The
"Nautical Bookshelf" - a monthly look at books about
boats.
Washed Up
The Curious Journeys of Flotsam and Jetsam.....
Skye Moody (Sasquatch Books, 227 pp, $16.95)
January
2007 
The last scene in this book recounts a conversation between
the author and her psychiatrist. She’s explaining jubilantly that she
has discovered her true calling: a self-confessed “flotsamist.” He
tells her to “face her demons.” She ends the session with the all too
familiar phrase, “time’s up,” adding, “I have twenty minutes to reach
the beach before the tide turns. After that storm last night, I can’t
wait to see what washes up.” The shrink says, “hold on, I’ll get my
coat.”
There is something magic about finding good "junk" on the beach, or floating while out on your boat. Why not a book about the subject?
Author Skye Moody writes as if she were musing to a companion during
a walk on the beach, casually and without any discernable pattern or
order. In one chapter she discusses bits and snatches of the history of
flotsam, defines flotsam, jetsam and lagan—an unfamiliar term to me.
(It’s flotsam that sinks to the bottom and stays there until a diver
discovers it.) In another she perkily profiles some of the most
intensely devoted “flotsamists” and provides photographs, both
portraits and pictorial proof of their prowess. It is an eccentric
bunch, and you’ve gotta love em for their passion.
Another chapter deals with ocean currents and the west
coast team of scientists who are “tracking flotsam as a way of
understanding ocean currents, including the giant circular currents
known as "gyres" - dubbed "the great garbage patch."
Every ocean has them.
The North Pacific subtropical gyre is an area about the size of Africa.
Its accompanying air current is about the same as “a baby’s breath.”
The North Atlantic subtropical gyre includes the Sargasso Sea and the
Horse Latitudes.
What’s significant about these currents for "flotsamists" (as
opposed to sailors) is that they collect immense amounts of
garbage—from jettisoned cargo, wreckage and refuse snatched from
distant shores by wind and water. During a seven day crossing of the
North Pacific gyre, one of the west coast scientists reported that he
never saw clear water, “just a carpet of floating debris, bottles,
bottle caps, plastic wrappers, beach balls, and fragments of plastic.”
The weight of the gyre’s litter was calculated to be about three
million tons.
The aesthetic consequence of loading the Earth's oceans with
human garbage, the vast majority of which is plastic is not the worst.
As the material ever so slowly degrades it releases toxins which poison
the water and all the individuals who breathe it. “Until the world
decides to convert most of its petroleum based plastics to something
biodegradable [like corn and soybean oil] the problem is just going to
get worse,” says marine environmental researcher, Charles Moore.
One resonable reaction to this news is guilt and despair
but not to the flotsamist. It’s reason to get to the beach early and
often.
There book includes a story of a huge container vessel
on its way from Korea to the U. S. carrying, among other things,
several containers full of Nike athletic shoes. A large wave washes
twenty-one containers overboard, five of them full of Nikes. Of
approximately eighty thousand shoes, beachcombers along the northwest
coast of the U. S, and Canada have retrieved about thirteen hundred
shoes.
Because the shoes all had serial numbers, scientists
were able to calculate drift patterns (which were influenced by the toe
curvature of right and left-footed shoes) and flotsamists up and down
the west coast participated in a shoe swap to match pairs.
An athletic
shoe can stay afloat for about ten years. The shoe swapping network is
active to this day. Got a left men'ssize 10?
Washed Up is a fun read and tantalizing in it’s
“tip of the iceberg” treatment of a subject that is both a hobby and an environmental threat. An in depth examination of
the consequences of water-born human garbage would be a very different
book. Hope it's been written, too.
Previous
"Nautical Bookshelf" Columns
•September
2006 - Two Odd Books
•August
2006 - It's Your Boat Too
•June
2006 - A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind
•May 2006 - Getting Started In Sailboat Racing
•April
2006 - A Temple To The Wind
•January
2006 - A Field Guide To North Atlantic Wildlife
•December
2005 - Stormy Reading
•August
2005 - A Salty Piece Of Land
•July
2005 - A Splendid Madness
•April
2005 - A Return To Treasure Island
•February
2005 - London Goes To Sea
•January
2005 - Fluke
•October
2004 - A Speck On The Sea
•September 2004 - The Rudder
Treasury
•August
2004 - The Ship & The Storm
•July
2004 - Two Children's Books
•June 2004 - One Pan Galley
•May
2004 - Call Of The Ancient Mariner
•April 2004 - 3 books on
cruising
Carol
Standish and her husband John go boating from their home
port of Kennebunkport, Maine (they say it's the "balmy
southern coast of Maine"). You can learn more about
that part of the world at their web site - Maine
Harbors. |
