Ecology
crew-member to what I was told was a small rip I fi nd myself half asleep staring aloft at a sail split in two. From back to front along the seam a three-metre length separating the top third of the sail, without it we will struggle to get to Cape Town some 3,500nm away across the South Atlantic Gyre. We need to sail as much as possible across to South Africa, travel for free and preserve fuel. At sea we have no sponsor at hand to provide a replacement, good old-fashioned repair techniques are adopted, we are resourceful, interdependent and self-reliant – we have to be out here. In the good, old-fashioned way we must stitch and repair our sail, a recollection to those long forgotten, but satisfying skills of repair when every commodity carried value, nothing was wasted and people fi xed their own shoes.
Whilst out at sea it is hard not to refl ect upon the choices that we make, lifestyles that we choose and the way we conduct our lives. We are driven onwards towards technology, effi ciency, convenience and advancement and yet the people back on Isla Grande reminded me of the beauty of simplicity in life. As we haul the trawl in more reminders, tiny fi sh, marine organisms and plastic fragments, our impact upon the marine environment our consumerist wasteful lifestyles.
Visualise
It is hard to visualise the scale of the issue and yet out here it is very clear; we are over a thousand nautical miles from land dragging a sixty centimeter wide trawl across the surface of the ocean for an hour and couple of miles at a time – every time we retrieve plastic, and that is just on the surface. The oceans are vast, over 70 per cent of the world’s surface, from onboard we can see perhaps 12 miles to our horizon where there must be hundreds of thousands of particles, but even that radius is the tiniest dot on the ocean’s surface. The scale of the issue is mindboggling but just the mere fact that plastic debris exists out here so far from land is enough. The shortest distance between two points; Isla Grande and Cape
Town for us is a straight line, ignoring fourth dimension theories. Anyone who has sailed and been to sea will know this, but will also be well aware that while this is the optimum there are many forces outside of our control that will infl uence this course. Perhaps wind is the most obvious but currents, weather systems, the forecast and sea state all play their part in infl uencing the course taken.
68 cywinter 2011
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