[C38] TERRIFYING: ENTIRE PACIFIC OCEAN IS DEAD... Reports VETERAN YACHTMAN Who just went from Aus - Jap - USA
Tom T.
tdtron at earthlink.net
Fri Jan 10 22:47:34 EST 2014
*The Entire Pacific Ocean Is Broken" -- Veteran Yachtman Who Just
Completed A Circuit From Aus >Japan> USA*
*Posted By: **Watchman**
Date: Thursday, 9-Jan-2014 20:44:53 *
IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those
before it.
Not the absence of sound, exactly.
The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves
still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.
And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and
scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.
What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous
similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.
The birds were missing because the fish were missing.
Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had
sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to
do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw
out a baited line.
"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we
didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice,"
Macfadyen recalled.
But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch
was two.
No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.
"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he
said.
"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before
taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of
the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."
But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded
his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.
North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big
fishing boat working a reef in the distance.
"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like
a mother-ship," he said.
And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the
morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that
the ship had launched a speedboat.
"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry
in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in
deep trouble."
But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The
speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of
fruit and jars of jam and preserves.
"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.
"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had
obviously been in the sun for a while.
"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish.
There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them.
They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they
would have done with them anyway, they said.
"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch.
That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was
rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day
and night and stripped it of every living thing."
Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among
countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing
exactly the same thing.
No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing.
There was nothing to catch.
If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.
The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for
most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a
degree of fear.
"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead,"
Macfadyen said.
"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling
helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumor on its head.
It was pretty sickening.
"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing
turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this
time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."
In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.
"Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of
years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable
load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there,
everywhere you look."
Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United
States, marveled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic
buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets.
Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol,
everywhere.
Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by
the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.
"In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just
start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.
Not this time.
"In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling
the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard
of situation, out in the ocean.
"If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the
daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.
"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into
the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's
all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces
the size of a big car or truck.
"We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of
boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big
container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.
"We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing
through a garbage tip.
"Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the
hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As
it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits
and pieces we never saw."
Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway
domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and
utensils.
And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by
sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off
Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.
BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the
shock and horror of the voyage.
"The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.
Recognizing the problem is vast, and that no organizations or
governments appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about
it, Macfadyen is looking for ideas.
He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.
More immediately, he will approach the organizers of Australia's major
ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that
uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.
Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to
an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey
forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern
in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure
in Japan.
"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the
mess," he said.
"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from
burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the
debris there."
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