On the Water

Four mechanical engineering undergraduates from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), have installed a computer and eight velocity sensors on a surfboard, in effort to create the ultimate surfing experience. While the students ride the board across the waves, the sensors register the speed at which the board skims along the water, then send that data to the computer, which proceeds to transmit it wirelessly to a laptop on the beach. The computer also saves the data on an internal memory card. The students built the board for their senior design project, but also as a part of Ph.D. student Benjamin Thompson’s science-of-surfboards project, in which he hopes to design the "perfect" board. Read More

If you saw this thing on your neighbor's trailer, you'd laugh at him. "What sort of pretentious man-child buys a boat shaped like a shark," you'd scoff into your mugaccino, secure in the knowledge that you'd never shell out for something so ridiculous. But you might change your tune if you caught him down at the lake and watched him pulling 50mph (80km/h) barrel rolls, then diving under the surface and launching the thing 12-feet (3.6m) into the air like some sort of evil mechanical dolphin. The Seabreacher X is preposterous in theory, but in practice it's an adrenaline machine that can do things pretty much no other watercraft can – take a look at the video after the jump. Read More

Fouling of hulls is a major problem for world shipping – for private leisure craft as well as large cargo ships – with barnacles being a major culprit. It reduces the performance of vessels and increases their fuel requirements. Medetomidine has proved effective in preventing fouling of ship bottoms and now researchers attempting to develop new, environmentally friendly methods to limit marine fouling have identified the gene that causes barnacles to react to the substance, opening up the possibility of an antifouling paint that is gentle to both barnacles and the environment. Read More

Looking to claim the environmental high ground at the next megayacht owners potluck get together? Sauter Carbon Offset Design has unveiled what it calls “the world’s first carbon neutral megayacht,” and it could be just what you’re looking for. Harnessing energy from sustainable sources such as photovoltaic (PV) cells, power sailing kinetic energy regeneration and wingsails, the Super Nova 60 is capable of generating enough surplus energy to allow it to cruise carbon neutral for 7,000 nautical miles a year... and it can feed energy back into the grid while docked. Now you can enjoy cruising around the Mediterranean in luxury with an environmentally clear conscience. Read More

Bill Stewart has been shaping and selling surfboards since the late 70’s and, like most surfers, it seems that Bill thinks there just aren’t enough daylight hours to enjoy his wave riding past time. To rectify this he’s created a one-of-a-kind board complete with headlights designed specifically for surfing at night. Dubbed the Night Stalker, Stewart’s creation is the first ever shortboard to pack LEDs embedded in the side fins and two 700 lumen headlights contained with the board’s transparent plexiglass nose to form a pair of surfboard headlights. Read More

If an octopus’s garden in the shade is where you like to be then this two-person submarine could be just the ticket. Capable of descending to a depth of 1,000 feet the Personal Submarine gives you and a friend a chance to check out coral reefs, shipwrecks and whatever other attractions can be found on the sea floor. Although, with its rather steep asking price you’ll either really want to be beneath the sea, or have a really large chuck of spare change laying around. Read More

We’ve got cars, motorcycles and bicycles that are electric, so why not hookah air pumps for diving? They make much less noise than their gas and diesel-powered counterparts, they don’t stink up their surroundings with toxic fumes, and they don’t emit carbon. Of course, as is the case with many other e-things, the electricity that powers them has to come from somewhere, and chances are that somewhere isn’t a wind turbine or a solar panel. A new diving system from Brownie’s Marine Group, however, has another ace up its sleeve - a variable-speed compressor that automatically adjusts in accordance to the diver’s demand for air, thus saving power and allowing for longer and/or deeper dives when running off a battery. Read More

What do you do if you want to draw attention to the threats faced by the world’s oceans, in particular the huge amount of plastic waste that ends up in them? Easy, you sail across the Pacific Ocean, visiting and documenting environmental hot spots along the way. That, at least, is what the crew of the Plastiki are in the process of doing. The group of six adventurers set out from San Francisco on March 20th, with Sydney, Australia as their final destination. Three and a half months into the 11,000 nautical mile journey, they’re currently about 4,000 miles from the finish line. What makes their odyssey particularly remarkable is their sailboat, the Plastiki – a craft made almost entirely from recycled and/or recyclable plastic that gets the majority of its flotation from approximately 12,500 two-liter plastic bottles. Read More

Canadian adventurer Greg Kolodziejzyk's planned attempt on the world’s first human-powered Canada-to-Hawaii crossing has been delayed. Kolodziejzyk, who has set previous records for human-powered land and water travel was to embark on the two-month trip this week in his custom-built fully-enclosed pedal-powered kayak named WiTHiN. Unfortunately, however, he encountered some difficulties with the boat that couldn’t be fixed in time to make this year’s departure window. Read More