SkyTruth Uses Satellites to Track – a Bicycle?!

Shepherdstown, WV –  On Friday, July 25th, SkyTruth will turn our attention from aimless oil tankers and drilling sites in America’s Heartland to an unlikely suspect – a bicycle. Technically we’re more interested in the man riding the bicycle – Tony Long, Director of the End Illegal Fishing campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts. 

Long, a former commander in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy (UK), is taking part in the Action London-to-Paris ride, a 24 hour bicycle, ~240 mile challenge to raise money for children’s medical research. Along the way Tony will be carrying a SPOT personal tracker provided by SkyTruth in order to demonstrate how remarkably simple and inexpensive it is to deploy a satellite monitoring system, whether it’s for a bicycle winding through the hills of Northern France or a 608 – ton fishing vessel plying the waters of the South Pacific for tuna. 
   
SkyTruth CTO Paul Woods is the brains behind putting Tony’s path on the map. “It’s a nice example of how easy it is for anyone willing to be transparent about their actions with a trivial investment of time and money.”  

Some fishing vessels already employ AIS transmitters as a way of broadcasting their location to avoid deadly collisions at sea, but the use of AIS is not mandatory everywhere. 

“Imagine if every commercial fishing vessel were as trackable as Tony’s bicycle. Overnight we could make it infinitely harder to hide illegal fishing,” Woods said. 

Long agrees, “Tracking fishing vessels is a vital element of ending illegal activity – the only thing that is missing is the will to make it mandatory globally.”

You can follow Tony’s progress on the map below, starting at 14:00 GMT (that’s 9:00 AM EDT for those of us in the US). And you can sponsor Tony’s cause by clicking here.