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Pacific-Ocean
Attribution: Brocken Inaglory CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
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The ocean is broken
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.
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