The ocean is devastated

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The silence distinguished this journey from all the previous ones. However, some sounds were still heard. The wind was still fanning the sails and howling in the rigging. The waves still splashed against the fiberglass hull of the ship. There were other sounds as well: muffled thuds and creaks from the impact of the boat's hull on debris. The only thing missing was the cries of the seabirds that had accompanied the boat on previous voyages.

There were no birds because there were no fish.

Ivan Macfadyen

“In those 28 days of sailing, not a day passed without us catching good fish, which we then cooked with rice for dinner,” McFadyen recalls. This time, during the entire long journey, the catch was limited to only two fish.

No fish. No birds. Almost no sign of life.

“Over the years, I got used to birds, their cries,” he admits. “They usually accompanied the boat, sometimes landing on the mast before taking to the sky again. The flocks circling in the distance above the sea and hunting for sardines were an everyday sight."

However, in March and April of this year, his boat, the Funnel Web, was surrounded only by the silence and desolation that reigned over the ghostly ocean.

North of the equator, above New Guinea, the sailors saw in the distance a large fishing boat skirting the reefs. “All day it has been scurrying back and forth with the trawl. The ship was large, like a floating base,”says Ivan. And at night, in the light of searchlights, the ship continued its work. In the morning, McFadyen was hastily woken up by his partner, reporting that the ship had launched a speedboat.

“No wonder I was worried. We had no weapons, and pirates are quite common in those waters. I knew that if those guys were armed, we were gone,”he recalls.“But they were not pirates, at least not in the conventional wisdom. The boat docked and Melanesian fishermen gave us fruit, jams and canned food. They also shared five sugar bags full of fish. The fish was good, large, of various types. Some were fresh, and some had obviously been in the sun for a while. We explained to them that with all our desire we cannot eat everything. There were only two of us, and there was little storage space."

Dutch supertrawler FV Margiris at work

They shrugged their shoulders and offered to throw the fish overboard, saying that they would have done the same anyway. They explained that this was only a small fraction of the daily by-catch. All they wanted was tuna, and the rest was useless. Such fish were killed and thrown away.

They walked around the entire reef with a trawl from morning to night, destroying all life on the way.

McFadien felt something snapped in his heart. That ship was just one of countless others hiding behind the horizon and doing similar work. No wonder the sea was dead. Unsurprisingly, the baited rod went without a catch. There was nothing to catch. If it seems depressing, it gets worse.

A sea turtle swims past oil-contaminated sargassum algae after an explosion and spill at the Deepwater Horizon platform

The next route of travel ran from Osakiv San Francisco … Almost throughout the voyage, a feeling of disgusting horror and fear was added to the devastation: “When we left the shores Of Japan, the impression was created that the ocean itself was deprived of life.

We hardly saw anything alive. We met a whale that seemed to be circling helplessly on the surface of the water, on its head was something that looked like a large tumor.

Quite a disgusting sight. Throughout my life, I have plowed miles and miles of ocean space. I am used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and large flocks of vain hunting birds. This time, for 3000 nautical miles, I saw no sign of life."

A dead whale washed ashore in San Francisco.

Where life used to be, frightening heaps of rubbish floated around. Some of them are the consequences of the tsunami that struck Japan a couple of years ago. The wave swept over the coast, picked up an incredible pile of everything and carried it back to the sea. Everywhere you look, all this rubbish is still there.

Glenn, Ivan's brother, climbed aboard on Hawaiito go to United States … He was shaken by the "myriad thousands" of yellow plastic buoys, giant webs of synthetic rope, fishing line and nets.

Millions of Styrene Polypene Bits. Continuous oil and gasoline film.

Countless hundreds of wooden electric poles, uprooted by a deadly wave and dragging their wires in the middle of the sea.

“In the old days, in calm weather, you just started the engine,” Ivan recalls, “but not now. In many places, we could not start the engine for fear that this tangle of ropes and wires would wind around the propeller. An unheard-of situation on the high seas. And even if we dared to start the engine, it was definitely not at night and only in the daytime, watching the debris from the bow of the ship.

North of the Hawaiian Islands, from the bow of the ship, it was clearly visible through the water column. I saw that the debris and debris were not only on the surface, but also in the depths of the ocean. Various sizes, from plastic bottles to wreckage the size of a large car or truck. We saw a factory chimney rising above the surface of the water. Below, under the water, a kind of cauldron was attached to it. We saw what looked like a container swaying on the waves. We maneuvered among these debris. As if they were floating in a junkyard. Below deck, it was constantly audible how the hull bumped into debris, and we were constantly afraid to run into something really large. And so the body was already covered with dents and scratches from debris and fragments, which we never saw."

Osborne Reef, 2 kilometers from Fort Lauderdale, Florida: 2 million tires were dropped there in the 1970s, during a failed ecological operation to create an artificial reef.

Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags, all kinds of household waste imaginable, from broken chairs to trash scoops, toys and kitchen utensils.

There was something else. The bright yellow color of the ship, which over the years had not faded either from the sun or from sea water, reacted with something in Japanese waters, losing its luster in a strange and unprecedented way.

Back in Newcastle, Ivan McFadyen is still trying to recover and recover from the shock he experienced. “The ocean is devastated,” he declares, shaking his head and hardly believing it himself.

Realizing the magnitude of the problem and that no organization, no government seems to be interested in solving it, McFadien is looking for a way out. He plans to influence government ministers, hoping for their help.

First and foremost, he wants to reach out to the leadership of the Australian maritime organization in an effort to attract yacht owners to the international volunteer movement and thus control litter and monitor marine life.

McFadien joined the movement while in the United States, responding to a request from American scientists, who in turn asked yacht owners to report and collect samples daily for radiation samples, which became a major problem caused by the tsunami and subsequent nuclear power plant disaster in Japan. …

McFadien turned to scientists with a question: why not demand to send a fleet to collect garbage?

But they replied that it was estimated that the environmental damage from burning fuel in such a cleanup would be too great.

It's easier to leave all the trash in the same place.

Wakuya village, Japan. The consequences of a 9-point earthquake and the subsequent tsunami.