[SaveJFC Admin]

This thread is dedicated to our oceans loved by our favorite surfers.  And to WildCoast, the Atlantic Shore and the Gulf Coast. 

[SaveJFC Admin]

"What's the Matter with the Well" by Ben Winship

"What's the Matter with the Well" by Ben Winship

[Sven2]

I Shall Not Be Moved
This video would go along well with yours, Save.
I probably saw it on Facebook. In general I resent spreading bad news, especially if there is no action to be taken. Bottled up anger is harmful!
Here it calls for some action, whatever insignificant it seems.

[skordamou]

New Age Music Nº3:Paul Winter- Lullaby from the Great Mother

[skordamou]

Ocean Lovers - Gulf Spill Call to Action

[SaveJFC Admin]

Not about "our oceans" in particular but just amazing behavior from one of our beautiful ocean creatures...

Dolphin Bubbles: An Amazing Behavior

[Sven2]

You probably saw that, and when I did, my first thought was - they are happy guys, may I join?
Elephants Hit the Beach

[Patrick]

An oily wave crests , so sad 

[skordamou]

When you have a few minutes, this is well worth watching.
Charles Moore - the Great Pacific plastic trash island

[SaveJFC Admin]

The beauty of...

Oceans - Trailer #2

[SaveJFC Admin]

Sam at Pacific Beach in San Diego:  Posted 2 weeks ago...  She says:

"SamuelDavid1981  —  May 28, 2010  — I hope any John from Cincinnati fans out there appreciate the musical reference."

Sam at Pacific Beach in San Diego

[Sven2]

Unfortunately more and more like that....

[Sven2]

If anyone gets to South Cali in August, make a trip to IB:

The 30th Annual
U.S. Open Sandcastle Competition

Friday August 6th, 2010

The Sandcastle Dance kicks off the weekend at the Imperial Beach Boys and Girls Club. This 21 and up event is filled with live music and great company, and is a wonderful way to start off what is sure to be a fun filled weekend!

Saturday August 7th, 2010

In Imperial Beach, California, on Saturday, August 7th, the street festival begins. Over 140 vendors set up for the weekend activities. Continued with entertainment, food, arts and crafts, and lots of fun. Visitors stroll up and down Seacoast Drive, closed to traffic for the event, taking in the sights, sounds, and other sensory experiences of everything the U.S. Open Sandcastle Competition has to offer. The musical entertainment, selected from a wide variety of family friendly local acts, draws a huge crowd every year. The Kids-N-Kastles Competition is held on Saturday afternoon.

Sunday August 8th, 2010

On Sunday August 8th, the official U.S. Open Sandcastle Competition will be held. This is the championship of sandcastle building where the professional sand carvers vie for the title of Master's Champion. Professional and amateur sand carving teams throughout the U.S. will compete in the sandcastle building competition with more than $21,000 in cash prizes. Trained representatives for the US Open Sandcastle Competition will judge all categories. The weekend festivities conclude when the teams are presented with titles and cash prizes presented at the Awards ceremony.

Sandcastle building begins at 9:00am and concludes at 2:00pm. Sculptures are only available for viewing until 4:00pm due to the tides.

from:
http://www.usopensandcastle.com/index.php

[SaveJFC Admin]

Please Donate Generously ... Sponsor a Child
Sunday, October 17th - Imperial Beach Pier Plaza

http://johnfromcincinnati.net/_docs/Dempsey_Scholarship_2010.pdf

Over the past seven years, hundreds of children have enjoyed participating in the WiLDCOAST Dempsey Holder Ocean Festival and Surf Contest. Many of these children have become active WiLDCOAST volunteers playing a direct role in our efforts to protect our coast and ocean.

Last year, we provided scholarships for the children and young adults in our community and a chance to surf in the Dempsey Ocean Festival and Surf Contest.  Please help us continue this effort by supporting the children's scholarship fund so that WiLDCOAST may continue to provide the under-served community of South San Diego County, an opportunity to participate in this family-friendly event that promotes ocean conservation and stewardship, community service and athletic achievement. Many of these children have become active WiLDCOAST volunteers playing a direct role in our efforts to protect our coast and ocean.

After tragedy struck Mark&'s family, a longtime Dempsey participant, he still continued to volunteer for WiLDCOAST events - including helping stop the proposed Trestles Toll Road. He even recruits his friends to volunteer for WiLDCOAST as well. Mark is now in high school, excelling in sports, and plans to attend college after he graduates.

Your gift of $35.00 sponsors a scholarship for children like Mark, so they can thrive in the ocean at the Dempsey and give back to our coast.

Thanks to a Challenge Grant we received from a generous donor, for every new donation we receive or an increased donation from past donors, your gift will be matched 100%.

Donate Online: https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/WildCoast/OnlineDonation.html

Send in your Donation: WiLDCOAST * 925 Seacoast Drive, Imperial Beach, CA 91932
More Information: Contact Celia @ 619.423.8665 x201 * dempsey@wildcoast.net.

Please be generous and give a child the gift of the best day of their year-- the opportunity to enjoy the WiLDCOAST Dempsey Ocean Festival and Surf Contest. For more information, please contact Celia at 619.423.8665 x201 or dempsey@wildcoast.net.


Mahalos,

Serge Dedina, Ph.D.
Executive Director

[Sven2]

Noc the talking whale has told us to get out of the water

The beluga's attempted 'speech' echoes a canary in the mine – and only serves to emphasise the distance between our species


In the 18th century, whalers who heard whales singing beneath their ships believed they were listening to the souls of drowned men. The notion of the silent ocean having a voice seemed so improbable. It wasn't until the second world war and the advent of underwater acoustics that science discovered how vocal whales really are.

Initially it was thought that these sounds were seismic shifts in tectonic plates. Only later was it realised that cetaceans such as blue, fin and sperm whales were the loudest animals on Earth. A fin whale vocalising on one side of the Atlantic can be heard by another fin whale on the other side of the ocean.

Noc, the beluga whale who finds himself newly if posthumously famous after reports that he once told a diver to "get out of the water", hails from the most vocal of all cetacean species: belugas have been dubbed the canaries of the sea. What today's story tells us is nothing new. But it does underline the fact that such whales are not only still kept captive in oceanaria in Europe, Asia and North America, but that they are actively being hunted in Russian waters for sale to such facilities in the United States.

The great whales provide great problems: it is difficult to study them in the field. Smaller, captive cetaceans such as belugas and dolphins offer easier (if less comfortable) opportunities for investigation. The stagers of such marine entertainment often justify their captive cast with scientific studies. Yet historically, this is where much of the still-nascent work on cetacean science was carried out. Some experiments even came out of the military use of cetaceans, which have been trained to lay underwater mines and even kill human divers.

Out of the US Navy's post-war whale programme – much of it still secret – came the most sensational story: that of John C Lilly in the 1960s, whose work included the creation of a 24/7 facility in which researchers could live full-time with their subjects. Lilly's outlandish conclusions on dolphin communication prompted him to declare that they spoke "dolphinese", and in fact constituted an alien race living among us. Lily was later discredited by experiments in which he injected LSD into dolphins' brains. In doing so he set back scientific work on cetacean communication by decades. Only now is it becoming respectable again, shrugging off its anthropomorphic past.

Yet we are human, and sometimes we can only comprehend by seeing the world as our mirror. Noc's plangent, if unmusical, venture into attempted human "speech" also emphasises the greater distance between our species. The disjuncture between human and cetacean underlines this vexed relationship. The whale has represented industrial resource, environmental barometer, and entertainment. It has been co-opted into the human world.

Even the apparently benevolent techniques of modern researchers in tagging whales has been shown to have an adverse effect. We try to assimilate their behaviour – from making them into roving GPS transmitters to furnish nice clean convenient data sets – to "interpreting" their communications in human terms.

Recently, Lou Herman has used more benign ways of establishing cetacean capabilities. Working with two captive dolphins, Phoenix and Akeakamai, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Herman has created an artificial language of signals and gestures to establish that his charges can even understand nuances of grammar and tenses, answering questions and displaying predictive and abstract cognition.

Meanwhile, Hal Whitehead, of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, has also used less intrusive methods – the hydrophone – to identify no fewer than five different sperm whale clans in the Pacific Ocean, each distinguished by communicatory "click" sequences which are as discrete and unique to each clan as a regional accent is to a human being. Like us, whales appear to be defined by the way they speak. For them, it is their cultural expression, their essential sense of self.

Yet the oceanic environment is pumped with anthropogenic noise fit to deafen them. The effect of shipping lanes on the highly endangered right whales of the north-east coast of the US was only discovered after the enforced silence in the days following 9/11, researchers realised that the whales were vocalising much more loudly – apparently resuming their natural voices in the way that the birds around Heathrow airport seemed to sing louder when the Icelandic volcanic eruption of 2010 gave them the window of opportunity.

Noc's pathetic squeaks echo through the fog of noise, a sea canary singing in the mine. We can hear the whale; but are we listening? It's a bit late to tell us to get out of the water.

CLICK ON THE LINK:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2012/oct/23/talking-whale-mimicks-human-speech-video

from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/oct/23/noc-whale?intcmp=239