Students from Lipson Co-operative Academy have joined the sail training tall ship Pelican of London for the fifth annual Plymouth Ocean Science Voyage. They just about made up their bunk beds, completed initial training and had dinner, and we’re already deploying scientific equipment over night…
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Imagine you have sailed through the night, watched a beautiful sunrise and finally the anchor has found a firm hold…you are enjoying the calm of the morning…when a buzzing sound alerts you to the presence of a drone overhead, rudely interrupting the privacy of having your breakfast on deck.
That sums up my irritation with drones…up to now!
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The ROV is deployed and we’re watching the seabed habitat in real time. Seaweed…a crab…a glimpse of a fish… What if we could find out what animals are actually living in the sea beneath the waves?
We can and we did!
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Let’s spell it out: cleaning communal toilets, sharing a dormitory with strangers, travel sickness, washing up for 46 people and standing in the wind and rain for hours on end are not common entries on people’s lists of favourite activities.
Yet 27 young people chose to do just that for a chance to live on ‘planet Pelican‘ for a while and experience all the good stuff that comes with it…
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Growing (up) is all about exploring and once more, sail training on board the tall ship Pelican of London proved to be an excellent vehicle for both, exploring self and the world and finding out how we deal with challenges along the way …
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When, in May 2025, the UK Met Office reported that “Northwest European waters are currently experiencing an extreme marine heatwave“, the yachting community in Plymouth had been talking about worsening fouling on their boats for weeks.
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One of the most rewarding aspect of my job on Pelican of London is to sit down with a group of trainees, who just obtained a bunch of data from a scientific instrument, graph it, kick ideas around to make sense of it and place it into a bigger context.
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The reflections of Andrea Garfias about her time on board the tall ship Pelican of London are not only eloquent but also poignant in tumultuous weeks on the streets of England.
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Last year, Olivia Yorke-Dunne was our youngest ever Scientist in Residence on the sail training tall ship Pelican of London. This year, she’s been back.
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Call me a nerd (I’m doing that all the time) but there is something beautiful about the coming together of superb engineering and design to create a gadget that does what it is meant to do, simply, efficiently and fool-proof.
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We’ve only had the ECO by Nortek Group on board Pelican of London for a couple of days and already it’s got sufficiently under our skin for a bad case of anthropomorphism to develop: we named it Bob.
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I am a fan of crowd-sourcing scientific data. I know it has its challenges, not least relating to quality control and assurance, but in my view that is balanced by the added value of engaging the public in the scientific process.
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Challenging Habitat 