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Notes from a Green and Blue Boat

I don’t know what you’ve been up to over the summer but I have not long returned from a four month cruise across the Indian Ocean. It was beautiful out there and more especially so because I was about as close to the elements as you can get and that sort of thing floats my boat, literally. Mine was a green cruise, a rowing cruise in fact – and I was the engine. I was all alone and rowing from East to West, from Fremantle, western Australia over  to Mauritius – a paradisiacal little island on the other side, a few hundred miles off the coast of Madagascar. Over 3,000 miles of open ocean lies between the two places, and there is nothing on the way, apart from whales and dolphins and albatrosses and sharks and a huge list of wonderful wildlife. There were no islands, although  I came to learn that the distance from land meant nothing – signs of humankind were all around me, even if people weren’t.  I didn’t see another person in all those 124 days, but I certainly saw signs that they were out there, somewhere on the edge of the ocean where I had made my home.

Sadly when we’re talking of signs of humankind, we’re talking rubbish, literally. I am sorry to say that I reckon I saw a piece of litter nearly every day I was out there, though I am yet to compile my final spreadsheet of sightings. Considering that my little boat only stands just above the water line, giving me a range of sight  which is really very limited on anything but a pancake calm day with no waves, this is a whole lot of rubbish, even along my tiny transect.  So if you then start scaling up from my miniature field of view up to what you might see on a bigger boat, and then again up and up to what you could see with a clear view of the whole ocean, it makes for a mind-boggling amount of rubbish. An ocean of rubbish, perhaps. Remembering that the oceans are a 3D world and that there is a lot of plastic residue and miscellany too small to pick up from above, it is surprising that we haven’t renamed any of the blue stuff the ‘Rubbish Ocean’.

When talking rubbish, we’re mostly talking plastic. It is far and away the biggest baddy of the ocean litter, accounting for over 80% of marine debris items, according to a 2009 report by the UNEP and the Ocean Conservancy www.grida.no/news/press/3712.aspx . The problem with plastic is that it is so pervasive and durable and takes a lethal eternity to degrade, while also absorbing toxic compounds in the process. Besides being an eyesore on otherwise pristine beaches, plastic debris is a very real threat to marine wildlife – from thin plastic bags which choke larger animals mistaking them for food, to tiny plastic pellets being ingested by teeny tiny planktic organisms – at every stage in the food chain there are high levels of plastics to be found, including on your dinner plate. In short, there could be no worse enemy to the Big Blue and all who sail, row or enjoy life on it or besides it – and as we all depend on the healthy functioning of the blue stuff in one way or another, this means we are all affected by it, and I daresay we are all accountable, too.  Needless to say there is still heaps to be done in terms of encouraging improved waste management and reduction and recycling, in a bid to clean up our oceans.

For me, life on the ocean was all about taking each day at a time, while never losing sight of my long term goal of making land on the other side – this is probably the way forward for management of the seas, too. Little by little, each and every one of us, working towards a cleaner greener ocean – then everything and everyone on this planet will benefit and maybe we’ll keep the ocean namers from calling any of the blue stuff the ‘Rubbish Ocean’ for a little while longer. I hope so.

Sarah Outen