Woo hoo! The Mission Aquarius video series we made at One World One Ocean was nominated for a Webby Award in News & Politics!

A big honor, considering the company we are in: NY Times, Washington Post, ABC News, the Daily Beast, etc. This couldn’t have been done without incredible teams (both OWOO, and Aquarius Reef Base), and an incredible story. Read about Mission Aquarius here, and watch the video series:

Aquarius Reef Base is an incredible resource for ocean exploration and understanding of our planet and we almost lost it. After budget cuts it was slated to be shut down, but after a ton of effort by numerous teams and individuals, to bring attention to the issue, new leadership has stepped in with funding to keep it open. While this is due to numerous factors, we’d like to think our team at One World One Ocean had a good deal to do with it.

Read the post on our blog, The Water Column, here.

I first saw a trailer for this film by Chris Jordan months ago. It was beautifully shot, with a haunting message. Thousands of miles from the nearest humans, a seemingly paradisical island inhabited by sea birds is slowly being strangled by our plastic discards. The beautiful creatures go on eating bits of junk they think is food, filling their stomachs with something that will inevitably kill them slowly and quietly, out of view of the world. The pure innocence of animals, beauty of natural ecosystems, and and unintended cruelty of our wasteful ways is powerful.

Jordan asks a simple question: “Do we have the courage to face the realities of our time, and allow ourselves to feel deeply enough that it transforms us?”

The new trailer is even better than the first one. Here it is.

MIDWAY : trailer : a film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.

A polar bear swims in a sea with less and less ice. Photo: Florian Schulz.

As a reminder of my time on the other side of the surfing coin, living in the mountains, riding snow, I still occasionally get powder alerts from various ski resorts. It’s a little painful when we’ve had a long flat spell and I sit down at my laptop to see Snowbird got 20 inches last night. Especially when the water temp drops, the offshores blow cold out of the canyons, and the north swells have yet to show – it starts to seem like all the chilliness is for naught. But then a slide like this comes across the light box and it all makes sense – yes, we have our white winters here at the beach too.

To kick off this blog series, we’d like to introduce you to someone whose work you are already familiar with from visiting this website. As Online Editor for One World One Ocean, Ted has a hand in everything that touches our site, from content to design to implementation to campaign planning to partner and contributor relationships. Between editing the blog, coordinating the development of infographics, and launching the online store, among other tasks, the new father still finds time occasionally to show the rest of the team photos of his adorable son, Cedar.

He is an avid surfer as well as a photographer, and we couldn’t help but notice that he also has a real knack for modeling. Without further ado, this is Ted:

Photo by Geoff Glenn.

I had seen the mag in the grocery store, but hadn’t read the story, or seen this interview. I knew nothing more than that photo. So I got curious partly to hear what it was like, and partly to see how this guy would describe it.

He took a few seconds to respond, like he had to sift through some troubling imprints to access the memory.

After we had spoken for a few minutes I asked, “Did it hold you down long? Or was it quick but really brutal?”

He paused, looked up at me.

“Both…” he said, then trailed off, as if the memory had taken him somewhere he could only go alone. I sat there looking around at the glassy peaks bowling around us, and other surfers scratching into heaving two footers.

He then came back.

“I was surprised.”

“Surprised it was so brutal?” I asked.

“Surprised I came up.”

No qualifiers. Not, “came up so quickly,” or “came up without any injuries,” just “came up.”

Period.

He truly thought it was over.

Someone yelled, “Hey bro!” from the other side of the peak to the north of us, and hurried over, almost paddling over the nose of Nathan’s board, high-fiving him as he tried to finish talking to me, asking if he was heading to the North Shore soon. Nathan finished his sentence, said hi to the guy, and as a set was approaching we paddled off toward different bumps in the peaky, bending beach break morning.

That’s when it happened.

I got the sickest barrel. It was like shoulder high. I was so in there. Seriously. I even caught air on the kick out. It was epic. I think a bodyboarder hooted. There was a guy on the beach with a huge lens. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be in the next issue of Surfer.

And here’s proof I know what it’s like to eat it in the tube on a wave only slightly less threatening than Fletcher’s.

Photo by David Pu’u.