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No nation  ·  No sponsor  ·  No algorithm  ·  Just the world, honestly witnessed
Conflicts & Crises
The Deal the Fighters Didn’t Sign
Israel and Lebanon’s governments agreed a US-brokered framework in Washington. But a deal binds the signatories, not the gunmen — and on the ground, the firing hasn’t stopped.
Lebanon · Developing
Two Days of Open Fire
Open US–Iran strikes gave way to a memorandum the two capitals already describe differently. Washington calls it a settlement; Tehran says nothing is final; the Strait of Hormuz stays closed.
Middle East · Developing
Faster Than the Tracing
The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has roughly doubled in a week, to 635 cases — and there is still no vaccine for this strain.
DR Congo · Developing
The World This Week
Lead Story · The Pacific

The Lines Come Off the Map

On 11 June, President Trump reopened roughly half a million square miles of the Pacific's most protected waters to commercial fishing. The case for it is real. So is the case against it — and so is the federal court that struck down its near-twin ten months ago.

On 11 June, with a single proclamation, President Trump reopened roughly half a million square miles of the Pacific’s most protected waters to commercial fishing — undoing protections that three presidents, across both parties, had built up over fifteen years around Papahānaumokuākea, the Mariana Trench, and Rose Atoll.

The case for it is real: a domestic fleet hemmed in by foreign competitors and its own shrinking grounds. So is the case against — the science of refugia, and a federal court that struck down a near-identical reopening just ten months ago. What follows is what was opened, who asked for it, and what it means to draw and erase lines on the open sea.

Science & Space
The Net Nobody Drops First
Anthropic has asked the world to slow down before machines learn to build their own successors. The request is more honest than its critics allow — and less likely to work than its authors hope.
United States · Analysis
The World
An Abandoned Atoll Teaches About Ocean Recovery
Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, depopulated for eight decades after nuclear testing, now host some of the highest reef-fish biomass measured anywhere on Earth. The dominant driver of reef health is fishing pressure.
Pacific · Science
The Overlooked — Stories the world missed this week
Tanzania · The Overlooked
The Rocks Beneath the Cloud
The race to dominate AI is also a race for the minerals and the power that run it — a contest being fought, largely unwatched, in places like Tanzania.
Pacific · Deep Dive
The Middle of the Map
For three decades the Pacific has been treated as the calm centre of the world.
The Ocean
Learning to Listen

For the first time, machine learning is finding structure in the sounds whales make — an alphabet, even vowels. We still cannot say what it means, and some doubt the structure is real.

Ocean Briefing
Equatorial Pacific · Climate
When the Pacific Exhales
El Niño has formed, and forecasters now give a super-event better-than-even odds at the winter peak. What that means for the year ahead.
Pacific · Tuvalu
Where the Fuel Stops
When the Iran war pushed global oil markets, the consequences reached Tuvalu — a country of 10,000 people, twenty-six square kilometres of land, and an ocean territory.
Pacific Focus
South Pacific · Structural
The Fleets That Hammer the South Pacific
Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and Taiwanese fleets operate at the boundary of South American EEZs. The species don’t honour the line.
Indonesia · Recovery
What Has Recovered in Raja Ampat: The Misool Story
250% reef-fish biomass recovery in two decades inside the Misool no-take zone. The ocean is capable of recovery when fishing pressure is removed.
Positive Dispatch — The world is not only broken
First, Teach Them to Swim
In Hout Bay, a big-wave surfer’s swim club has spent eight years opening the ocean to the township children who grew up locked out of the water at their feet.
The Vatican on the Seafloor
A coral reef the size of Vatican City. Twenty-eight new species. A cold seep, a whale fall, a phantom jellyfish. All discovered off the Argentine coast on a single expedition.
The Most Effective Tool Against Amazon Deforestation Is Indigenous Land Rights
Indigenous-controlled lands retain forest at 70% higher rates than non-indigenous lands. Brazil on pace for its lowest deforestation year on record. The mechanism that bent the curve.
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 — Cocos Island, Costa Rica

The Island of Many Treasures

Three hundred and forty miles off Costa Rica, reachable only by thirty-six hours at open sea, Cocos Island has no hotels and no roads — just a ranger station, a wall of jungle, and the water Jacques Cousteau called the most beautiful in the world.

Buried pirate gold drew the treasure hunters here for centuries, until the government banned digging altogether. But the real treasure turned out to be the water: one of the last places on earth where scalloped hammerheads still gather in genuine schools, an apex-predator ecosystem intact because rangers spend months at a time keeping illegal boats out. The real treasure was never gold — anyone who has dived Cocos already knows it.

Also This Week
The Coco de Mer
The world’s largest seed, the double coconut, grows only on two islands in the Seychelles — and the strange, centuries-long fight to protect it.
The Faroe Islands: Eighteen Islands That Decided to Stay
A North Atlantic archipelago of 54,000 people speaking a language descended from Old West Norse. A small place that has decided, repeatedly, to continue being itself.
Rapa Nui: Marine Protection Won, Enforcement Unwon
A Polynesian community on the eastern edge of the Pacific protected 720,000 square kilometres of ocean. The fish honour neither the boundary nor the politics.
The Lens — A Bigger Question
"The danger is not that we misremember the abundance — it is that no one will remember it at all."
Justin Jenkin
Captain. Editor. Currently at sea.
This Week's Essay

As Far As the Eye Could See

By Justin Jenkin

Seven years ago, in a refresher course in New Zealand, I fell into conversation with an Australian who had spent thirty years running purse-seiners in the Indian Ocean. I told him what I’d seen from the late 1980s on — tuna and dolphin in schools so vast they changed the colour of the water to the horizon — and then the sharp falling-off, the schools thinning, breaking apart, finally not there at all. He nodded the whole way through. He had watched precisely the same thing, from the deck of a vessel whose entire purpose was to catch them.

Two men remembering is not a dataset, and the gap between what sailors recall and what science can prove is the real subject of this essay. Part II of The Emptied Sea: what the Indian Ocean’s vanishing tuna reveal about how much we have already agreed to forget — and why the danger is not that we misremember the abundance, but that no one will remember it at all.

Read essay →

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.