The Ocean is Broken

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It was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it. Not the absence of sound, exactly. The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves 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 were the cries of seabirds that surrounded the boat on previous voyages across the same seas. The birds were missing because the fish were missing. 'It felts as if the ocean itself was dead,' says Ivan Macfadyen. Photo: Lindsey Hoshaw Ten years earlier, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen sailed from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do was throw out a baited line to catch a fish. Advertisement ''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 recalls. But this time, only two fish were caught on the long sea voyage.There were no fish, no birds, in fact there was hardly a sign of life. ''In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises,'' Macfadyen says. ''They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/th...#ixzz2iSJlDnHA

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