Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Bloody hell, I'm glad we hit that in the day and not at two in the morning,” remarked
Penny.
“Yeah, just imagine if that was a container; we would be sinking about now,” I added, shak-
ing my head. “I've heard about that you know, containers slipping off monster container
vessels in bad storms, and they float about half-submerged in the currents.”
It is a very sad fact that the once pristine oceans are now becoming alarmingly polluted.
This huge lump of timber was bad enough, and I suppose a “natural phenomena;” it could
have been an old tree trunk washed into the ocean by a river. The real pollution was man-
made: floating plastic containers and plastic wrapping from beer and soda packs that have
been proven to suffocate fish, baby seals, and turtles. Rubber sandals float about the ocean
currents in the thousands as well as bottles with their lids or corks still intact, as well as
fishing floats, sadly not too often the glass ball varieties.
On-board Déjà vu we had a system where we saved all plastics in plastic bags where they
could be crushed and stowed easily, and all tins and bottles were made to sink into the deep,
where the tins would in time rust away, back to the earth whence they came. This may
sound hypocritical, but it is very difficult on-board a little boat to stow all of one's bulky
trash. We compromised, but if I did it again, I would think long and hard about throwing
any trash over board. There is something rather obscene about diving around a beautiful,
colorful reef, teeming with tropical fish and seaweed of blazing colors, only to find nestled
amongst all this a rusty old sardine can or beer bottles rolling around!
After the scare, we all kept a wary eye out for any other floating debris. Where there's one,
there's bound to be more. Of course this was fortunately an isolated incident, but it was
good to keep a lookout, though I doubted that the balk of timber would have been spotted
in any case.
One night I was woken up by Gavin, who had been outside on watch, “Have you ever seen
a moonbow?” he asked quietly in the dark, “Quite an interesting sight.”
I went above, and sure enough, the moon, which was full, had a white aura about it,
similar to a completely round rainbow, if ever that could happen. “Wow, that's amazing!”
whispered Penny, who now joined us in the cockpit. The sky was inky black with clouds,
and the moon and her bow made a dramatic unworldly contrast. I had seen this only once
before, in the Atlantic, with Paula and Herman.
We really missed the engine when the trade winds died or became too weak to sail by. The
combination of wind and motor always had us sailing pleasantly along even though it was
rather noisy; it was small price to pay.
