote William Derham, one of England's most meticulous meteorological observers. He was right. Three hundred years on, it holds the record as the coldest European winter of the past half-millennium.

Derham was the Rector of Upminster, a short ride north-east of London. He had been checking his thermometer and barometer three times a day since 1697. Similarly dedicated observers scattered across Europe did much the same and their records tally remarkably closely. On the night of 5 January, the temperature fell dramatically and kept on falling. On 10 January, Derham logged -12 °C, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 °C on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days. After a brief thaw at the end of that month the cold returned with a vengeance and stayed until mid-March.

Later that year, Derham wrote a detailed account of the freeze and the destruction it caused for the Royal Society's Transactions. Fish froze in the rivers, game lay down in the fields and died, and small birds perished by the million. The loss of tender herbs and exotic fruit trees was no surprise, but even hardy native oaks and ash trees succumbed. The loss of the wheat crop was "a general calamity". England's troubles were trifling, however, compared to the suffering across the English Channel.

In France, the freeze gripped the whole country as far as the Mediterranean. Even the king and his courtiers at the sumptuous Palace of Versailles struggled to keep warm. The Duchess of Orleans wrote to her aunt in Germany: "I am sitting by a roaring fire, have a screen before the door, which is closed, so that I can sit here with a sable fur piece around my neck and my feet in a bearskin sack and I am still shivering with cold and can barely hold the pen. Never in my life have I seen a winter such as this one."

In more humble homes, people went to bed and woke to find their nightcaps frozen to the bed-head. Bread froze so hard it took an axe to cut it. According to a canon from Beaune in Burgundy, "travellers died in the countryside, livestock in the stables, wild animals in the woods; nearly all the birds died, wine froze in barrels and public fires were lit to warm the poor". From all over the country came reports of people found frozen to death. And with roads and rivers blocked by snow and ice, it was impossible to transport food to the cities. Paris waited three months for fresh supplies.

People went to bed and woke to find their nightcaps frozen to the bed-head
There was worse to come. Everywhere, fruit, nut and olive trees died. The winter wheat crop was destroyed. When spring finally arrived, the cold was replaced by worsening food shortages. In Paris, many survived only because the authorities, fearing an uprising, forced the rich to provide soup kitchens. With no grain to make bread, some country people made "flour" by grinding ferns, bulking out their loaves with nettles and thistles. By the summer, there were reports of starving people in the fields "eating grass like sheep". Before the year was out more than a million had died from cold or starvation.

The fact that so many people left accounts of the freeze suggests the winter of 1708/1709 was unusually bad, but just how extraordinary was it?

In 2004, Jürg Luterbacher, a climatologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, produced a month-by-month reconstruction of Europe's climate since 1500, using a combination of direct measurements, proxy indicators of temperature such as tree rings and ice cores, and data gleaned from historical documents (Science, vol 303, p 1499). The winter of 1708-1709 was the coldest. Across large parts of Europe the temperature was as much as 7 °C below the average for 20th-century Europe.

Why it was quite so cold is harder to explain. The Little Ice Age was at its climax and Europe was experiencing climatically turbulent times: the 1690s saw a string of cold summers and failed harvests, while the summer of 1707 was so hot people died from heat exhaustion. Overall, the climate was colder, with the sun's output at its lowest for millennia. There were some spectacular volcanic eruptions in 1707 and 1708, including Mount Fuji in Japan and Santorini and Vesuvius in Europe. These would have sent dust high into the atmosphere, forming a veil over Europe. Such dust veils normally lead to cooler summers and sometimes warmer winters, but climatologists think that during this persistent cold phase, dust may have depressed both summer and winter temperatures.

None of these things accounts for the extremity of that particular winter, however. "Something unusual seems to have been happening," says Dennis Wheeler, a climatologist at the University of Sunderland, UK. As part of the European Union's Millennium Project, which aims to reconstruct the past 1000 years of Europe's climate, Wheeler is extracting data from Royal Navy logbooks, which provide daily observations of wind and weather. "With daily data you can produce very reliable monthly averages but you can also see what happened from one day to the next," says Wheeler. He and his colleagues have now compiled a database of daily observations stretching back to 1685 from the English Channel area. "This is a key climatic zone. The weather there reflects wider conditions across the Atlantic, which is where in normal circumstances much European weather originates."

The most immediate cause of cold winters in Europe is usually an icy wind from Siberia. "What you would expect would be long runs of easterly winds with a well-developed anticyclone over Scandinavia sucking in cold air from Siberia," says Wheeler. Instead, his data show a predominance of southerly and westerly winds - which would normally bring warm air to Europe. "There were only occasional northerlies and easterlies and those were never for more than a few days," says Wheeler. Another odd finding was that January was unusually stormy. Winter storms tend to bring milder, if wilder, weather to Europe. "This combination of cold, storms and westerlies suggests some other mechanism was responsible for that winter."

There may be no easy explanation for the Great Frost of 1709, but unexpected weather patterns revealed by Wheeler's data underline why climate reconstructions are so important. "We need to explain the natural variation in climate over past centuries so that we can tease apart all those factors that contribute to climate change. But before we can do that we need to nail down those changes in detail," says Wheeler. "Climate doesn't behave consistently and warmer and colder, drier and wetter periods can't always be explained by the same mechanisms." In the two decades after that terrible winter, the climate warmed very rapidly. "Some people point to that and say today's warming is nothing new. But they are not comparable. The factors causing warming then were quite different from those operating now."

Cold Snap

I cannot believe that anyone has failed to notice that winter is kicking our butts this year. The surprise is to learn that the Arctic cold snap in the northern reaches has exceeded anything in northern Saskatchewan since record keeping began 116 years ago. Mother Nature is now mocking the true believers in global warming.

Any who have read my earliest posts know that I have never thought that the linkage of global temperatures to rising CO2 was a safe research strategy because historical evidence indicated we were likely dealing with normal variation and that such a strategy would surely inflict a damaging reversal. This is a rout and the true believers are becoming very quiet.

This unfortunately does nothing to promote responsible management of CO2 emissions.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has reversed and will likely be gone for decades while we wait for sunspots to pick up again. It was fun while it lasted.

The real surprise was just now fast this reversal was upon us. It took twenty years to modestly improve weather conditions in the north and a mere year or so for all that to blow away. We certainly have gained a far better understanding of the factors that affect our climate and know better what to watch. Just as we came to understand the impact of El Nino and La Nina, we surely now understand the impact of the PDO a lot better and can include it properly in our models.

If the variation of solar energy is sufficient enough to be a primary climate driver, then the Pacific Ocean is the natural transfer mechanism. It is not chaotic and it represents fifty percent of the world’s surface. It also absorbs energy very nicely. Thus it is reasonable in a simple minded way to imagine a surplus of heat expanding the warm surface waters of the Pacific into the northern edge of the Pacific basin which is certainly what happened.

Maybe our salmon fisheries will now vigorously rebound with a minimal support effort.

In the meantime, these folks are experiencing cold weather that is simply dangerous as these reports show. In this country there are times that car failure is a swift and potentially fatal disaster if you are not prepared.

Cold streak sets new record

City experiences 24 consecutive days of -25 C or lower

Rod Nickel, The StarPhoenix

Published: Tuesday, January 06, 2009

How's this for cold comfort? Saskatoon's deep freeze is likely the longest streak of low temperatures below -25 C that has numbed this city since record-keeping began in 1892.

The 24-day streak started cruelly Dec. 13 after relatively mild temperatures and continued at least through Monday, said David Phillips, Environment Canada's senior climatologist.

"That's the thing that's brutal," Phillips said from Toronto, where he was enjoying a temperature of -4.

"We can all handle a few (cold) days. It's the long haul that wears you down.

"It's really a shocker, the duration of the cold."

Phillips said he couldn't find a longer cold snap in Saskatoon's recorded weather history during a look through the records Monday. Even during the infamous January of 1950, when temperatures hit -46 and -45 (not counting any wind chill), the cold streak of -25 or lower lasted "only" 21 days.

The first two mild weeks of December kept the month from being Saskatoon's coldest ever. It still averaged -20.6, the sixth-coldest December on record and the most frigid since 1983.

Prince Albert was slightly colder in December, with an average temperature of -21.4, while Regina registered -18. Neither of those burgs have suffered a -25 streak approaching Saskatoon's, Phillips said.
The normal average temperature for Saskatoon in December is -14.3C.

The historic streak could end today. Environment Canada was forecasting a low of -23 for today, before another drop Wednesday.

There's no good news on the horizon.

January is expected to be colder than its normal mean temperature of -17, said Environment Canada meteorologist Bob Cormier. The three-month period of January through March is also expected to be colder than normal, he said.

The frigid temperatures and the bad timing of the New Year's Eve snowstorm has left city snow crews well behind schedule.

As of Monday, snowplows still hadn't touched almost one-third of the priority streets, which range from arteries such as Circle Drive and Eighth Street to bus routes and minor collector streets. The major arteries have been cleared once, but may need a second pass, said Gaston Gourdeau, manager of the city's public works branch.

Ninety per cent of bus routes are cleared, but many minor collector streets still haven't seen a snowplow.
"We're looking forward to warmer temperatures," Gourdeau said. "It's been tough for everybody."

The New Year's Eve storm was a double-whammy for snowplow operators.

Many city staff were on holidays. Hydraulic parts of heavy equipment respond more slowly, like everything else, in the cold, forcing crews to get less done than they normally would.

Gourdeau predicts snow crews will be in some neighbourhoods clearing out trouble spots by the end of the week.

He said he decided against implementing a street parking ban to speed up snow clearing for two reasons.
The city hasn't had the staff to guarantee cleanup within 72 hours until this week.

In frigid weather, it's also difficult to ask residents to move cars off the street to spots where plug-ins may be unavailable, he said.

rnickel@sp.canwest.com

Extreme Alaska cold grounds planes, disables cars

JUNEAU, Alaska – Ted Johnson planned on using a set of logs to a build a cabin in Alaska's interior. Instead he'll burn some of them to stay warm.

Extreme temperatures — in Johnson's case about 60 below zero — call for extreme measures in a statewide cold snap so frigid that temperatures have grounded planes, disabled cars, frozen water pipes and even canceled several championship cross country ski races.

Alaskans are accustomed to subzero temperatures but the prolonged conditions have folks wondering what's going on with winter less than a month old.

National Weather Service meteorologist Andy Brown said high pressure over much of central Alaska has been keeping other weather patterns from moving through. New conditions get pushed north or south while the affected area faces daily extremes.

"When it first started almost two weeks ago, it wasn't anything abnormal," Brown said. "About once or twice every year, we get a good cold snap. But, in this case, you can call this an extreme event. This is rare. It doesn't happen every year."

Temperatures sit well below zero in the state's various regions, often without a wisp of wind pushing down the mercury further.

Johnson lives in Stevens Village, where residents have endured close to two weeks of temperatures pushing 60 below zero.

The cold has kept planes grounded, Johnson said. Food and fuel aren't coming in and they're starting to run low in the village, about 90 miles northwest of Fairbanks.

Johnson, whose home has no heater or running water, said he ventures outside only to get more logs for burning and to fetch water from a community facility. He's been saving the wood to build a cabin as a second home, but that will have to wait a few years now because the heat takes precedence.

"I've never seen it this cold for this long," he said. "I remember it 70 below one time, but not for a week and a half."

In Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, residents are used to lows of about 10-degree temperatures in January — not 19 below zero, which is what folks awoke to Wednesday morning.

Temperatures finally settled to about 10 below at midday, but that was cold enough to cancel races in the U.S. Cross Country Ski Championships.

Skiers won't compete unless it's warmer than 4 below zero, but the numbers have ranged between 10 below and 15 below.

That has led to four days of canceled or postponed competition with organizers hoping to get a set of races under way on Thursday, the event's final day.

Meanwhile, in Juneau, the state's capital is enjoying balmy weather by comparison with lows in the single digits.

Pleistocene Evidence

My articles on the Pleistocene Nonconformity and the likely prior establishment of a developed human society for the previous several thousands of years fills a large gap in the emergence of mankind. It also recognizes that human occupation of the temperate zone was not a viable option, as any survey of ice age conditions confirm.

The population had the great coastal plains, now submerged and a couple of good zones in the Tropics.

For these conjectures to stand up and bark, there still has to be viable evidence. And in fact the evidence exists and is out there to be recognized. But without these conjectures in place and part of the mental tool box, all eyes are blind.

With these tools, it is now possible to look at old evidence and provide a superior interpretation. This will not always work, and the number of possible artifacts to be recovered decline rapidly as we go back in time. I also suggest that we should recall our own artifacts are nor surviving for very long at all and are now been vigorously recycled and will soon be all recycled unless they make it to an antique store.

As an example, my working conjecture on the presence of Bronze Age traders in the Mississippi valley has allowed a rereading of old reports whose evidentiary content could not easily have been fabricated at the time they were published and conform to established Bronze Age communities overlain on the indigenous societies. Now we need more informed eyeballs even if they are trying to prove that conjecture wrong.

There is evidence, controversial of course, from the time frames that matter and in the one place that they could be expected to exist. Scattered occurrences of unexpected artifacts have been found in mining locales. Most have a recent genesis as expected but a few simply do not.

The problem is sufficiently troublesome as to bring a whole range of aging methods into question. We are not just talking of the substantial readjustment brought to the science of carbon dating. Radioactive aging has always relied on the assumption that the process is independent of external effects.

If anything, the carbon fiasco should have cured us, but instead we actually have a situation in which the data is often fudged and ignored if it goes against prejudice. This means that although most dating is valuable, it needs to be confirmed by some form of physical method such as checking strata.

Aging is still a young science and we do not know what can alter radiometric readings although we certainly have evidence that it is possible. It is prudent to be overly cautious.

From my articles we have established that the crust shifted with the original pole migrating thirty degrees south along the longitude running through Hudson Bay. This shifted materials of the equator and led to compressive forces that lifted both the Andes and the Himalayas. It also led to a lot of additional alteration at the same time that we do not easily recognize.

One of those events may be the Columbia River basalt flows. It is actually the sort of thing that could have happened then. The studies on aging were saying that they were far older than that. And I would have been happy to simply leave it at there. Except human artifacts were then located below the basalt itself. When that happens, something has to give and ignoring the evidence is utterly unacceptable.

At which point everyone remembers that the basalts look fresh. That is also my beef about a lot of the mountains in the Andes and Himalayas and along the ring of fire. There are simply way too many surfaces defying gravity for a few million years to be very believable. If anything, the record shows an eruption of activity perhaps fifteen thousands of years ago followed be a steady settling down of such activity.

This also suggests that we should look to the Northern points of weakness and this quickly gives us the hyperactive Alaska volcanoes and Iceland by itself astride the crustal divergence rifts. Iceland likely was build during this era. The oldest rocks in Iceland are a meager 23,000 years, at least the last time I checked the literature.

It always amazes me that when you have a successful conjecture, how easily evidence falls into place. Right now we know specifically where to look.

I will make one additional comment. The early proponents of a crustal shift including Hapworth and Einstein opened the door to a couple of additional shifts which I dismissed as unlikely. With the advent of direct human causation, additional shifts become feasible and simply may have been necessary to achieve the final configuration that has given us the Holocene.

This is just a beginning. There are many reports out there that have been shelved that suddenly make a lot of sense if we are using my conjectures. If you see something in an odd location that I should see, let me know.

China sends Global Warming Ransom Note

This is a timely article on the likelihood of international agreements similar to the Kyoto accord. I never thought that accord was ever worth the paper it was written on. Particularly since India and China begged off because of poverty and the USA refused to have anything to do with it. Of course the Europeans found a marvelous way to game it all while looking serious. And Canada said yes and our then liberal government promptly forgot about it all, leaving it to their successors to take the heat for telling the truth.

The joke was on everyone who believed any of it.

Of course with the global chilling possibly about to set in with a vengeance, it is wise to drag our feet for another couple of years. Someone needs to tell Obama that this is a great time to promote the excuse that he needs to concentrate on saving the global economy first for the next two years.

There is a real need to create global initiatives that contribute to the successful terraforming of the planet. Suspending development in order to prevent a third of the population from rising out of total poverty is not a good idea. Expanding their participation in the globe’s economic life is a good idea and can be a powerful global initiative.

That can be in the form of guarantees supporting micro credit everywhere. The infrastructure and expertise is growing naturally and making it a global undertaking would be a wonderful confirmation.

Adding the remaining third of the global population to the world of consumption will supercharge global growth for the next two generations.

China Sends Global Warming Ransom Note

November 2, 2008

by Dennis T. Avery

China has now destroyed Western hopes for a new global warming agreement, just weeks before global talks in Poland aimed at writing a successor for the Kyoto Protocol- which expires in 2012. China has attached a ransom note to its Polish meeting RSVP: They might go along with a new warming pact if the rich countries agree to hand over 1 percent of their GDP-about $300 billion per year-to finance the required non-fossil, higher-cost energy systems the West wants the developing countries to use.

Bad timing: The U.S. and Europe are trying to bail their financial systems out of Barney Frank's Fanny Mae/Freddy Mac sub-prime mortgage adventure. "Climate change policies need a lot of money to be invested. However, developed countries have not made any substantive promises about how much they are going to spend on this," said Gua Guangsheng, head of China's Climate Change Office on Oct. 28. "And they did not fulfill some of the promises they made in the past very well either."

China, India, Brazil, and Mexico had already demanded-in July- that the developed countries cut their own emissions

by 80-95 percent by 2050. Very unlikely. The EU has loudly boasted of trying to set an 80-percent cut in its emissions, but that now looks impossible. Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Greece are part of a "blocking force" saying says they can't afford to give up coal and oil during a financial crisis. Especially when the only alternative is imported Russian gas; Russia recently "invaded" Georgia, many think to stop Georgian efforts to build a gas pipeline that would have competed with Russia's.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who helped create the Kyoto Protocol, now says that drastic cuts in CO2 emissions are "ill-advised climate policy." She's building 26 brown-coal power plants instead, and re-thinking the German promise to scuttle its nuclear power plants.

Don't spend much of your "worry time" on a new climate treaty however. Global temperatures are doing their best to tell us that CO2 isn't very important after all.

Global thermometers stubbornly refused to rise after 1998, and have plummeted in the past two years by more than 0.5 degree C. The world is now colder than in 1940, when the Post-WWOII Industrial Revolution started spewing lots of man-made CO2 in the first place. On October 29, the U.S. beat or tied 115 low-temperature records for the date.


Alaska, which was unusually warm last year, recorded 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit that night-beating the previous low by 4 degrees F.

London had snow in October for the first time in more than 70 years.

The 2007-08 temperature drop wasn't predicted by the global climate models, but it had been predicted by the sunspots since 2000. Both the absent sunspots and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation now predict a 25-30-year global cooling. After that, the remaining enthusiasm for global warming agreements will presumably have vanished-without any big payoff to the Chinese government.

Meanwhile, India is about to rescue our Appalachian coal industry. India is already importing 50 million tons of coal per year, and sees our high-sulfur eastern coal as an under-priced energy resource. While New York and Philadelphia import low-sulfur coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin, India wants to buy not just Appalachia's coal but the mines that produce it. They note, "It's a buyer's market."

Jon Turk and the Jomon road

I am reading the book written by Jon turk titled 'In the Wake of the Jomon' in which he recounts his expedition in one man vessels from Japan up through the Kurils and along Kamchatka and onto Alaska. Two boat types were used, at first with Windriders to Kamchatka, and finally with sea kayaks.

This was a practical effort to evaluate the possibilities and the limitations faced by these stone age seafarers. He is successful in doing just that.

Two principal routes have been espoused for the peopling of he Americas. The earliest been the ice age sea route that allowed mariners to travel the Pacific Coast from Asia down through to the tip of South America starting around 20,000 years ago when making the sprint across the top of the Alaskan gulf was possible. They relied on sea food for sustenance including seals and walruses.

The second route was the late opening of the passage between the Cordilleran Ice Sheet and The Laurentide Ice sheet after the Pleistocene Nonconformity, allowing big game dependent hunters to break into North America from the Bering North Slope. These are the folks who perhaps created and used the Folsom point to take down the large game around them.

I was an early fan of the sea route and of course welcome the steady addition of evidentuary support. So perhaps I am a little biased. The point that I make in my book Paradigms Shift is very simple and is based on anthropological reports of hunter gatherers living in a productive ecosystem. It is that a successful group that is able to occupy a hunting ground like a fishing village will have an increase in population over the carrying capacity of the range. This will lead to a calving off of a subset of sufficient young people who will then march over to the next empty hunting range or in the case of the coast, the next available safe landing and build a new settlement. This has been going on forever.

Jon Turk imagines intrepid voyagers who imagined a new world a thousand mile away. I imagine brave young men who scouted out a suitable location forty miles away and then dragged their wifes there while promising to visit home often. Generation after generation others followed these stepping stones and helped create stepping stones themselves, until they faced long barriers of ice that made return unlikely. Eventually a few would make the sprint, or conditions ameliorated enough to make it easier. In any event, in a thousand years or so, their descendants were moving south along the coast into constantly improving conditions.

What Jon shows us is that it was all very possible and actually inevitable using the skin boats of the time and place. The folk most likely were living throughout the Siberian coast merely including Northern Japan. In fact we have every reason to suspect that these mariners were also the same stock as the Polynesians and other early stock that made up the populations of 20,000 years ago. Remember that the onset of agriculture selected through population growth several small tribal groups who then became large enough to largely impose their genetic characteristics onto the remaining populations. The Han Chinese is perhaps the best example but is hardly unique.

Our scholars of the past have been so bound up in attempting to classify peoples as to their characteristics, that they have often been blinded to the obvious. What woke me up was a photo of a crowd of people in the Tibetan mountains. Their features could have been dropped in among the Haida and no one would have noticed. In fact the northern global root stock is discernible as such and it differentiated across Asia Europe and the Americas during the past 20,000 years. Were differentiation was minimized was in those areas where agriculture was a latecomer or never arrived and the tribal ethos was sustained. This describes the Haida and the Tibetans and other constrained northern populations.

Jon shows us both that the the challenges were daunting in the extreme but yes they could be mastered. And yes, men would die. His own trip rolled the dice several times and it is a surety that ten such trips would kill someone sooner or later. Jon of course, made no serious effort to live off the sea on this trip. It would be neat to retrace part of the route with an Australian bushman aboard just to gain his insight of even for him is a hostile foreign environment. His instincts may inform us.