2 May 2010
This is a very important subject in today's environmentally sensitive world, and one which I am often asked about. What do you with all the garbage you collect after being weeks at sea. On the smaller islands in the Scottish Hebrides we have a policy never to take our trash ashore. They simply do not have the infrastructure to deal with it. So it is the same with many of the islands in French Polynesia, particularly the tiny motus of the Tuamotus. Yes, it is very hard to keep all your trash on board. For one thing there is a question of storage, not easy in a smaller boat with lots of crew, and you cannot possibly store three weeks of garbage on the boat, although some people believe that nothing should go overboard. And then there is the question of heat. In the heat of the tropics food rots quickly and the last thing you want are bags of rotting garbage on the boat. Food packages can be rinsed to take away the odour. We toss anything biodegradable overboard but only when well offshore, not in the middle of an anchorage. If we are within a week of a major landfall we collect and store our trash in a bow locker. One thing we never do is throw any aluminium drink cans or tetra paks overboard. This is an absolute no, no, for us. It is not difficult to crush them up small. This also goes for plastic bottles. You only have to look at what get washed ashore on the beaches to realise that the plastic water bottle must rank as one of the worst and biggest pollutants of our oceans (after oil spillage of course)! Glass bottles we do fill with seawater and commit to the deep. I like to think, perhaps misguidedly that they might help to form a coral attachment.
Check, check and check again!
This was my favourite quote from "Jerry the Rigger" at the ARC seminar back in March 2009. I wonder how many people are checking their rigging. When at sea, David does this twice a day, dawn and dusk. After every major ocean passage I winch him up the mast and he does a thorough check of everything from the rigging wire to the all the fittings, pins and shackles. We have witnessed a yacht on this rally with the mast bent forward under the stress of a parasailor. We watched in horror thinking that at any minute the mast might come tumbling down and have the photographs to prove it. Fortunately it did not but has the rigging been inspected since? Rigging checks are as much a part of ongoing boat maintenance as is the engine, the generator, perhaps even more so, especially when there are many boats that because of the racing element are pushing their boats to the limit. On the last rally although we had had brand new rigging fitted before the start, and sailed our boat conservatively, we still found a broken strand when we arrived in Tahiti, which of course we had replaced. Up until now we have had light winds, but cannot be complacent about standing rigging checks to the boat. In our previous experience from now on the winds started to get much stronger, indeed we had two or three very big blows between here and Australia. Now is the time to go over everything with a "fine tooth comb".
My new computer is brilliant. To start with the screen saver has pretty flower pictures on it. The battery life is five hours which means I can write my blog usually during my night watch without having to negotiate trailing cables every time I pop down to the chart table top scan the radar and the electronic chart. It starts up in a fraction of the time that my old one did. It does not repeatedly ask me questions the answer to which I do not have a clue and then have to summon David which has a tendency to make him ever so cross! So thank you Carole or Ollie, you have saved my sanity!
Susan Mackay