Last night I returned from the 5th International Marine Debris Conference. The conference isn’t over yet, but I have an ocean to row (12 days and counting!) so I had to get back to Fremantle in Australia for final preparations. The conference was eye-opening, in the same uncomfortable and disillusioning way that Copenhagen/COP15 was.

Kamilo Beach, Hawaii

I had thought that plastic pollution was much less contentious than, say, climate change, but it seems that there is no limit to humankind’s ability to find grounds for division rather than cooperation. I was shocked to witness a hostile encounter between two individuals partaking in the conference, culminating in a rather personal attack on academic credentials. Come on, people, let’s focus on the issues!

“Disposable” plastics were also much in evidence at the conference, despite a statement that the use of such items had been minimised. I guess I have a different definition of “minimal”.

And the three main sponsors of the conference were Coca Cola, the American Chemistry Council, and the Ocean Conservancy. This made me raise my eyebrows, and a few questions too.

I don’t know what the final outcome will be, but the draft strategy was not a promising start. It focused mostly on cleanups and recycling, rather than reducing the supply of plastic at source. I had hoped that it would make some bold policy recommendations, but it looks like it will still be down to us, the average consumers, to show the way. If industry and government won’t do it, we will.

If you are interested to know the scale of the problem, here are some interesting figures (mostly gleaned from the Plastic Oceans website):

Chris Jordan states that 1.1 million kgs (2.4 million pounds) of plastic enter our worlds oceans every hour of every day. (This could be a conservative estimate. The Plastic Oceans site suggests that the figure could be closer to 5 million kgs.) In terms of sheer weight, that ends up equal to 3-5 times the hourly flow rate of the Deep Water Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. (Thanks to Doug McLean of WWF-Australia for his calculations.)

Over the last 10 years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century.

Plastic production uses 8% of the world’s oil.  4% of this is actually used in energy consumption to make the plastic.

More than one million plastic bags are used, worldwide, every minute.

We are currently producing 300 million tonnes of plastic per year – about half of this will be used just once and thrown away.

To read about the tragic impact this is having on marine wildlife, see this article by Dr Wallace J Nicholls. Or if turtles aren’t your thing, how about the impact it is having on us?

So that’s the bad news. Here’s the good news. With ever more plastic flowing into the oceans every day, we all have the opportunity to step up and take responsibility. For starters, I would take it as a huge personal favour if you would please never again use a “disposable” plastic item. I now have quite an arsenal of non-plastic items in my bag that enable me to avoid most “disposable” plastics:

Stainless Steel Drinking Straw

Water bottle

Grocery bag

Coffee mug

Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your colleagues. Write to your supermarket and your city mayor and your state governor. Support city bans on plastic bags. If we all pull together, we can make a world of difference!

And if, after all of this, you need a smile, I highly recommend this short video on recycling – Flashmob style. You might not get this kind of reaction every time you do the right thing, but on the inside you’ll know you have done your bit to help save our planet.

Other Stuff:

Another smile: check out the Wipe Out Waste song.

Tomorrow it’s Earth Hour – please turn off your lights at 8pm for an hour, enjoy a candlelit dinner of organic yumminess, and thank your lucky stars that we live on such an amazing planet. You can see my Earth Hour video message here.

Fancy an adventure combined with an eco mission? You don’t have to spend 4 months alone in a rowboat. There are still a couple of crew spots available on OceansWatch sailing expeditions to Melanesia. Contact [email protected] to find out more details. I sailed with them in Papua New Guinea last year. Highly recommended!

I am presently in Hawaii for the 5th International Marine Debris Conference. Last night I keynoted at the opening reception at the Marriott in Waikiki. I thought you might be interested to hear what I said – or rather, what I intended to say. I don’t speak from notes, so it always comes out a bit differently from what I drafted, but hopefully bears some resemblance!

It sums up a few themes that are going on in my head right now at this interesting point in time. Personally, I am trying to make sense of everything that has been happening so far this year – in terms of the political and physical upheavals around the world. And I am now less than 2 weeks away from the launch of my next row. I wonder how different the world will be by the time I get back to dry land.

Okay, over to that speech….

With Marcus Eriksen on board the JUNK Raft

“On 13^th August, 2008, I attended one of the world’s more unusual dinner parties. A few hundred miles east of here, in the middle of the ocean, I boarded the JUNK Raft, a vessel made out of 15,000 empty water bottles, crewed by Joel Paschal and Marcus Erikesn of the Algalita Foundation. Like me, they were on the ocean to raise awareness of the North Pacific Garbage Patch.

We had spoken briefly before we set out on our respective voyages, me from San Francisco and them from Long Beach, and agreed that we really should collaborate with our campaigns. But life had got busy and we hadn’t got around to coming up with a strategy. Fortunately fate intervened.

My watermaker had broken and I was running out of reserves. Their voyage was taking much longer than expected and they were running out of food. Suddenly a mid-ocean rendezvous became more than a nice-to-have. It became a matter of life and death.

We met at around sunset that day, and they showed me a sample that they had collected. Even here, on the edge of the North Pacific Garbage Patch, they were finding that plastic outweighed plankton by a ratio of six to one.

A fish full of plastic - the mahi mahi caught by Joel

Then Joel the navigator harpooned a lovely big mahi-mahi for our dinner. Luckily it was in better shape than one he had caught a couple of weeks earlier. When they opened that one, they found that its stomach was full of bits of plastic. They knew enough to realize that this fish would not be good for eating, because of all the hormone disruptors and toxins that come out of plastic. So it went back in the ocean.

This is a story that I often tell in my presentations. It has a bit of everything – a bit of drama in real life, ocean adventure, alas no romance with the hunks on the junk, no time for that – and it also has a message. It illustrates that plastic pollution is not just an issue out there on the ocean. It is a problem right here on our dinner plates.

At the joint press conference that the Junk guys and I did at the Waikiki Aquarium after I arrived here, we issued a plea that people should stop and think before using a “disposable” plastic item. It makes no sense to make a disposable object out of an indestructible substance.

Preparing for the Indian Ocean

I am currently based in Australia, preparing to row solo across the Indian Ocean, to complete my trilogy of Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Down there, in particular, 2011 so far has been a hell of a year. With the emphasis on hell. Australia has been clobbered every which way by flood and fire. Then there was the earthquake in New Zealand. Then, on a whole higher level of disaster, Japan. More earthquakes. Tsunamis. Nuclear meltdowns.

We live in interesting times. From conversations that I’ve had, it seems that there is a rising consciousness that we have not been good stewards of this planet, and that it is starting to rebound on us.

This is a good time to be talking about marine pollution. It is not necessarily the biggest issue facing our world today, but it is one of the most visible. It is difficult for many people to get their heads around climate change, or ocean acidification, or collapsing fish stocks.

Bring your own bottle!

But ask them to picture how many plastic bottles, or bags, or coffee cup lids they personally generate in a year, and get them to multiply it by a lifetime, and by every member of their family, or by everybody in their city, or by everybody in the world, and you can see them start to wonder where it all goes. How come we’re not all up to our eyes in plastic?

And this is how we can start to drive home this concept that on a finite Earth, there is no “away”. What goes around, comes around. I find it abhorrent that something that is in use for 20 minutes will be around for a hundred years or more.

For me, personally, it has to do with the way that I came to environmental awareness. 7 years ago, in February 2004, I had my environmental awakening. Reading about the Hopi tribe of North America, I finally had my eyes opened to the blindingly obvious truth that we have to look after this planet if we want it to look after us. They believe that if we lose touch with our spirituality, with our connection to Nature, then we are flirting with disaster. Or more than flirting, we’re a dead cert.

When I had this epiphany, I was shocked and horrified that I had been so oblivious. And so I took to ocean rowing as a rather extreme way to get a platform, to raise awareness, to inspire action and wake people up to the fact that if we don’t start recognizing the interconnectedness of everything, our complete and utter reliance on the Earth and all its systems, then we are, not to put too fine a point on it, completely up the creek.

During my long spells on the ocean, I have grown to understand a few things about this planet.

One of the trawls I will be taking with me this year to collect samples from the Indian Ocean

First, it is not as big as we think it is. What goes around, comes around. Since I had my epiphany, the US alone has generated 700 billion plastic bags, 150 billion plastic bottles, and lord only knows how much plastic silverware or coffee cup lids or bleach bottles. On my boat I am very aware of my inputs and outputs.

Second, mother nature rules. There is nothing like facing 20 foot waves in a 23 foot boat to remind you who is in charge. We can flout laws of nature for a while, but ultimately, she runs the show.

Third, we have to take responsibility. Every action counts. Every time we buy something, use something, or throw something away, we are casting a vote for the kind of future that we want.

We’ve all been doing what we can, in our small ways. Personally, I’ve been involved in a campaign to make the 2012 Olympics plastic bag free. This year I’ll be gathering samples in the Indian Ocean to assess the amount of pollution. At this conference we have the opportunity to take that up a level, and to spread the ripples of change much further. We have a chance to influence policy, and set an agenda for the world.

This is more than a quest to end the plastic peril. This is a spiritual quest. We have an opportunity to decide what kind of future do we want. This comes down to what we believe about the kind of future that we deserve. Are we amazing creatures, evolving towards our highest selves? We have been blessed with this thing called free will. Are we going to use it to save ourselves?

And it’s about more than just plastic. We are going to face a multitude of such challenges. Plastic is a useful testing ground for a new, more collaborative approach, which we will need in order to tackle the bigger issues.

A plastic pollution publicity shot taken in Britain last year

Plastic has become a symbol of our throwaway society. Let’s move away from our emphasis on materialism, and instead place the emphasis on happiness. I wouldn’t mind so much if trashing the Earth even made us happy, but it doesn’t. Let’s return to simpler, more authentic values, the things that really make us happy, like good relationships, a sense of self-worth, a sense of peace.

In these turbulent times we have an opportunity for change. Let’s seize that opportunity, and change course for a better future. We could be at a tipping point, as people see that the old paradigm isn’t working. A few tiny actions on our part could make all the difference.

It took me 2.5 million oarstrokes to row the Pacific Ocean. Each stroke only took me a few feet, but added all together, they added up to something truly significant. Every action counts. Let’s pull together, and together, we can save the world.

Thank you.”

Dictated by Roz at 21.07 on May 21^st and transcribed by her mother Rita Savage.

Position: -08.19040S  153.62320E

I had an interesting conversation this morning with Dr Kiki Sanford during our regular weekly podcast at twit.tv/roz and it got me thinking. We were talking about the evils of plastic but I found myself almost defending the horrible stuff. It seems to me the plastic itself is not the problem, but the ways we have chosen to use it.

Like so many other things plastic can be used or it can be abused. You can use your TV to watch fascinating documentaries, to visit places you would never otherwise see, to learn more about all kinds of things, or you can watch reality TV and soap operas. Likewise you can use the internet to connect with on-line communities, to collaborate with colleagues overseas, research any subject under the sun, or you can browse porn sites.

Similarly there are lots of good uses for plastic: for example on my boat I have many invaluable items that would not work so well if made from any other substance: waterproof cases, electronics, life jackets, buckets – but why use just toxic, non-biodegradable substances to make “disposable” items out of it, generating these items by the billion to be used for a few minutes and then dumped. It just doesn’t make sense.

There is a very short-term list of items like plastic bags and bottles. Then there are the longer-term items which are just as bad but harder to avoid: shampoo, conditioner, body lotions, toothbrushes, household cleaning products, food packaging. As no-impact man showed it is really hard to live in the twenty-first century without generating plastic trash.

As consumers we cast our vote every time we buy something. If you have found clever ways to reduce your plastic consumption, please log on at ecoheroes.me and share your tips with the rest of our ecohero community.

The good news, and the bad news:  if all we have to do is change the thinking. It is not the world we need to change, it is human behaviour.

Whale Shark - Roz 2009.

Other Stuff: I was very sad to hear that among the creatures most seriously impacted by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are turtles and whale sharks, my two favourite marine animals. Incidentally oil is used in the production of plastic so if we used less plastic we would need less oil.

And now enough about the environment. Back to me. Today I managed to make some progress west and now getting very close to that diagonal line dividing the Solomon Sea. See maps from a few days ago. In theory, once I cross that line, I should get out of this fast, south-flowing, current (between one and two knots) and into more neutral waters before finding the north west flowing current up the coast of Papua New Guinea.

But I am not getting much cooperation from the elements. The prevailing winds are supposed to be from the south east but I have experienced mostly light westerlies instead. Today I noted with concern that I am less than seventy miles from Woodlark Island, which more or less marks the start of that long chain of islands leading up into Papua New Guinea and I am heading straight for it.

In other words I need to turn the corner of this big hairpin and start heading north west. And soon! But the winds and the currents are not helping. A change in conditions would be very welcome. Any time now would be good. Hello, up there – is anybody listening?

Nova’s News:

Check out the Roz Fundraiser Commercial – find the link in the Twitter box. Then watch for the new contest coming soon!

Please remember the request from Blue Frontier Campaign to vote EVERY DAY for Roz and Margo: http://pep.si/9ZMuai. Many more votes needed!

Dictated by Roz at 21.08 and transcribed by her mother Rita Savage

Position: -07.55639S  153.92323E

A good day for progress, after four days of trying I finally made it back across the line of longitude at 154 degrees east. Hopefully this time it is for keeps. But who knows?

This morning I woke to find that the wind had shifted to the east (good) so as quickly as I could I got the sea anchor back on board and got rowing. Soon after that the wind veered into the south which meant that it was pushing the waves against the current so it all got a bit choppy and messy.

I bludgeoned on regardless and although I don’t think I would have won any points for style, I don’t care. I only care about the numbers and they show that today I have made 0.3 . . . of a degree south and 0.25 of a degree west. Not spectacular by any means but given the present conditions, quite proud of my day’s work.

This evening I am feeling rather reeky. I seem to have hit some kind of threshold of grime tolerance. Bucket and sponge baths are the best part of the evening but right now I would give almost anything for a proper shower and access to a washing machine. Suddenly I am feeling itchy and dirty and generally grotty. Maybe tomorrow I will treat myself and wash my hair. Always good for morale.

My feelings of disgust have been compounded by the grottiness of this patch of ocean. Today, as well as empty drinks bottles, I have been seeing hundreds of  little pieces suspended throughout the water. I can’t say with accuracy what they are pieces of, but they definitely don’t look organic, but I suspect that they are remnants of plastic bags and such like. Probably about a dozen pieces per cubic foot of water. Yuck!

I also saw a couple more yogurt pots. If I had a home, one of the first things I would buy would be a yogurt maker. One of my favourite breakfasts is yogurt with fresh fruit and nuts. But those empty yogurt pots really add up. I’ve got a friend in Flagstaff who makes his own yogurt and he says it is dead easy.

Can’t think of a catchy slogan for this one though. Is there a word in the English language which rhymes with yogurt?

Roz’s EBay Store:

Last few hours remaining to bid for the signed photograph of Roz on her boat. Find it in the Roz Savage items.

Please remember the request from Blue Frontier Campaign to vote EVERY DAY for Roz and Margo: http://pep.si/9ZMuai. Many more votes needed!

This is Roz’s blog for May 1st, just before all her technology went wrong.
Maybe because it is day 13 but today has not been a good one. The main casualty has been my 12v electric kettle that I use to boil water.
Tonight I was bringing my kettle out on deck ready to rehydrate my dinner. A sudden a wave lurched the boat and I grabbed hold of the starboard guardrail (oar) with the same hand that was holding the kettle. The kettle toppled out of its bracket and dropped into the water.
I didn’t even stop to think, If I had Id’ve done the same thing. It wasn’t the kettle that mattered, I have got a spare, but I couldn’t drop plastic in the ocean and just leave it there. So with barely time for a quick expletive I followed my kettle into the water, hat and all
The day was not the day I would have chosen to go for a swim. It has been stormy and chilly most of the day and the ocean waters have been sullied by a long windrow of plastic shred accompanied by small slimy green blobs and the occasional jellyfish. It was a nasty, dirty, polluted bit of ocean and the last place I wanted to go for a dip but it had to be done.
I retrieved my kettle and splashed my way back inelegantly back to the boat trying not to think about jellyfish. I don’t suppose that many people have tried to swim with an electric kettle in one hand, so take it from me, it isn’t easy
Unsurprisingly the kettle isn’t working too well now. The light comes on but it doesn’t heat up, which is kind of the point of a kettle, really. So I had to resort to the spare, but maybe kettle number one may recover when it has had a chance to dry out.
Luckily kettle number two is doing a grand job and soon I will be tucking into some nice hot fish pie, extra welcome on such a dank gloomy day as this.
Other stuff: I found the long trail of plastic pieces very despiriting on an already depressing day. I am a long way from land, and I can’t think where such a quantity of plastic has come from. It looks a bit like packaging material – I’m not sure what it is. I picked it up to give to Marc Eriksen for analysis.Yuck.
Alf was sighted on the forecabin today looking healthy as far as I can tell. Alf lives to fight another day!
Big tech hassles, as you may have gathered from the disappearance of my blog. Technology has reverted back to what it was in 2005, and I’m completely fed up with the whole shebang. A carrier pigeon would be more reliable. Pah!
I hear that Yachtpals have posted a nice article about me. I can’t access it, but you can at http://yachtpals.com/roz-savage-9071 thanks to Kim and the gang.
Thanks for all the GREAT comments further to my questions about the past and the present. I can’t even begin to respond so them here , but it was great to see what thoughtful, insightful, visionary readers I have on this blog. I’m honoured!
My position at the end of Day 13 was 1 17.684 S, 165 23.416E.

I am in hiding – from the sun. This might sound a bit pathetic for an intrepid adventurer – but there again I’ve never made any particular pretence at being intrepid, and when it becomes simply too painful to have the sun shining on me, I’m not too proud to hide out in my cabin until sunset. Like a vampire.

I got caught out this morning. There had been a lot of rain overnight (with steady drips from a small leak in my cabin, the source of which I cannot locate) and this morning was still heavily overcast and grey.

Silly me – I know it’s still possible to get sunburned through cloud. But it seemed such substantial cloud. Anyway, by the time I realised what was happening it was too late. I hadn’t put on my lovely organic Green People sunscreen and now I am paying the price. At times like this I curse having had a ginger-haired father. I have many things to thank him for, but my tendency to turn lobster-red in the tropics is not one of them.

Even though it is now nearly 5.30pm and the sun sets in just over an hour, there is still enough strength in it to make my skin feel like red-hot needles are being poked into it. So it seemed a good time to take cover and write a blog.

I’ve thought about going totally nocturnal. Now I have a fan in my cabin, this could in theory work quite well. During the day I have plenty enough solar power to keep the fan going nonstop, so the cabin is comparatively tolerable. And the nights are cooler – with no risk of sunburn.

Trouble is, I am whatever the opposite of a night owl might be. Come the darkness, comes the doziness. My body just wants to shut down and go to sleep. I can stay up all night when sufficiently stimulated by good company and good wine – but neither are available out here.

Any tips from nightshift workers on how to turn my body clock upside down?

Other Stuff:

Today’s audiobook – not so good. Called Blackout. By Connie Wills. I can’t wait for it to end, in fact. Seems like forever the 3 time travellers have been running around trying to figure out how to get back from World War II to 2060. The book could have been a third of the length. And should have been. As one book critic once wrote of another book, “The main problem with this book is that its covers are too far apart.”

And the narrator isn’t much better. She has the most peculiarly affected English accent, so that passengers is pronounced “parsengers”, passages as “parsages”, and she generally sounds like a cross between Sybil Fawlty and a particularly priggish schoolmarm.

But as perseverance is the name of the game, I will grit my teeth and see it through.

Its one redeeming feature is that I am learning a bit more about London during the Blitz – the sustained aerial bombing campaign waged by the Luftwaffe during World War II. Solidarity in the face of adversity became the “spirit of the Blitz” – when Londoners of all social strata united in their determination not to let the ongoing bombardment dent their morale.

Makes me think that environmental issues would be a lot more easily tackled if we had an identifiable enemy to unite against. If my enemy’s enemy is my friend, humanity needs a shared enemy so we can stop pointing fingers at each other and get on with tackling the REAL problem.

Oh but hang on, the problem is us.

Enjoyed this morning’s podcast with Dr Kiki Sanford, with special guest Marcus Eriksen. We enjoyed uninterrupted satphone connection, and a really interesting conversation about plastic pollution. Check it out. Oh, and Marcus, I forgot to ask you to pass along my thanks to Anna’s mum for the cookies. They were yummy!

Amongst other things, we discussed what can be done to clean up the North Pacific Garbage Patch. Probably not much. But we can avoid making it worse. If you’re still using bottled drinking water and accepting plastic bags at the grocery store, please rethink. Add up how many bottles or how many bags you use in a year. Or a lifetime. And then think how much plastic you could save if you invest in a few reusable bags, a water bottle, and a water filter system you keep in your refrigerator. Just because plastic bags don’t cost you anything, doesn’t mean they don’t cost anything at all.

And while you’re at it, sign up for Eco Heroes at ecoheroes.me, and join our merry band of heroes all doing their bit for a greener, cleaner future. Thank you!

And finally – see that button in the top right of my website? Check it out for our fun contest to bet on when I make landfall. Don’t wait – we are only running the contest for a few more weeks. After that it will get too easy so we’ll end it long before the end of my voyage. Carpe diem!

Today I saw a piece of debris – not a lot, just a flat piece of painted wood drifting by about 15 feet from my boat. I have been asked if I’ve been surprised not to see more debris than the two or three pieces I’ve reported – and the answer is no, not really.

The first reason is that while I row I have a (relatively) great big cabin in front of me, blocking most of my view. I can of course look out from the sides of the cockpit, but that tends to muck up my rowing (as any crew rower can tell you, you’re not supposed to look at your oar!) so I tend to keep my eyes on the compass between my feet, and for much of the day I’m lost in the world of my audiobook. So there could be all kinds of exciting things going on alongside me, and I’d be totally oblivious.

Second, I’m not in the worst part of the ocean for debris. The North Pacific Garbage Patch, allegedly the size of Texas, is north of my current position in the centre of the North Pacific Gyre – the “eye” in the huge circulatory system of winds and currents that spans the Pacific north of the equator. I knew before I set out that if I found myself in the middle of the NPGP something would have gone horribly wrong with my navigation!

But the third reason is the most worrying. The last time I saw pollution in the ocean was on a dead calm day. The surface of the water was as calm as a millpond. And there, drifting around near the surface, like motes of dust in a sunbeam, were tiny pieces of unidentifiable flotsam. They definitely weren’t animal, vegetable or mineral, so they were almost certainly manmade, and very likely plastic.

It’s these tiny little bits and pieces of plastic that are the insidious invaders in the ocean ecosystem. Small creatures mistake them for food and eat them. The plastic can’t be digested or excreted, so it sits in their digestive system, leaking its deadly load of toxins into their bodies. These small creatures get eaten by slightly larger creatures and so on up the food chain, the plastics and the toxins accumulating at every stage.

Until we get to the top of the food chain – humans.

My father was from Yorkshire, and they have a traditional song there called On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At (meaning “without a hat”) – which follows this logic (with huge apologies to all Yorkshirepeople for losing the accent and flavour of the original, but I’m trying to make it comprehensible to all): If you go on Ilkley Moor without a hat, you’ll catch your death of cold. Then we shall have to bury thee. Then worms will come and eat thee up. Then ducks will come and eat up worms. Then we shall come and eat up ducks. Then we shall all have eaten thee.

And that’s what’s happening with the plastic. We throw it “away” (except of course there is no such thing as “away”) – and eventually it comes back to us on our plates.

Shopping bag chowder, anybody?

Other stuff:

Position at 2130 29th July Pacific Time, 0430 30th July UTC: 24 01.189′N, 139 02.119′W.

Yes, I’ve crossed another line of longitude, and the milestone of 140 degrees West is just around the (metaphorical) corner. The Golden Gate Bridge is at 122 degrees West, and Oahu is at 158 degrees West, which puts 140 slap bang in the middle Westerly-wise. Exciting!

Meanwhile, I also have to keep an eye on my North/South-iness (latitude). So I’m still rowing across the waves from the NE, in a bid to stay on course for Hawaii. This makes for regular swamping waves. I’ve had to bail out the water from the footwell 3 times today, which is a bit tedious, but not as tedious as missing Hawaii would be!

Thanks for all the terrific messages of support and good humour. Thanks especially to: Deb Caughron for the donation – please say hi from me to all the teachers and students at Woodberry! John H – I am so impressed. 21 hours of beach cleanup done, 19 to go. I hope that other readers of this site will be inspired by your example! Karyn – no, I don’t do celestial navigation. I know how, but the GPS is much more time-efficient. And the sun, moon and stars have been hiding behind clouds most of my time out here. Thank heavens for technology! Roger F – you read my mind! Already trying to figure out how I can look presentable on arrival when I haven’t been able to get my legs waxed for 3 months. Jan – thanks for sharing your story about Ryan. I am so sorry for your loss, and admire your positive attitude. Also Caro, Bev, Robert, Laetitia, M, Ken (the ex-lurker!), Jan (will try to answer your question in the podcast Q&A on Saturday), Jim, Sharon, Russell and Gene.

Click here to view Day 66 of the Atlantic Crossing 4 February 2006: Tiny Little and Eddy Large – of wind and currents.

(more…)

I don’t know the answer to this question – and I won’t put it to the test, because although I’m sure the kangaroo skin parts would disappear quite quickly (seeing as they’re half disappeared already), there are other parts of the glove like the Velcro, made from man-made materials, that would last much longer.

This got me thinking about how long it takes other items to biodegrade. As luck would have it, I happen to have here a leaflet from NOAA’s Marine Debris programme that gives some information on this very subject.

Paper towel: 2-4 weeks

Milk carton: 3 months

Plywood: 1-3 years

Cigarette filter: 1-5 years

*Plastic bag: 10-20 years

*Plastic cup: 50 years

Aluminium can: 80-200 years

*Plastic soda bottle: 450 years

Disposable diaper: 450 years

Monofilament fishing line: 600 years

In connection with the items I’ve marked with an asterisk I’d like to clarify something. This is represented by NOAA as a Degradation Timeline. This is not the same as BIO-degradation. Plastic items do break down – but they only break down into smaller and smaller pieces, and even when microscopically small these pieces still enter the food chain. In fact, they can then enter it at a lower level, so accumulate to higher levels further up – which is even worse.

The truth is that plastic is still too new an invention for us to know just how long it takes for it to disappear entirely.

This is why I (and many others) regard plastic as Public Environmental Enemy #1, the nastiest of all nasties. We just don’t know what its ultimate environmental impact is going to be, and in the meantime we continue to churn it out at prodigious rates.

Don’t get me wrong – plastic is not an evil in itself. It has many useful purposes and enables useful items to be made at affordable prices.

But it is really, really NOT a great choice for “disposable” items.

So I’ll be putting my old gloves in with the rubbish to be brought back to dry land. Especially as, unlike any of the occasional bits of food that sometimes go overboard, I can’t imagine that any of the fishies would have a use for a worn-out pair of golf gloves. (no bad jokes about fish fingers, please!)

Other stuff:

Position at 1900 19th July Pacific Time, 0200 20th July UTC: 24 56.085′N, 133 43.830′W.

Sometime in the next couple of days I should pass the halfway mark, at 134 30′W. At that point I will have rowed 1304 nautical miles, with 1304 still to go. And in theory the second half should be significantly faster, now that I’m in the trades. As my weatherguy says, from here on it’s downhill all the way!

Conditions very rough today – big rolling swells and winds over 20 knots. I’ve been rowing, but it hasn’t been much fun. I don’t enjoy seeing a big curling wave bearing down on me and knowing I’m about to get a drenching, but the thought of that halfway mark has helped keep me going.

Thanks for all the messages, from newbies and regulars alike! Thanks also to those who joined us for the Leo Laporte podcast this morning. As usual on Saturdays, it was our Q&A session, when you can ask me questions live on Twit TV (meaning is rather different in the US than in the UK!). So if I haven’t answered your question in my blogs, you might want to join us next Saturday at 1700 UTC, at twitlive.tv.

Special hi to Jez at the Royal Navy’s FWOC – thanks to you and the guys for the support and the words of encouragement. Too bad the RN won’t be able to drop in for a visit this time around!

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER! We now have a facility for you to sign up for a newsletter. At the moment it goes out once a week, on Thursdays, and after a short message gives you a list of links to the week’s blogs. In the “off-season”, while I’m not on the ocean, it will go out every couple of months with any important news or a general update. If you’d like to sign up, go to my Home page, and down at the bottom you’ll find a box labeled: “Sign up to the Roz Savage newsletter, just enter your email address:”

Click here to view Day 56 of the Atlantic Crossing 25 January 2005 “Zen and the Art of Ocean Rowing” with a message about hope.

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The value of things on an ocean rowing boat is very different from their value on dry land. Out here, the dollar/pound value of an object is totally irrelevant. If I can’t eat it, drink it, or row with it, then it’s worth very little to me, whereas there have been moments when I would have paid hundreds for a slice of pecan pie.

Actually, that’s a slight over-simplification. There are some items on board that I don’t eat, drink or row with, but which make my life that much more pleasant. Here are a few examples of things that are enrich my life out of all proportion to their monetary value (including some edible ones):

iPod – I actually have 4 iPods on board, but by far the most cherished is the one donated by Leo Laporte (who does the podcasts). It is loaded with 323 books, courtesy of audible.com. I listen to the books while I row, and they make the time pass SOOO much more easily than the total silence I endured on the Atlantic. Leo’s taste is very highbrow. I’m learning a lot!

Lock ‘n’ Lock boxes – simple food storage boxes with admirably watertight lids. I use them for everything from my Sanyo Xacti video camera (also an excellent item) to my various snacks.

Sleeping bag – my Ocean Sleepwear sleeping bag is my haven. Waterproof outer shell, fleecy lining. Fantastic.

Trusty latte spoon – probably purloined from a coffee shop at some time in the past. I eat every meal with it. It’s long enough to reach to the bottom of boil-in-the-bag meal sachets, or to the bottom of the mug I use for freeze-dried food, thus avoiding the unappetizing horror of lumpy, partially rehydrated food that managed to avoid proper stirring.

Tea tree oil – applied neat to the parts of the body (use your imagination) that are susceptible to the saltwater sores that caused me such misery on the Atlantic. It has powerful antiseptic qualities, and smells lovely and fresh and clean.

Boil in the bag meals – so much nicer than the freeze dried meals, because they have proper chunks of meat and veg in them (and even dumplings!) rather than the finely minced dusty rubble of freeze-dried food. Alas, I ate the last one a couple of days ago, so it’s freeze-dried from now on.

Sproutamo – my doughty seed sprouter (see photo). It lives in a mesh bag, tucked away in a corner of the deck underneath the gunwales. I’ve mastered the art of sprouting seeds using the absolute minimum of water, and in less than 48 hours I have fresh crunchy beansprouts. Super-healthy! And environmentally friendly too, as they are fresh and unprocessed so don’t have the carbon footprint of freeze-dried foods, nor the packaging.
(Roz was very tired last night after making the most of good rowing conditions – she was unable to attach the picture. I have added one taken on the Atlantic crossing but she uses a different sprouter now. Rita.)

From my ocean perspective it strikes me as pretty funny what people will pay for a Picasso or a rare stamp. Out here it’s all about survival and efficiency. Not enough room for a Picasso on the wall of my cabin, anyway.

Other stuff:

Position at 2150 14th July Pacific time, 0450 15th July UTC: 25 56.708′N, 130 37.513′W.

Lovely conditions for rowing today, and I’m making good progress. I’ll enjoy it while it lasts!

Blue Pledges: today was the grand presentation of the pledges at the British Houses of Parliament. I’ve asked the BLUE Project to let me know how it went, and will report back.

Glad to hear about all the cool stuff on the internet – the podcasts, 1planet1ocean and so on. I just wish I could see them too!

Today I saw a tiny piece of plastic floating past – it looked like a square inch or so of plastic carrier bag. And there was one of the little blue crabs sitting on it! So now I don’t know if the crabs actually swim, or if they just hitch rides on passing debris.but either way I was sad to see the plastic so far from land.

Today I took my first saltwater sponge bath. I can’t spare enough fresh water, but I desperately needed a wash – it was hot and windless today and I was sweating. Further to John H’s suggestion, I made sure I wiped off all the saltwater when I’d finished to avoid that sticky feeling. And it seemed to work pretty well – I felt clean and refreshed. Thanks, John!

From BLUE Project newsletter: Anne Qu?m?r? (France): Ocean Kite Surfer

As our second BLUE Ambassador set to cross the Pacific Ocean this year, Anne will follow in Roz’s footsteps when she sets off alone from San Francisco in three months time. However, this is where the similarities between the voyages end as Anne will be using a kite to propel her tiny craft across the Ocean rather than oars and is heading for the French Polynesian Islands some 4,350 miles away.

That’s all for now. It’s been a long day at the oars. Thanks again for all the wonderful messages of support and encouragement that continue to pour in.

Click here to see Day 51 of the Atlantic Crossing Friday Night Dinner Party: the 4 guests she would choose for such an imaginary event.

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Woodside, California

The environmental time bomb represented by plastic in the world’s oceans has at last come to the attention of the media. Thank you to the many people who have sent me links to recent coverage in the British press, much of it arising from the publication of a study by a team at the University of Plymouth.

Dr Richard Thompson suggests that microscopic pieces of plastic are being eaten by similarly microscopic organisms – and the digestion process then releases the toxins (like DDT) from the plastic. The toxins are absorbed by the tiny creature, which gets eaten by the slightly larger creature, and so on up the food chain. All the way up the food chain the toxins accumulate, until at the top of the ocean food chain are the carnivorous fish – which get eaten by us. So we end up eating the poisons that we created.

So what goes around comes around – and in a very obvious way. How could we ever have thought it would be otherwise? We live on a planet of finite size. We have polluted it and abused it with growing intensity, as our population has increased and our appetite for processed food and manufactured goods has increased. And the oceans have for a long time been regarded as a bottomless landfill – out of sight was out of mind.

But even the oceans, vast as they are, have reached their limit, and now we are reaping what we have sown – we are eating our own man-made poisons.

Do take a look at this article, and also follow the links on the right to other articles.

There are also links and articles on rozsavage.com, including an article kindly written by Dr Richard Thompson specifically for my website. Follow the links to other pages on this site revealing some startling facts and what we can all do to help. Click here for more on Oceans in Crisis.