From Pangaea’s favourite skipper, Eric Loss.
As soon as I stepped ashore in Africa I knew it was going to be a very different port from where Sea Dragon has taken me over the last few years. We walked down the wooden jetty towards the beach, stepping over gaping holes where planks had been ripped off by a recent storm, passing a crew of men industriously working to repair it. The smell that had haunted the anchorage was stronger here, a mixture of rotting fish and saltwater, and as I stepped ashore I could see why – as far as the eye could see, from water’s edge to the walls of the houses fronting the beach, the sand looked like a confetti cake. Walking up the beach it was impossible to avoid stepping on rotting fish in various stages of decomposition, bits of seaweed and driftwood, and vast fields of plastic. Bags, bottles, boxes, fragments, a thick carpet of plastic covered the beach, in places hiding the greasy grey sand from sight under a multi-colored blanket.
Yesterday we were sitting aboard in the afternoon, getting ready to go ashore to check email, when Shanley shouted down the companionway “Hey Eric! Come up here! There’s someone coming!” I came on deck to see a tiny white inflatable boat bumbling across the bay, looking perilously overloaded by its 2 man cargo. As they approached, the passenger started waving, and after some brief confusion, we recognized Pierre, who sailed with us from Bermuda to the Azores in July with The Ocean Cleanup, peering out from beneath a new haircut and bright baseball cap. He came aboard and told us of his travels since sailing on Sea Dragon, a month on an organic farm in the Azores, then coming here to Senegal, where he has been spending his mornings teaching students math and english as a volunteer instructor. He showed us photos of the fishing nets that the fishermen near his house brought in every day, nets filled to bursting, but not with fish – the catch was more than half plastic. This unwanted bycatch was dumped back on the beach, to be swept back out sea again by the evening tides. Pierre and his students have been trying to clean up sections of the beach in Pikine, the neighborhood of Dakar where he teaches, but the lack of reliable waste collection makes it difficult – the piles of garbage they haul to the street for collection often sit for days, drawing the ire of the neighbors. And the next day’s tide finds more trash on the beaches, brought in from the sea and unearthed from shallow burials on the beach.
Dakar is a fascinating city, bustling with people, and is the economic hub of West Africa, and a cultural hotspot. Yet the beaches and the sea are more polluted than any that we aboard Sea Dragon have ever seen. Sitting on deck this afternoon, watching a snowfield of dead fish drift out to sea past the boat, it strikes me that no amount of cleanup and waste reduction in Europe and the USA will make a difference here, and that the struggle to clean the oceans needs to expand beyond the borders of Los Angeles or London.