The ocean is broken
IT was the silence that made this voyage different
from all of those before it.
"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.
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.
"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
tumour 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, marvelled 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.
Recognising the problem is vast, and that no
organisations 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 organisers
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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