Cousteau Heir to Revive TV Ocean Voyage Genre
Date: 11-Aug-03
Country: USA
Author: Gina Keating
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 chain of islands into the nation's largest marine sanctuary, rivaling the size of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
"It's a place I had never been and I'm always intrigued to explore new places," Cousteau told Reuters. "My sense of adventure and discovery gets triggered real fast."
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, he said.
They also encountered sea creatures whose faces, necks and flippers were marred by pollution-induced tumors, he said.
"We have a job to do to make people understand that the plastic revolution is having an extremely negative impact on some parts of the world and we had better do a better job of recycling," Cousteau said.
But the documentary also includes the same feast of marine life that graced his father's work. "We encountered extremely rare fish that people like to collect and pay a fortune for, " he said. "I won't tell people where because I don't want them to go collect them. We were amazed by the diversity."
Cousteau completed primary photography on the documentary on Thursday, but will return to the islands in September to send a submersible to film rare deep-water species.
