Mother Nature
Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Tue 27 Sep 2011 13:51
|
Tuesday September 27th 0923 UTC 1023
BST
12:09.318S 009:32.477W
Wind: SE 18 knots, COG 298 Deg True, Speed 7.6
knots
Yesteday gave me an insight into the frustrations
and insanity inducing conditions that I may face in a few days and frankly I am
dreading it. Yesterday the wind dropped as forecast down to about 10 - 12 knots
from directly behind me. This simply causes the sails to slump uninterested in
my quest to get north west. The slumping is OK but with the roll of the boat the
flogging of the sails I swear, would drive me insane in no time at all. Peeling
away from the wind as it was so light would have meant making slow progress
towards Nigeria or Argentina which may well have been an option except that
these courses would bring me across the ocean swell. This in turn would cause
the boat to roll - and yes - probably cause the sails to flog. Aaaaarghh!
I gybed this morning and am currently pointing at
the Amazon. Not the book store. The river. I have taken a large scale grib file
for the next seven days and I see a forecast seam of 15 knot winds to the
west and north of Ascension so I am going to make westing for the next two
days or so and then bear towards the north to see if I can hook into at least
winds that will keep the sails pressed.
Did it ever occur to any of you out there that I
might not manage this challenge? Funnily enough it hasn't occured to me either -
but it should have. I suppose the odds are a little against me - but hey, aim at
nothing and you will hit it! I think to be fair I identified at the outset
that the biggest challenge was not to break the boat. So far on this
circumnavigation I have sailed the boat hard
and with 40 tonnes careering round the open ocean at speeds of upto 15 knots,
things break. Like your back for instance. That was certainly broken and is
weakened, but the mind is strong - and the back though it has been giving
me quite a bit of bother these past few days, has been
repaired. This part of the journey however I
had decided to take it easier and sail a little more conservatively. I believe I
have been doing that but to be honest I think these rolly conditions withthe
wind directly behind me will be harder in some ways on the boat than sailing
hard. Halyards giving way is one concern, sails parting is another. Time will
tell.
Last night the breeze filled in a little
and I managed to get some sleep until - high drama! A ship! Yes "Fjell"
clearly heading from South America to Africa headed across my path about 0200.
He was going rather slow at 9 knots and I was doing about 7 knots by then
so it took about an hour and a half from when he entered my 12 mile radar alarm
zone to when he left again.
I still don't get the weather here. I am 12 degrees
(720 nm South) from the equator and it still feels relatively cool, though sea
temperature is now 24C. Again today, as it has been almost every day I have
complete grey cloud cover. Last night there were no stars and no moon to be
seen.
Now the environment......it's all a disaster isn't
it? We are destroying the planet and there will be none left over for our
children. The icecaps are melting because not enough people ride
bikes. People are dying in Africa because my car has a V10 engine and there
is a floating raft of rubbish in the Pacific the size of Alaska.
Right? No actually....... these are just the hysterical rantings of the
greenites the scaremongers and the politicians.
Here is what I have actually found going round the
world. While in the last 100 years yes, we have been quite hard on the planet.
However I have now travelled to about 35 countries on this circumnavigation of
the world and also travelled widely before embarking on this adventure. I figure
that I have been to close to half the countries in the world and certainly to
countries where way more than half the worlds population lives - including India
and China several times.
What I have found is a world in rude good health.
The oceans are teeming with biomass, the reefs are alive and well, the jungles
are lush, wild life is everywhere and where action has needed to be taked to
preserve parts of our natural heritage for the most part that has been done. I
sailed across the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and now the South
Atlantic. And guess what no rubbish. Since I left Capetown I have sailed through
2,500 miles of ocean and I have not seen one single anything. The Atlatic the
Pacific and the Indian Ocean were the same.
When we approached Indonesia and South East Asia
there was a fair bit of rubbish in the sea and that is something as a developing
nation that they will need to address, though understandably when people are
struggling to have the basics of food and shelter in an impoverished country
dealing with attitudes to litter understandably but regretably fall some
way down the listy of priorities. I am hopeful that as the rest of the world
gets wise to "not shitting in their own back yard" then so too will the
developing nations. But the world in not "on the brink".
We have seen endless amounts of fish, whales,
shark, turtles, corals all across the world. In fact I have caught or shot and
eaten quite a few myself - and why not? man can't live on bread
alone......... We have seen huge amounts of indigenous flora, fauna and
wildlife everywhere we have gone including huge numbers of White Rhinos which I
can remember as a kid were threatened with extinction.
We are now gaining a bit of understanding about
finite resources and for the most part the western world has come to realise
that this can't go on. It has come up with the "brilliant" plan that the
developing nations industrial revolution must be much cleaner than the west's
which of course would hamper the progress of their development. Unother stroke
of genious to pretend we are doing something about our own excesses is to trade
carbon vouchers - tickets to pollute! These things are just
superficial actions what we really need is to consume less. As one part, but one
critical part of natures interwoven fabric we have to allow mother nature
time to rebalance after our 100 year onslaught on her resources. But she can and
will - providing as we are doing, and perhaps we have the Greenites and
scaremongers to thank for bringing "the environment" to our
attention, albeit in a sometimes incredible
way.
What James Lovelock calls Gaia but
what Bhudist teachings of the Dalai Llama would recognise as the
interdependent nature of all living things and First Nation Americans and many
of the worlds indigenous peoples respected as a whole interconnected and
living entity we can call "Mother Nature".
If we push Mother Nature too far (and I am not sure
we have the power to overwhelm her and do so) - say by flooding the world with
50 Billion people - will this be the end of the world? No it will be the end of
20 or 30 billion people or what ever number that the world can't support.
And on that subject which is the only country in the world who are taking the
responsible action, cruel though it seems on the face of it, to limit
population? Yes, China. For after all to truly protect the environment for the
long term we need to reduce our consumption rate of the worlds resources and if
it is not credible, as I don't believe it is, to tell the developing nations to
curtail their consumptrion of natural resources then we in the west who already
waste huge amounts of resources must be more frugal and the overall growth in
population of the world must be dramatically slowed. Simple. Mother
nature will find the balance.
However whether the ice caps melting is caused by
our actions in the last 50 years - I believe that I am right in saying that the
temperature of the world has actuallys cooled in a fifty year period since th
eindustrial revolution - or not I am not so sure. There have been huge movements
in the ice caps and world temperatures in the past
lon before you could choose to ride a bike or drive
a Range Rover. The period of time we are measuring and reactting to is too tiny
a sample to get too excited about.
For sure we must stop wasting resources (
I believe there is barely a person in the western world who could not
consume 10% less resource than we do) and we must pay attention to the
environment but for goodness sake it is still a wonderful world out there. And
what I have seen of it in these past two years it is still in pristine
condition.
And another thing. Nobody is starving in
Africa because of the environment or global warming. Don't fall for that one for
a minute. People are dying in Africa, a continent awash with some of the
richest resource in the world, because of corrupt and murderous sometimes tribal
leadership. Next time there are people starving in Africa look at the
leadership and spend a few quid "re-housing" them. The fact of the matter is
that mostly in Africa people are starving not because of global warming but
because their leaders are no better than their white colonial past
masters.
So there we have it we still live in a wonderful
natural world, mother nature is just about on top of things and if we back of
the consumption a bit there will be more than plenty left for the kids. Me?
I sold the V10......
As you know I could go on and on, and sometimes I
do, however todays wee blog like all good things must come to an end and I will
finish with a solution to the Palestinan problem .............. just joking
we'll leave that for another day!
|