EAMT Succeeds!

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The sweet smell of success!


Since setting off in November 2012, the East African Marine Transect team have been through and survived a verydifficultexpedition. This was a hard fought expedition, requiring everyone to dig deep into reserves at times we were not even certain we had. To say this wasn’t a pleasure cruise would be an understatement, a big one.

Before we left a mentor of ours told us to write down on pieces of paper everything that we think could possibly happen to us on this expedition. From the average to the down right impossible. I would love to show you these papers because all the impossible ones, like having to abandon ship, were all written down and then laughed over with gay abandon, “oh that will never happen, har har har. “ I hate irony, it’s the universes way of letting you know you are really not as cool as you think.


We had failed, catastrophically, and then clawed our way back to do what we planned in four months, in two under incredible pressure.

And now we can say officially that we pulled it off. None of that would have been possible without the support of everyone on the team and at home and the sponsors that gave us the ability to get the job done. This was a full effort across the board, and we could not be more proud and grateful of our little team of six, the OA2 crew and our extended support base. We still now have to analyze a massive amount of data, putting together the largest collection of base line data of the East African coast line. There may have been detours and obstacles along the way, but in terms of the science and setting out to do what we originally proposed five months ago, this was a complete success.


Maybe this is what adventure is all about? Being able to face your fears and failures, but not let them alter the fundamentals of why you chose to get off your butt and walk out the front door in the first place.


In the words of Mark Twain, and because I have a thing about quoting great authors, and it’s aptly nautical:


“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor and catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore.”

Because life is either a great adventure, or nothing.


Thanks for coming along with us on ours. In the following weeks I will be updating the Moving Sushi blog with some of our findings, the more exiting and interesting parts of the expedition.  Follow us on twitter or facebook and subscribe to our blog to receive details on how the data write up and analysis goes,


And see you on the next one.


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