This week we had a session with BLAKE. This program taught us about the problems in the ocean using Virtual Reality headsets, we saw videos of all the different sea animals, the person from BLAKE also told us that they put a tracker on a whale named Wiremu, we watched Wiremu’s journey from when he left Auckland heading to Australia coming back around passing Antarctica. We also learnt about Sir Peter Blake the founder.
You may be wondering “Who on Earth is Peter Blake!?” well… Peter Blake was a man who wanted to save the ocean, more specifically the animals living within it.
Peter Blake was a New Zealand yachtsmen who won the 1989-1990 Whitbread Round the World Race and the America’s Cup. He also had a passion for looking after the ocean and the sea animals within the ocean.
He turned his focus to taking care of the ocean and raising awareness of the issues the ocean faced. He would voyage to ‘environmental pulse points of the planet’ and tell the world what he had discovered. His exploration vessel the ‘Sea-master’ helped him and his crew journey around the world. Peter and his crew visited Antarctica to discuss and observe the impacts of global warming, they then traveled to the Amazon to look at the impacts of deforestation .
Unfortunately, Peter Blake was shot by pirates while journeying with his crew through the Amazon river.
Many people were devastated by this so they established the Sir Peter Blake Trust (BLAKE) in 2004 to continue his work.