"The Ocean Is Broken"
by Greg Ray
"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 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 were the cries of seabirds that surrounded the boat on
previous voyages across the same seas. The birds were missing because
the fish were missing. 'It felt as if the ocean itself was dead,' says
Ivan Macfadyen.
Ten years earlier, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen sailed from
Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do was throw out a baited line to
catch a fish. ''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 recalls. But this time, only two fish were caught on
the long sea voyage.There were no fish, no birds, in fact there was
hardly a sign of life. ''In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the
birds and their noises,'' Macfadyen says. ''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 plied across a haunted ocean. North of the
equator, above Papua 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 says. And all
night it worked too, under bright floodlights. In the morning, Macfadyen
was woken 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, 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,'' Macfadyen says. ''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. They
told us that this was just a small fraction of a day's by-catch. That
they were only interested in tuna and 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.''
It was one fishing boat among countless others working unseen beyond the
horizon, many doing exactly the same thing. Little wonder the the sea
was dead.The next leg of the Australian's voyage was from Osaka to San
Francisco and, for much of the trip, desolation was tinged with fear.
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