One Ocean Expedition 2025-2026 

A 12-month global voyage with the Norwegian tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl - a floating ambassador for the UN Ocean Decade. Combining sail training, ocean science, education and diplomacy to inspire action for a sustainable ocean. 

2025 - 2026

One Ocean Expedition

Statsraad Lehmkuhl departed Herradura Bay, Costa Rica on December 13 and is now at sea en route to Cartagena, Columbia, via the Panama Canal. The ship will arrive Cartagena on December 22. Aboard are everyday people sharing the journey.

Over the course of a year, the expedition will visit ports across three continents. Several legs are open to the public - no sailing experience needed! Welcome on board!

Sailing route

At sea en route to Cartagena

Follow our journey

Statsraad Lehmkuhl visits Herradura Bay, December 9 - 13, 2025

Herradura Bay, Costa Rica

In the ports Statsraad Lehmkuhl visits, schoolchildren are invited to share how they experience climate change affecting the environment where they live. They do this by handing over a message in a bottle to the captain.

Delivering emergency messages to the grown-ups

Marine biologist Adrian Munguia Vega is looking for species never seen before. – People believe that, okay, we are just traversing an empty ocean, that there is not much going on because we cannot see it. But there is a lot going on, you know.

In search of the secrets of the Gulf of California

Latest news

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Following the success of the One Ocean Expedition 2021–2023, Statsraad Lehmkuhl is once again setting sail on a 12-month circumnavigation to promote ocean sustainability. The voyage will include 27 ports of call across three continents, combining ocean science, education and international cooperation to raise awareness about the crucial role of the ocean for a sustainable future.

On The One Ocean Expedition, Statsraad Lehmkuhl is filled with students, researchers and voyage crew who all work together to sail the big ship and gather experience and knowledge about the ocean.

Life on board

Tromsø, Norway

Bergen, Norway - Lerwick, UK

Reykjavik, Iceland

Nice, France 

Ponta Delgada, the Azores (Portugal)

Nuuk, Greenland

St. John's, Canada

Bermuda

Los Angeles, USA

Bermuda - Panama Canal 

Vancouver, Canada

Seattle, USA

San Francisco, USA

San Diego, USA

Ensenada, Mexico

La Paz, Mexico

Herradura, Costa Rica

Cartagena, Columbia

Herradura, Costa Rica - Panama Canal

Norfolk, USA

Cádiz, Spain

Brest, France 

Dublin, Ireland

Bergen, Norway

Costa Rica in Central America is a fascinating destination for anyone who loves nature experiences: a long coastline with beautiful beaches and mangroves, large and small islands, lakes and rivers, mountains rising to more than 3,400 meters, untouched forests, and rich wildlife.

A quarter of the country is protected, so it is no surprise that tourism is an important source of income.

Costa Rica was colonized by Spain in the 16th century and gained independence in 1821 when the country became part of the First Mexican Empire, and then a member of the Federal Republic of Central America in 1823. In 1847 Costa Rica formally declared independence.

After a bloody civil war in 1948, the country became the first in the world to abolish its military, and it has held free and fair elections ever since.

Costa Rica cultivates bananas, pineapples, coffee, and other crops, but the production of medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, software development, and ecotourism are now the country’s most important industries.

Statsraad Lehmkuhl anchors in Herradura Bay, about an hour’s drive from the international airport in the capital, San José, located inland.

Herradura means horseshoe in Spanish - which is exactly what the bay looks like: a wide curve with dark, fine sand at the innermost part. 

The bay is one of the country’s most popular destinations. In Herradura you’ll find hotels, apartments, a golf course, and a marina with boat rentals. But no pier large enough for a 98-meter sailing ship, so Statsraad Lehmkuhl will lie at anchor in the bay.

Costa Rica has a tropical climate, warm all year round, and only two seasons; one wet and one dry. 

Over the course of a year, 1,629 mm of rainfall falls, most of it between May and November. The rest of the year sees little rain. The normal maximum temperature in Herradura ranges between 29 and 31 degrees year-round.

Normal maximum temperature in December: 29.9 °C
Normal rainfall in December: 21 mm

A message in a bottle is something we usually associate with an emergency, something cast into the sea by a shipwrecked person asking for help when no other means of communication exist. During the One Ocean Expedition, messages in bottles are also being sent out, but here the emergency messages come from children to adults.

Here you can read about the Message in a bottle -project and how schools can take part.

Also in La Paz, the ship received messages in bottles.

– Message in a Bottle can be anything from nice drawings to video productions. And yes, it’s very moving to see how engaged the kids are. There’s no doubt that the generation growing up now has much more on their agenda than my generation ever did, says Captain Jens Joachim Hiorth.

Three school classes came on board in La Paz, 130 children. Jens Joachim was handed the messages, and one of the students explained what they had created and how they had approached the task.

– I haven’t had the chance to go through everything yet, but what I have seen so far is wonderful, Jens says with a smile. We even received a bottle ship, they had made a little ship and placed it inside a bottle! They may have had a bit of help with that, because that’s not exactly easy. But it was fantastic, and I’m looking forward to seeing everything displayed.

All the Message in a Bottle -items will be exhibited during One Ocean Week when Statsraad Lehmkuhl returns to her home port of Bergen, Norway, in April 2026. The messages will also be available to view on the One Ocean Expedition website.

After the handover, the children were shown around the sailing ship. For that, Captain Jens Joachim needed help.

– These were young children who only speak Spanish. Fortunately, our science coordinator Natacha speaks Spanish, so she did an excellent job showing all 130 of them around and explaining everything.

The purpose of the One Ocean Expedition is to raise awareness and share knowledge about the ocean, and Message in a Bottle is an important part of this.

– I think it’s an important project because it supports the whole idea behind the One Ocean Expedition, to reach everyone, from the very youngest to the very oldest, all the way up to heads of state in the most extreme case. So Message in a Bottle is a very important element, especially because it’s we adults who have created the mess. And then comes a generation after us that unfortunately has to deal with the problems, says Jens Joachim.

– But with the level of engagement they show, there might be hope. Still, they will need some help to get started. We have a lot of work left to make things as easy as possible for them when the baton is passed on.

Jens Joachim believes the next generation will manage to clean up.

– Yes, I do. I mean, I have two little girls myself, and if I didn’t have hope, I would sink into some kind of deep depression. So of course I have hope for the next generation.

The Gulf of California is 1126 kilometers long and between 50 and 240 kilometers wide, separating the Baja California Peninsula from the rest of Mexico. The gulf is part of the Pacific Ocean, but it is so vast that many consider it its own body of water, the Sea of Cortés.

It’s not the size that fascinates marine biologist Adrian Munguia Vega - it’s the depth, more than 3000 meters at its deepest point.

Vega is a researcher affiliated with the University of Arizona in Tucson in the USA, and also the founder and director of a private genomics lab based in La Paz in Mexico. The laboratory he leads is developing new techniques to measure biodiversity with genomic tools in the ocean.

Vega is collecting the tiny particles that all animals and plants leave behind where they live, particles that contain DNA - genetic material.

– The ocean is a soup of DNA. You know, every animal, plant, anything that lives in the ocean releases its DNA the same way that when we go into a pool - you know strains of your hair fall out, and cells from your skin will peel off. It is the same with fish, and all the invertebrates - they release DNA to their environment. And over the last ten years the DNA sequencing technologies have advanced very far, and now we have the ability to sequence millions of sequences simultaneously, Vega explains.

To sequence DNA means identifying the order of the four building blocks that all DNA consists of, shortened A, T, C and G. The sequence is unique to each species. Once you know it, you can determine which animal or plant the particle comes from.

The method is called eDNA, short for environmental DNA, and Statsraad Lehmkuhl has the equipment scientists need both to collect water samples and to filter them so the particles can be analyzed.

The Gulf of California sits where the Pacific and the North American tectonic plates meet. Twelve to fifteen million years ago, the Pacific plate tore away the piece of the North American plate that is now the California Peninsula, and the gulf opened up in the rift that formed.

This is one of the most diverse regions in the world, home to more than 5,000 species of small invertebrates. Parts of the Gulf of California are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But only a small share of all species is known, far fewer than scientists once believed.

It used to be common knowledge that most species live near the ocean surface, and that their numbers decline the deeper you go. Now the marine biologists understand that this was due to a bias in their knowledge.

– As we are starting to get more samples from the deep ocean, we are realizing that that's not the case. Some of the water samples from the deep have the same number of species, and sometimes even more species, than at the surface. And we are realizing that samples from the deep ocean are very diverse. At the same time the species that we see at the surface, where we can dive, where we can observe them, are very different from what we see in the deep ocean. So, you know, it's changing our view, the deep is not a very lonely, empty space. It is a place that has a rich biodiversity, we just didn't have the tools before to observe it, and we just assumed that there was not much going on there, Vega says.

Vega compares the DNA sequences in his samples with sequences registered in genetic databases. One is maintained by the US, one in Europe, and another in Japan. All three are updated daily and contain DNA sequences for all known species.

Often, there is no match, meaning the species that shed a particle in the deep has never been observed before.

– When we sample the deep ocean many of the sequences, maybe half, don't have a match, which means that nobody has seen anything like it. And that just tells you that we haven't spent much time exploring the deep ocean, and there are not a lot of people doing DNA sequences to try to understand what lives there, Vega says.

– It is first when we understand what is living there, we can try to understand, okay, are these species maybe for human consumption? Are they a source of protein that we can exploit or not? Are there any endangered species here that we need to protect, and what ecosystem services are these species doing, and why are they important for us?

For Vega and his colleagues, joining Statsraad Lehmkuhl sailing along the California Peninsula and into the Gulf of California is a unique opportunity.

– There is not a lot of information from the deep ocean in general in the world, and very little especially in Mexico. So we hope to maybe describe for the first time which animals and plants that live in this place. The research tools that the ship has, give us access to parts of the ocean that are very difficult to reach unless you have a large vessel with a lot of cable and tools that you can deploy to take water samples from the deep ocean, he says.

Vega uses “the rosette,” one of the scientific instruments on board Statsraad Lehmkuhl, to collect water samples. He also deploys a camera to film what exists down in the depths.

– Every time we drop a camera, we see something. Sometimes we are able to reach the bottom, and every time it's just like a space exploration. You don't have any idea where you're gonna land, he says.

– Sometimes you land in very cool places that you never dreamt of, and you are maybe the first one seeing it. We have found rocky surfaces full of sponges, really big sponges, like a sponge garden, beautiful. People believe that, okay, we are just traversing an empty ocean and there might be just sand down there. That there is not much going on because we cannot see it - but there is a lot going on, you know. So for me, my real goal is to make people understand by showing it.

It’s easy to see that what drives Vega is not only scientific curiosity, but also a deep and personal desire to explore.

– Well, you know for me, exploring the ocean depths is really exciting because it's so close to home. But you are at the surface all the time, it is unreachable, you know. So for me, it's just the concept of being there but not being able to see - and then suddenly having these new technologies that allows you to understand and see what's going on. I think that's really amazing.