Mother Nature will
solve it all but over a far larger span of time than I had counted on. This is two years on and far too much
remains.
What is a certainty is
that the global ocean fishery will itself collapse. All these methods can be barely sustainable
provided strip harvesting is practiced along with direct tenure or license. The strips provide refugia for immediate
repopulation. In these regions, it has
already fully collapsed and the garbage blocks any fishing now and easy recovery
of the fishery.
Toxins as well continue
to linger and it is obvious that feel good statements to the contrary is
rubbish. What is already in the ocean
will take twenty years to reduce and remove and centuries to bury.
We desperately need to
convene a conference of the sea that is mandated to license fishing tenures
that enforce prudent practice at least. This
is readily monitored by satellite tracking today and must include reef management
and bottom management that ensure half the license area remains unfished permanently.
It needs to be enforced
by the USA navy in particular and through all home ports upon surveillance
establishes infractions. Since vessels
can be easily identified, failure to apprehend at home can be used immediately
to apprehend at sea. That makes piracy
extremely expensive.
The ocean is broken
Tue,
22 Oct, 2013
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 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."
1 comment:
Google - Harp
will explain everything
Post a Comment