Jean Michel Cousteau has set sail to remote Hawaiian Islands in hopes of reviving interest in televised ocean exploration made popular by his late father, Jacques Cousteau.
Cousteau and his 22-person crew pulled into Honolulu Harbor this week at the end of a six-week voyage to the Northwestern Hawaiian island chain with underwater footage set to air on French and U.S. television in 2004.
Cousteau, 65, hopes the one-hour documentary, called "Voyage to Kure," will further his crusade to persuade Congress to turn the vast 1,200-mile (1,930-km) chain of islands into the nation's largest marine sanctuary, rivaling the size of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
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He also intends the film to spark the same interest in marine conservation that children of the 1960s discovered in "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau."
"We want to help the public understand that ... it's there for them to enjoy and financed by their tax dollars," he said. "I wanted to leave behind me a legacy of what I learned from my dad."
The remote island chain is home to 65 percent of the United States' coral reefs as well as thousands of birds, marine mammals and reptiles, he said.
"Many have been extremely well managed by the fisheries and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ... but the concept of the sanctuary is wider and we wanted to make a commitment to that," Cousteau said.
The crew came upon grim reminders of the impact that humankind has even in the farthest reaches of the ocean. The crew filmed birds nesting among tons of plastic debris that littered the beaches and water, brought from all over the world by a confluence of tides...
They also encountered sea creatures whose faces, necks and flippers were marred by pollution-induced tumors...
'Gina Keating' Reuters 9 Aug 2003
