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Editor's Note
The Waypoint is moving to a fortnightly rhythm — not less, but deeper. And the first of those longer gaps is one I'm spending off-grid, on the far side of signal. A note on both, before the edition proper.
Conflicts & Crises
The Slipped Anchor
Almost all of the world's data, and some ten trillion dollars a day, crosses a few hundred fragile cables on the ocean floor. Since 2023 someone has been cutting them — and maritime law has no clear way to stop it.
Europe · Structural
Nobody Came in Time
2,300 dead this year, 1.5 million driven from home — a record, more than one Haitian in ten. In June the UN chief came in person and named the real adversary: indifference. A new force is arriving, far below the strength it was promised.
Caribbean · Developing
The Lights as a Lever
A US fuel blockade — imposed after American forces seized Venezuela's president in January — has cut Cuba's oil to almost nothing, collapsed its grid again and again, and tipped ten million people into what the UN now calls a humanitarian crisis. Largely off the world's front pages.
Caribbean · Developing
The Lens
Lead Story

Life Support

Iceland resumed killing fin whales this summer for a market that no longer exists. Follow the money and the mystery deepens — but the money is not the real story. It is what the money keeps missing.

Iceland · Dateline: Saturday 11 July 2026

On the night of 21 June, two harpoon vessels that had left Reykjavík days earlier vanished — not beneath the waves, but from the screens. Hvalur 8 and Hvalur 9 switched off their Automatic Identification System, the transponder that lets any mariner or coastguard read a ship's position on a public map. To anyone watching from shore, the boats simply blinked out.

There is nothing illegal in it. The Icelandic Coast Guard confirmed the decision rests with each vessel's captain, and the ships still reported their positions privately, by satellite, every hour. But every seafarer knows what going dark signifies. You switch off AIS when you would rather not be watched. And Iceland's whalers had reason: the season's first two fin whales — the second-largest animal ever to live — were hauled up the slipway at Hvalfjörður at four in the morning,

Science & Space
Oceans that aren't ours
The most interesting oceans in the solar system are the ones we can't see — hidden seas under the ice of Europa and Enceladus. This year the case they could host life grew stronger, and the robots built to find it are being tested under Antarctic ice.
Global · Science
The World
The treaty meets the water
In January the High Seas Treaty came into force — the first tool able to protect the two-thirds of the ocean beyond any border. The distance between that text and the water, and the big powers still standing outside it, is the story of the year ahead.
Global · Analysis
The Water Beneath the Cloud
We talk about artificial intelligence as if it lived in the cloud. A new UN report measures what it actually consumes on the ground — electricity, water and land — and warns that getting more efficient may only make us use more.
Global · Structural
The Overlooked — Stories the world missed this week
Pacific · Analysis
The Door Left Open
Everyone reported that China warned Australia over the new Nakamal Agreement. Underneath the headline sat three things the wires skipped: the softer terms Vanuatu won, the climate case it took to the world court, and a clause quietly binding it to police its own passport scheme.
Tanzania · Structural
The Rocks Beneath the Cloud
The race to dominate artificial intelligence is also a race for the minerals and the power that run it — and that contest is being fought, largely unwatched, in places like Tanzania. A first-in-fifty-seven-years visit to Moscow is one visible thread of it.
The Ocean
The seabed goes to the highest bidder

The body meant to govern deep-sea mining still has no rulebook. So one company stopped waiting for the world and went to Washington instead — and by July it could hold the first licence to mine the international seabed, entirely outside the system built to share it.

Pacific · Structural
The current that may not come back
A patch of the North Atlantic is cooling while the world warms — a symptom that the ocean current carrying tropical heat north is slowing. New 2026 work says it's happening sooner than the models expected, and that the door, once crossed, does not reopen.
Global · Climate
A Hotter Year Loading
El Niño is no longer forming — it has formed, and the forecasts now point past "strong" toward the rare "super" tier, with a real chance of the strongest on record. What a very strong El Niño would mean for the year ahead — and why the honest answer is still a tilt in the odds, not a certainty.
Pacific · Climate
Positive Dispatch — The world is not only broken
Past ten per cent
For the first time, more than a tenth of the ocean is formally protected — the fastest expansion on record — and the whales are coming back. The honest asterisk: only about 3% of the sea is fully protected, and a line on a map is not a guarded sea.
A Law for the Open Sea
Two-thirds of the ocean lies beyond any country's borders, and until this year no law could protect it. The High Seas Treaty has now entered into force — the first real framework for the largest commons on Earth.
First, Teach Them to Swim
In a town pressed between mountain and Atlantic, a big-wave surfer's small swim club has spent eight years turning nearness into belonging — opening the ocean to the children who grew up locked out of the water at their feet.
The Good Work

People We Believe In

Organisations doing quiet, unglamorous, effective work. No affiliation, no fees, no algorithm. Just people worth knowing about.

Global Fishing Watch
International · Ocean transparency
The organisation trying to make the ocean's invisible economy visible. Satellite tracking, machine learning, and a public mapping platform exposing what commercial fishing vessels are actually doing in waters where regulators have been out of position for decades.
Learn more →
Misón Tiburón
Costa Rica · Shark and ocean conservation
A Costa Rican marine conservation organisation founded by marine biologists Ilena Zanella and Andrés López. Their scientific data was the foundation for Costa Rica’s first Shark Sanctuary, declared in 2018. Hope Spot Champions for Golfo Dulce. Recognised by the Whitley Awards and the St Andrews Prize.
Learn more →
The Waitt Foundation
Global · Ocean protection & Blue Prosperity
Funds and partners with governments to designate Marine Protected Areas and reform fisheries. Founding member of the Blue Prosperity Coalition. Active across Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, FSM, Bermuda, and the Azores. Conducted the largest nationwide coral reef assessment ever undertaken in Vanuatu.
Learn more →
Place — by Emerald Epke
This Week

The Island Where an Old World Ended and the New World Began

Centuries before any European saw this stretch of ocean, Arawakan-speaking peoples had been moving north out of South America and into the Caribbean, eventually becoming what we now call the Taíno — the people who would later be encountered across Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. The Lucayans were the northernmost branch of that migration: the Taíno of the Bahamas specifically, having settled the islands by around 700 AD. They called themselves Lukku-cairi — island people. By 1492 they numbered roughly 40,000 across the archipelago.

They lived well, despite a real obstacle most visitors never think about. The Bahamas have no rivers, no lakes, and no streams. The islands are limestone through and through, and rainwater simply disappears into the porous rock. The Lucayans became experts at collecting rainwater and locating natural seeps and shallow caves where fresh water collected close to the surface, a skill that later Bahamians,

Also Worth Reading
Narrow Streets, 300 Years of History, and One of the Best Dives in the Caribbean
Ten kilometres south of Guadeloupe, eight small volcanic islands — two of them about the most quietly beautiful places in the Lesser Antilles, and one of the Caribbean's best dives in the channel between.
The Island of Many Treasures
Three hundred and forty miles off Costa Rica, reachable only by a day and a half at open sea, lies an island of buried gold, hammerhead schools, and a family's name carved in the rock. A dispatch from the place Cousteau called the most beautiful in the world.
The Coco de Mer
My experience buying a suggestive nut in the Seychelles.
The Lens — A Bigger Question
Unless you sail across the oceans over and over for the length of a life, the usual observer watches a single stretch of sea and finds it roughly intact — so the ocean can empty in plain sight of everyone, and be seen by no one. I call it horizon blindness. Where the shifting baseline hides the loss in time, horizon blindness hides it in space: a decline too wide for any one horizon to hold.
Justin Jenkin
Captain. Editor. Currently at sea.
This Week’s Essay

Life Support

By Justin Jenkin

Iceland resumed killing fin whales this summer for a market that no longer exists. Follow the money and the mystery deepens — but the money is not the real story. It is what the money keeps missing.

Read essay →

More from the Lens
No Villain, No Countdown
The reef the Exumas made famous is going under a plant you can lift off the coral with one hand. The science is settled and the fix is sixty years old. What's missing isn't knowledge — it's attention.
Where The Plot Said It Would Be
A grey triangle of rock lifting out of the rain, exactly where the arithmetic said it would be — my first ocean passage, at fourteen, sixteen days from Saldanha Bay to a speck found with a sextant and a pencil. The island is still there. The distance that was its whole meaning is not.
The Editors
Justin Jenkin
Editor & Co-founder

Justin escaped Apartheid-era South Africa as a child on a small sailing yacht, on an oceanic voyage that set the tone for the rest of his life. He has spent thirty-eight years at sea, captaining vessels across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans, and raising a family in Vanuatu before the world locked down and separated him from his children for two years.

He holds an MCA Master 3000 GT license, is a qualified marine surveyor with the IIMS, and currently commands a 70-metre superyacht that’s just completed a world circumnavigation with 20+ crew. The Waypoint is his answer to a media world he no longer trusts — and a dedication to his children about the kind of information diet worth having.

British & South African. Currently at sea.

 
Emerald Epke
Editor & Co-founder

Emerald grew up sailing competitively before trading racecourses for ocean passages. She has crossed the Pacific by sail, dived the coral reef systems of Raja Ampat and the Great Barrier Reef, and has spent the last four years managing the complex logistics of a 70m yacht’s circumnavigation and subsequent voyages.

She biked 3,100+ miles across the USA when she was 15, holds degrees in International Relations and French, with a minor in Environmental Sustainability, is an SSI Divemaster with over 300 dives, and is thinking about her Captain’s License next. She remembers a childhood of climbing trees, carefree and happy boredom which fostered imagination, and a childhood that wasn’t stolen by selfies and social media. She edits the Place section and brings to The Waypoint an eye for the world that only comes from having actually moved through a lot of it.

American & New Zealander. Currently at sea.

Why The Waypoint Exists

We started The Waypoint because we were tired. Tired of news that tells you what to think. Tired of platforms that profit from your outrage. Tired of watching young people — our children among them — have their attention and their peace of mind monetised by corporations whose only interest is keeping them scrolling.

We grew up before this. We remember what it felt like to be informed without being overwhelmed. To read something and feel clearer, not more anxious.

The Waypoint is our answer. One edition a week. Every story cross-referenced. No national agenda. No advertiser narrative. No algorithm deciding what you see.

We don't ask for your outrage. We ask for one hour of your week.

— Justin & Emerald

One honest edition. Every Saturday.