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| Ivan Macfadyen aboard the Funnel Web |
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."
Newcastle Herald
