bacpacker
11-04-2013, 11:38 PM
I read this story last week and had forgotten about it until I read Stig's post about the problems with the Shrimp fisheries. I thought it worth putting up from a information standpoint. Basically the story is about a boat owner who sailed in a large area of the pacific for the second time and the differences he saw between the two trips. I thought it was a pretty sobering story and a great deal different than the story we get from the MSN.
http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/?cs=12
The ocean is broken
By GREG RAY
Oct. 18, 2013, 10 p.m
IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.
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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.
http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/?cs=12
The ocean is broken
By GREG RAY
Oct. 18, 2013, 10 p.m
IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.
See your ad here
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.