Meeting with Skipper Dee Caffari at the VOR Ocean Summit
Today I had all the luck a guy can have. Got a chance to personally salute a phenomenal ambassador for humanity, the oceans, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals – aka Agenda 2030 – Skipper Dee Caffari, sailing for the United Nations in the Volvo Ocean Race boat Turn The Tide On Plastic. We met at the Gothenburg Ocean Summit – a very interesting day with great speakers and panel discussions with reps within the top layers of decision-making in Sweden and from around the world.
Dee has not only raised tremendous awareness on the super serious plastic/ocean issue, she has chosen a crew onboard from a gender equality perspective, a global/international/cultural perspective with 10 nationalities onboard, and a youth perspective. Many of the young crew members sailed in a race like this for the first time. I can not bow myself deep enough for a statement of that kind. Well done Dee! We need more of what you do all the time and everywhere.
Snippet of the interview with Skipper Dee Caffari.
Received a short and nice "Hi" from Victoria, the Crown Princess of Sweden. I am proud to see her participating here at the Ocean Summit and thereby advocating for these important issues. Crown Princess Victoria has been deeply engaged in environmental issues for many years and is doing a great job to help raise awareness and collect resources needed for the solutions needed...particularly for issues on oceans.
Snippet of the interview with Marcus Eriksen, science advisor of the Volvo Ocean Race as well as Co-Founder and Research Director of The 5 Gyres Institute in San Diego. Also the guy who designed and invented the micro plastic trawl we got in our boat and are using along our journey:-)
Jan Eliasson, Former UN Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, made a great and very appreciated introduction and pushed the meaning of the word "together" as being key if we shall be able to solve the tricky issues we are facing now and ahead. I got to salute him personally and at least give him one of our postcards:-)
Snippet of the interview with VOR-scientist Toste Tanhua, responsible for the micro plastic sample filter collections and analysis from the VOR boats Turn The Tide On Plastic and Akzo Nobel. Later in the interview he opened up for an opportunity to compare the VOR-samples from the world's largest oceans with our samples from three of the worlds smallest bodies of waters – Skagerrak, Kattegatt and the Baltic Sea.
Snippet of the interview with Patricia, Marine Biologist at the Stockholm Resilience Center, dealing with and helping the big fishes in the fishing industry...
Bumping into sailor and old friend Marit Söderström from the fabulous Söderström-family with Marit, Johanna and Matthias, who won practically any race on water with sails on anywhere around the world when we all were younger:-) Marit is a tripple World Champion and an Olympic Silver Medalist. Of course she beat me and most of the other guys when she as only female raced (out of competition) in the male Swedish Championship in Flipper in Varberg some 100 years ago haha...Marit, I gratefully learned a lot that day about prejudice, and I will always consider myself being your loyal butler after that:-)
After the summit and the interviews it was time for a race with distinguished guests...here is the Crown Princess Victoria and crew leaving the dock on Turn The Tide On Plastic. I was of course asked to join them, but I said I'd rather get a short and nice film sequence from the dockside haha...
Karun sunglasses were displayed at the Volvo Ocean Race Ocean Summit in Gothenburg and I did buy a pair. They were really good and finally a pair of sunglasses I liked. Unfortunately while filming at some marine wind power plants outside of Denmark I lost them in the water. So my encounter with Karun must be concluded as a total failure on many levels – they did the work of picking up plastic from the ocean, reusing it, and developing cool frames, and I drop them back into the sea water. Ahhhrrrrg...really frustrating and embarrassing.
