A large gathering of sponsors, suppliers, team members and their families, politicians, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, along with the general public attended the ceremony outside the Emirates Team New Zealand base. Team New Zealand christened their new America’s Cup yacht “Te Aihe”, Maori for dolphin, at the official launch in Auckland.
The name Te Aihe (Dolphin) is based on the whakatauki (proverb):“Mā te Aihe e tuitui ai i te ngaru moana, mā te Rangatira e tuitui ai i te tangata”. “As the dolphin sows through the seas so does a leader sew people together”.
It was the first AC75 launched by any of the five teams that will be involved at Auckland 2021. Challengers Luna Rossa of Italy, INEOS Team UK, American Magic and Stars + Stripes Team USA will sail against each other with the winner going on to race Team New Zealand for the Auld Mug.
The boat was christened at 7.35am on September 6, 2019, local time in Auckand, by Marcus Gerbich, a member of the Motor Neuron Disease Association, which is the team’s official charity. The sleek 75-foot boat, painted black, red, grey and white, was blessed by Ngati Whatua who have a long association with the yachting syndicate.
The revolutionary design was suspended on a crane outside the base and splashed in the water after the traditional champagne moment. It didn’t feature its huge mast.
Ironically, just as much of it was on show yesterday when it sat in a cradle on the base’s forecourt, having its mast maneuvered into position by a large crane. Its hull and foil arms were clearly on display with shrouding not allowed under the rules that govern this 36th edition of the America’s Cup.
It is estimated the state-of-the-art boat took more than 100,000 man hours to design and build with around 65 people involved in that process. For the first time Team New Zealand have fully built their own boat at a purpose-built facility on Auckland’s North Shore.
TNZ chief executive Grant Dalton said it was a nervy time for him during the launch with the boat hoisted in the air. “It is a special morning for us, it’s been a long time coming. It’s emotionally stressful watching a boat up in the air at a launch like this. It rained, which I’m told is good luck. It’s been low key, which is the way we wanted it.”
Team New Zealand ace Peter Burling can’t wait to go from the virtual world to reality after months spent on a state-of-the-art simulator. That experience is about to be replaced by the real thing, with the revolutionary 75-foot foiling monohull launch and sailing at the first weather-appropriate opportunity.
Much of the initial work will be about calibrating the real boat against what was revealed on the simulator and understanding how to fully power and maximize a yacht that has never been seen before, let alone sailed. This is racing on a whole new scale.
“It’s going to be incredible to get it out and start debugging it,” Burling said of a boat he has had plenty of input into through the design and build process. “We have a massive list of things to check off. We’ve been looking at it getting built for the last little while now and it’s incredible to see it all coming together. It’s going to be a pretty cool spectacle for everyone to see. It just pushes the sport that much further and the performance that much further.”
I know a girl from an island She stands apart from the crowd She loves the sea and her people She makes her whole family proud
This piece was created as part of the @fandomtrumpshate auction, for @bourbakiaxiom and @jotoledo09. Thanks to you guys for donating and thanks to everyone else for bidding. The world is tough but these charities are doing good and important things.
Just a reminder that the first NASA astronauts were supposed to be women because generally they are smaller, lighter (less weight in the cockpit means less fuel required) and eat less than men and so would be easier to accommodate in space.
Both men and women trained (and many of the female finalists had higher scores than the men), but they were completely excluded from the final selection because of their gender.
13 women underwent final training, all were accomplished pilots with at least 1000 hours flying experience, all passed the necessary tests, all could have been astronauts if only they were afforded the opportunity.
[below, Jerrie Cobb photographed during testing]
They are collectively known as the Mercury 13, there’s a great blog entry about them here and a brilliant PBS documentary too.
Their names are Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Janet Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane “Janey” Hart, Jean Hixson, Rhea Hurrle, Gene Nora Stumbough, Irene Leverton, Jerri Sloan and Bernice Steadman. They should be remembered and celebrated for their role in the history of space exploration.
It wasn’t until 2 decades later that Sally Ride became the first woman in space in 1983.
7 of the surviving members of the Mercury 13 are pictured below, 33 years later in 1995.
The little “eggs” are
filled with spores! The spores are formed inside the capsules (called
peridioles).
The peridioles are
launched out of the “nest” (called the peridium) when hit by a falling raindrop at a precise angle. Raindrops that hit the rim of the cup/nest are apparently most
effective at launching the peridioles. They can travel via raindrop-launch up
to 1 meter!
Also interesting to note:
the peridioles are often attached to the nests by little wiry cords (called
funiculi). There are some species of
bird’s nest fungi, however, without these cords. When hit at the right
angle, the funiculus (or funicular cord) is said to help the peridiole wrap around whatever it lands
on (image below).
There are some AMAZING videos of this that I’m unable to post in a reply but they’re available here if you scroll to the bottom of this study.
In my experience, bird’s nest fungi are hard to find only because of their tiny size but they’re said to be widely distributed, so I’d keep looking! I tend to find them growing next to other mushrooms or if I’m looking super carefully at the ground anyway (like in my garden if I’m pulling weeds or taking photos of insects). I’ve honestly never found them while intentionally looking for them. They’re saprobic, meaning they feed off decaying matter, so I often find them in very heavily mulched areas growing on woodchips or in areas under trees or bushes where there’s decaying leaf litter.
Ok so… cool story: I found even more things that weren’t accounted for/weren’t right (and needed to be uploaded/reuploaded/fixed) when I was typing this post.
I’ll reblog this post with the missing things when they’re done too, so consider this sort of a rough draft. If you want to share all the video together, please don’t link this post externally and wait until I can link to the complete YT playlist? I’ll also make another post for linking/tagging/reblogging purposes.
List largely gleaned from the schedule website, but there were some changes to the schedule that I believe have been accurately reflected.
Some content was omitted – the vast majority of that was all the “filming other people’s films” – because that’s not cool. I’ll link to things when the filmmakers make that stuff available (or if they actually find this and want me to post it? But please note that some of it I actually didn’t record at all.)
@cetaceanawareness, your talk was also excluded because it was nestled in the Scholar Advocacy segment that the To the Sea (upcoming documentary) folks were in. If you would like your clip excised and posted (or just want the video in general) let me know?
If Rachel Clark stumbles across this and wants the reading from her book included, I can do that too. This is her book.
I’m new to dealing with a ton of video like this (which is why it took me so long to get this all sorted) – but the idea is that I’ll learn and improve from here on out.
There’s a little corner of trees (casuarinas, I think) that I walk through most days. They’re tucked between the zoo wall, a tram track and the hockey/netball centre. They don’t make a very big forest. Sometimes when I step in, if the wind is blowing gently, I close my eyes and pretend I’m in the country. I’m really glad this mini forest exists, and it often makes me happy, but sometimes that happiness is temporary and I’m left with sadness instead.
So I overlaid two photos together, to give some sense of that tension.
