Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I spent a very rough, sleepless night below in a wildly bucking, cold cabin! It was very
rough sailing. The wind gusted thirty to forty knots from the northwest, a typical mid-
winter gale, with icy rain deluges which were over in minutes. Stormy petrels and sooty
terns were wheeling about, my constant companions, God bless them; what an empty ocean
it would be without their royal company. I saw also a few albatross but no whales or dol-
phins.
I had a curious thought that came out from nowhere and would end up pervading my mind
for the rest of the voyage. It was a terribly sad thought and very real. I began to imagine
that in the course of humanity on its hungry marauding path, we would eventually turn to
eating, killing, and displacing all the animals on this earth. If we project our current, selfish
trend forward in time, this is an alarming and potentially real fact. As I looked about the
vast, open, and desolate wastelands of ocean, on a wildly bucking boat, I had the vivid im-
pression of what it would be like if there were no birds left, if there were no wildly free
albatross, frigates, or sea gulls; the sky was empty, save the gloomy, grey clouds. Below
me, in the icy blue and dark depths, man had managed to destroy the food chain, and it had
collapsed over time like dominoes (just look at the vast buffalo herds that once roamed the
plains across North America to see that, in a twinkling, we humans can wreak such hav-
oc in a world that took millions of years to perfect). My thoughts went submarine, and I
looked about the huge volumes of cold, frigid, sterile waters below my little keel: nothing.
No whales, dolphins, porpoises, tuna, no shoals of a thousand strong fish swarming about
in unison: all were gone, fished up in huge nets, sold and eaten. No sweet flying fish skim-
ming from wave to wave on gossamer wings. Down below I went to the muddy sea bed
where once roamed crabs, crustaceans, shell fish of unimaginable beauty and complexity:
all were dead and gone, just a trace here and there of a scuffed, faded shell. Seaweed that
had once thrived by the acre; now all had withered up and had long passed. There were
just unimaginable volumes of millions of cold, sterile gallons of salty water all fished out,
their ecosystems collapsed, just a historic scientific memory.
Being out there alone, very alone, cold, afraid a lot of the time, bored but alert, my imagin-
ation knew no bounds, and I saw it all with crystal clarity. What a grim, sad world it would
be with just stuffed toys that reminded us of a long time ago, of the dogs, cats, birds and
wild animals we had eventually allowed to disappear through selfishness, stupidity, over-
population, and short sighted laws, or lack of them.
I looked at my chart, figured out a deduced reckoning of where I was, and suspected that I
had sailed a lot more south again than I wanted. I was almost at thirty-seven degrees south
now, nearing the roaring forties where I expected to make some good easting.
There then began a time at sea that remains planted in my memory and will do so for all
the days of my life. I recall it as a time when the ocean, Mother Nature, and I were at odds
