Global Warming, Plastic and Worry for the Day
Vega
Hugh and Annie
Wed 6 Jun 2018 01:02
Still, as it happens, Lisa Blair and I have several things in common. We both have boats constructed of a fibreglass sandwich with end grain balsa core. We both sail conservatively with reefed sails to minimise crew fatigue and wear and tear on the boat. And we both use NZ weather forecasting guru Bob McDavitt for detailed passage planning. We have used Bob for our passages to and from NZ from Tonga/Fiji and with daily email updates it is hugely reassuring. Bob was a fellow university student with our good friend Chris Wallace who lived in NZ and we regret not being able to meet Bob whilst there.
Met Bob circulates a weekly “weathergram” summarising global conditions for things like sea temperatures and the implications for these on future weather patterns. Last Sunday he highlighted rising sea temperature levels as irrefutable evidence for global warming and the impact this is having on weather patterns. We have encountered more unsettled weather patterns than you might expect from historical records. Summer storms in the UK are becoming the norm. Unfortunately humans have evolved short term survival responses. We are predisposed to live for the now and not to compromise this in favour of some less certain future outcome. Nevertheless it amazes me that the climate change deniers will not acknowledge the evidence for global warming, even if they deny that it is caused by human activity. Of course once warming and its consequences are acknowledged it then becomes more difficult to argue that the risk of continuing activity (such as burning fossil fuels) that may make things worse is worth taking for economic gain. Short term profit will win out over the future of some remote Pacific and Caribbean Islanders increasingly hammered by more and stronger cyclones. Any consequences for the developed world can be dealt with in the future by those affected. And yet we all have a responsibility to respond even if it is just by not voting for politicians who are unlikely to pay much more than lip service to the issue. Bristol is still a log jam of fossil fuel burning vehicles and yet nothing meaningful is being done to address this. There would be an outcry if there was. We have to look to ourselves just as much as blaming others.
In a similar vein we need to keep checking the water impeller that drives the alternator on our Duogen (to provide power to the boat when sailing). It picks up material that wraps around and prevents it from spinning. Often it is weed as with the Sargasso weed when we were crossing the Atlantic. More often it is some kind of plastic - netting, bag, line or, as happened yesterday, plastic packaging cable that is wrapped around boxes and containers to secure them. This is a tiny impeller in a vast ocean and yet we frequently pick up plastic. The windward beaches of remote uninhabited Pacific islands are, in our experience, covered in washed up plastic. How long until the commercial pressure to use plastic is really countered? How long are people going to take to fully understand that quite profound changes to lifestyle are required but that these changes may be no more than that, just changes that alter the way we lead our daily lives but in no way diminish them - we might even feel better for them. ‘Twas ever thus.
Today’s Worry for the Day is our rope cutter. This is two blades attached to and facing each other on the propshaft. One is allowed to spin with the shaft while the other is held stationary. The two blades act like a pair of scissors if a line becomes wrapped around the propellor and the idea is to prevent the shaft from being suddenly stopped from rotating if it becomes entangled. It does work and we know this from two self inflicted incidents of lines going overboard. We had investigated a knocking when motoring before we landed in NZ and traced this to the rope cutter - the blades were coming into contact with each other when we were reversing. We had it adjusted a couple of times to no avail and then read the manual. Each blade has a nylon hub that goes around the shaft and acts as a bearing and is meant to be replaced annually. Ours were the originals from seven years ago! They fell out in several pieces when the two new ones were fitted. We are now getting a lot of noise from the rope cutter when motoring at less than 1800 rpm. You can even here the noise inside the boat (the rule of thumb is that noise from an external source will be heard from the outside of the boat and in fact we became aware of the latest noise from the side deck). Now hearing the noise loudly from within the boat does not fill us with confidence but at least it goes or is drowned out at higher revs. We have had to motor for three days already on this trip and it looks like we have the rest of today to motor as well.....................