Seven-tenths: random notes from the deep
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
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Creed O'Hanlon's biography and other articles by this writer
One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before?
What if I knew I would never see it again?'
– Rachel Carson, author and ecologist
The second time I crossed an ocean under sail, I had first to fly across it. I was one of a small crew of three bound for Fort Lauderdale, on the south-east coast of Florida, from where we were to deliver a forty-five-foot timber ketch to Malaga in Spain. It was 1980. The owner, an Englishman who had made his money dealing in second-hand aircraft, had secured our services just six weeks before the beginning of the Caribbean hurricane season. He had booked us on the cheapest flights he could find: an Air India service to New York from London's Gatwick Airport, connecting with some bankrupt, no-name shuttle service to Miami. The initial flight followed a great circle route looping over the Arctic rim of the North Atlantic. The early spring skies were clear. I had six hours to contemplate what a voyage across all that empty water would be like.
From 10,000 metres, only faint specks of white, the crests of the largest, wind-blown waves, glinted on the pale grey-blue expanse. When a large ship was sighted, every few hundred kilometres, it was like a tiny, russet insect. Nothing smaller – neither an iceberg nor, especially, a yacht – was visible. It was hard to imagine what living just a few feet above the ocean's surface, far from land, for nearly a month would be like. I knew only in theory that survival would depend on a precarious, imperfect conjunction of weather, seamanship, navigation, endurance, and a watertight hull.
All I could think about was the deep, the kilometres of cold dark water that clawed at a vessel's keel from the ocean's bottom: to me, the thought of this was more disturbing than the intractable vastness of its surface, whatever the state of its swell, the speed of its shifting tidal streams and currents, and the unfettered strength of its winds.
A week later, we sailed beyond the edge of the North American continental shelf. When the line of soundings plunged from less than a couple of hundred metres to a couple of thousand, and the last smudge of low-lying land slid beneath the horizon. I had to stifle a sudden, atavistic fear of the open sea by reducing its daunting reality to statistics. The few tonnes of salt water our vessel displaced – right there, on a western eddy of the Gulf Stream, where a tentative ‘x' in soft pencil ‘fixed' the position of our departure east-bound across the Atlantic – were a minute fraction of the 1.37 billion cubic kilometres that covered roughly seventy-one per cent of the planet, an area of around 361 million square kilometres. The numbers were as abstract and as barely imaginable as the British Admiralty metric charts on which land was always a flat, bilious yellow, inshore waters an insipid blue, and seas beyond the 200 metres line of soundings white.
EXCEPT IN THOSE CIRCUMSTANCES WHEN WE ARE IMMERSED IN IT, or floating on it, the sea's expanse is almost incomprehensible. We are awed by its power and limitless mutability, and we ascribe to it aspects of human mood and even sentience, usually during those episodes when it rises to inflict its force – note here the ready use of an emotive verb inferring mindfulness, even cruel intention – on us well above the high water mark that is the nominal demilitarised zone between a marine environment and ‘dry' land. No matter how much we love the sea – or claim a near-mystical empathy with its chimeric mammals, the whale and dolphin – very few of us feel for its alien and uncompliant ecology the same intense intimacy, that visceral sense of connectedness, of elemental dependence, that we do for the landscapes of our natural habitats ashore. Maybe it has something to do with uncertainty, a fear not so much of the unknown as the unknowable.
Much of the sea is invisible to us. Its most spectacular topography is unreachable, lying at depths well beyond the capacity of humans to reach without expensive and cumbersome mechanical support. Tens of millions of acres of submarine flora close to well-populated shores on every continent are as unknown and undocumented as the tens of thousands of kilometres of vertiginous oceanic trenches and mountain ranges that surpass the Himalayas in scale. Apart from a few functional structures such as piers and breakwaters, offshore lighthouses, and oil rigs, humans have failed to impose a permanent architecture on the open sea – there are none of the boulevards, plazas, parks, cathedrals, castles, and monuments that impress upon us the ingenuity and creative accomplishment of a large city. The sea is untenable. Our place in it is always fleeting and artificial.
Which only increases our fascination with the fish, mammals, reptiles, crustaceans, jellyfish, starfish, corals and anemones that inhabit it, even if the reality of our relationship with them is defined less by curiosity or concern than by a ruthless, industrialised harvesting that has turned us into the ocean's most voracious predators.
Again, whatever uneasiness we harbour about this is assuaged by the oceans' unrestrainable spill. From the air, where most landlubbers get their first view of an ocean unbounded by land, it appears too big and indomitable to be despoiled by mere human activity. Looking seaward from a heavily urbanised stretch of coast like Long Beach, California, or Yokohama, Japan, or closer to home, Sydney – beneath orange-tinted skies laden with dust, smoke, and chemical emission – the shimmering surface appears pristine and undisturbed by everything but the wind.
A quarter of a century before statistical reports on the state of the marine environment began to pile up like past due bills on the desks of politicians, journalists and academics, there was already plenty of anecdotal evidence of the oceans' deterioration. For half a dozen years, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, I worked as a professional seaman on vessels on both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Baltic, North, Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas, and along the Pacific coasts of the United States and Mexico. Back then, dockside mutterings about the lack of sightings of larger pelagic fish such as tiger sharks or marlin, or of populous migrating pods of whales and dolphin, or of flying fish, which every day used to collide, mid-air, with the pitching decks of ocean-crossing yachts (and end up in the galley, being prepared for breakfast), were common. Yachtsmen and the crews of inshore fishing trawlers also worried about being sunk by half-submerged steel containers – thousands are still lost overboard every year by merchant ships during bad weather – or disabled by plastic bags sucked into engine intakes or polypropylene ropes snarled around propellers.
Occasionally, some of us would bear witness to a small catastrophe. In 1977, I was on watch aboard a sea-going tug as it approached the Bay of Naples at the end of a two-day passage from Malaga in Spain. A dense pod of beak-nosed common dolphin surfaced about half a kilometre off the starboard bow. In a frenetic sequence of arcing leaps and splashdowns that churned the glassy swell into white water, they led us between the islands of Ischia and Capri towards the Italian mainland. A few nautical miles from Naples itself, the blue water turned brown. A dolphin swimming ahead of the rest of the pod, as if taking point, a solitary scout, leapt high out of the water and with a sickening, high-pitched squeal, fell sideways into it again with a graceless splash. It bobbed lifelessly in the low swell. Several more dolphins began to thrash on the surface nearby, then, one by one, they rolled onto their backs and lay still. Suddenly, the rest of the pod swerved away and sped seaward, no longer leaping, intent only on finding safety. A couple of minutes later, the tug sailed past a few dozen of the dead, which wallowed in a greasy slick of foul-smelling chemical a couple of hundred metres in diameter.