No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all. 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. 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. Thats what they would have done with them anyway, they said. They told us that his was just a small fraction of one days 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. 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 tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening. Ive done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and Im 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 its still out there, everywhere you look. 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, youd just start your engine and motor on, Ivan said. Not this time. In a lot of places we couldnt start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. Thats an unheard of situation, out in the ocean. If we did decide to motor we couldnt do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish. 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. And something else. The boats 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. theherald.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/?cs=12
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 02:39:17 +0000