The (sea) emperor’s clothes

An apology. On starting this blog I vowed to myself I wouldn’t wander too far from the Sargasso path and into the minutia of daily life that plagues many sailing accounts – you know, the “today we changed the sails and our socks” school of blogging.

But forgive me if I make the occasional digression, starting today with the outwardly dull, but really very crucial issue of foul weather clothing aboard “Moon River.”

Yacht sailors spend enormous amounts of time outside, in all weather, often doing very little beyond staring at the sea. Being on watch is essentially a wetter version of sitting by the fire, a strange, sedentary existence in which your reveries are interrupted by rain, sea spray and the odd proper thumping from a solid wave.

There are two main options for attire.

The most common by far today, and espoused by my brave Adele, is to don breathable Gortex-type fabric used in spiffy looking suits made by Musto, Gill and the like. Outfits sold by these specialist manufacturers are waterproof, supposedly let your body breath, and look good, complete with lots of go-faster Velcro tabs and pockets designed to house every gadget on Earth.

Here is Adele, resplendent:

The other school is modeled by yours truly. This is the same get-up favored among French trawler crews and produced by a company with the unlikely sounding name of Guy Cotten. What they’re really made out of I’m not sure. My jacket is emblazoned with a prominent, enigmatic stamp reading: “no lead.”

My usual get-up. Bullet-proof, or at least waterproof.

I have a lighter orange top for warm weather. Jealous yet?

Now, it’s true that my garb brings to mind clowns, jesters and maybe sweet wrappers. It’s also true that when wrapped in what is essentially rubber you soon get that clammy, cold sensation familiar to anyone who has tried wearing rainboots without socks. And I can't deny that almost no one else on sailing yachts wears the things.

But you stay really, really dry.

Adele laughs at me in my Guy Cottens, even if they are French. Calais is also French, she reminds me. So are those little handbags Frenchmen carry. France can’t be perfect. Yet that’s no reason not to try and dress perfectly.

Such remarks wash off my Guy Cottens much as the Atlantic waves. I don’t laugh at her many-zippered, ergonomically refined finery. But I will register a few facts on the matter:

1. Guy Cottens cost about a fifth of their breathable brethren.

2. They won’t rip.

3. They not only keep you dry but can themselves be dried with the wipe of a towel. Gills and the like stop water getting in, but they themselves become wet on the outside and have to dry out. Not Guy Cotten man. He can come below after a good soaking and simply towel off as if emerging from a shower. The rubber is squeaky dry within half a minute.

I agree there are weaknesses in my get-up. The total lack of pockets (don’t French trawlermen ever listen to iPods, or at least keep their cigarettes somewhere?) is a pain. And in warmer temperatures the lack of air inside your suit can lead to noxious build-up of gases from within – both greenhouse and other.

But to me, no amount of convenience or glamor could top the bulletproof waterproofness of the things.

Now that I’ve already taken this blog down-market, I may as well go all the way with a final anecdote that I believe will persuade you to climb into your very own Guy Cottens. (Editor’s warning: from this point on, the blog may be unsuitable for some adults.)

So, what happened was that during an especially rough night watch in mid-Atlantic this July I found myself eager to pee. Very eager. Of course, even on the best night this involves disrobing, perhaps quickly, and that isn’t necessarily one of Guy Cotten’s strong points, given the absence of those high-tech quick release Velcro straps, convenient zips and all.

This wasn’t the best night. This was a near gale, with “Moon River” sailing beam on to bullying seas, constant spray and water swirling around the deck. Worse, heavy waves sent the boat reeling sideways every few seconds, so that even if I were to disrobe successfully, and avoid getting totally wet, the fraught stage of actually peeing – a bucket at point-blank range being the only feasible target – was alarmingly challenging.

Trying to hold onto the boat with one hand, undo my trawlerman’s duds with the other, and aim for the bucket, which was moving just as erratically as everything else, with the other, was impossible – since that would require three hands. Yet I did my best, grasping here, there, everywhere, and actually, heroically, managing to fulfill a good part of this mission.

Then – and this is all in the dark – came one of those really thumping waves. Over went “Moon River,” over went I, falling hard onto the other side of the cockpit. And, yes, over went the bucket, right over me.

At this point, knocked down and drenched in pee, a man wearing a lesser set of clothing might waver. Who would blame him?

But awash in that salty wasteland, my ridiculous rubber outfit made me a beacon of defiance. Laughing, I rearranged myself, pulled the jacket tight to my throat and stood, much like Odysseus before the mast, calling to the sea.

And the sea soon obliged.

Crash came the next wave. Seawater doused me, washing my Guy Cottens, the cockpit and unfortunate bucket all at once.

I was clean again outside, reborn. Inside, I was as dry as ever.

Clinging on to the boat that night, I even began to wonder if those bright colors didn’t actually look rather good.

Sucked into the Atlantic Garbage Patch

On so many levels the Sargasso Sea is like a whirlpool: literally if you consider the spinning of the North Atlantic Gyre -- and, of course, figuratively.

In the days of sail, it was rumored that this lonely mid-ocean expanse sucked in ships, trapping them in the floating weed. Then in the 20^th century that myth became the Bermuda Triangle, where planes and modern ships would disappear into a time warp.

Popular vision of the Sargasso as a malignant sea -- more dangerous, presumably, than smoking Wills's Cigarettes. Picture courtesy of www.lookandlearn.com

All that’s disproved. But for our unheroic age, we have a third iteration of the whirlpool: a truly monstrous, irresistible force that pulls in floating rubbish and trapping it, like the ships of old, forever.

Environmentalists like to call the Sargasso the “rainforest of the ocean.” And true, this is a marvelous ecosystem with no real parallel. But that rainforest has earned a new name that tells the story of our times: “Atlantic Garbage Patch.”

On our sail through the heart of the Sargasso on “Moon River,” we witnessed both sides.

Golden sargassum weed stretched across Mediterranean-blue waves, their fronds brimming with life: small fish, crabs, shrimps, strings and strings of eggs. Whales were a regular sight.

Yet in this same ultra-clear water, many hundreds of miles from land, we also confronted the astonishing reach of society’s destructiveness.

Everywhere we found detritus from our wasteful, careless world: plastic bottles, what resembled a New York City coffee cup, fishing nets, fishing buoys, a container for motor oil, packaging, and even what might have been a white garden chair.

Huge abandoned plastic buoy from a fishing boat. Ironically, it has attracted several large tripletail fish (just visible to the right). They seem to prefer objects in the water as opposed to open sea and here, hundreds, even thousands of miles from anywhere except Bermuda, they're cozying up to floating rubbish.

Considering how far we were off the beaten track, this all seemed beyond belief. And the real tragedy is that the junk -- jettisoned from ships in the Sargasso, or pulled in by currents from the outside – was going to stay there forever.

The plastic circulates in the currents of the great gyre in exactly the same way as the debris drawn in depictions of the Sea of Lost Ships, that nightmarish, imaginary body of water that collected rotting Roman galleys, Spanish galleons and contemporary vessels alike.

Just as with the similar (and much more publicized) Pacific Garbage Patch, there’s no way to clean up the Atlantic’s floating junk pile.

Beyond the visible garbage, thinly scattered across enormous distances, there is a much greater accumulation of micro plastic to contend with. Fragments are widely enmeshed in the sargassum weed, while even smaller bits, along with their poisonous chemicals, are ingested by fish and so passed right along the food chain – eventually right onto the plates in fancy restaurants.

“The question is, how do you actually clean that? The plastic that is degraded is so small that the only thing we can do now is minimize the new plastic,” said Dr Samia Sarkis, a marine biologist working for the Sargasso Sea Alliance, a Bermuda-based conservation group.

“Reducing plastic is very hard to do,” Sarkis said, chatting aboard “Moon River” when we were anchored in Bermuda’s harbor of Saint George. “And the problem is that the very small particles are very good at concentrating toxins. When you get animals like whales who ingest vast quantities of water and plastic, it’s a huge problem.”

The impossibility of tackling existing garbage is one problem. The other problem is getting everyone who uses the ocean to agree on rules for preventing new pollution. Environmental regulations are often tricky to introduce, but nowhere are they harder than on the high seas – the international waters comprising the largest (and most lawless) area of our planet.

That leaves Bermuda looming significantly in the fight for the Sargasso, since it is the only land that can claim to lie within this mid-ocean sea.

“Bermuda is a place where you can say, ‘I can see what’s there,’” said Philippe Rouja, a prominent marine expert working with the Sargasso Sea Alliance and who is also in charge of Bermuda’s historic shipwrecks.

The high seas part of the ocean, for most people, he said, may as well be “outer space.”

Next March, government ministers and international organizations around the Atlantic are supposed to sign a non-binding declaration of intent to collaborate on protecting the Sargasso.

That may sounds like just talk, but it puts the uncharted Sargasso on the political map. And the Alliance is simultaneously pushing Bermuda’s government to turn a large portion of its own 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone into a marine protection area, or “Blue Halo.” The process starts with public consultations in September and hopes are that the island, in establishing the first Sargasso sanctuary, will encourage the international community to expand such a halo right across the high seas.

Already the project has won strong support from Philippe Cousteau, Jr, grandson of the legendary Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and in September the Alliance will be given the prestigious International SeaKeepers Society annual award.

“It’s an exciting time. If Bermuda can get this done, it’s going to set the tone for the rest of the ocean,” said Chris Flook, who represents the Pew Environmental Group in the Blue Halo project.

“There are so many tragic stories in the oceans. This could be a bit of hope.”

Sailing slowly through on “Moon River,” however, I could only think how odd – and sad – it is that of all the terrible phenomena associated with the Sargasso over the centuries, the garbage patch is the most sinister. And real.

In legend, man has always looked to the watery depths for his worst nightmare: his Kraken, his Jaws, even Nessie. But it seems that the true sea monsters are found right on the surface: in our own reflections.

Swimming with the monsters of the Sargasso Sea

Stay on the boat! That simple command never leaves the sailor’s mind while at sea.

Falling overboard isn’t quite like falling out of a plane without a parachute. You may live. Yet your chances rapidly decrease in offshore conditions, where the boat is moving quickly, the waves are big, and, very likely, the one other crew member capable of rescuing you is fast asleep on their off watch.

Fall overboard and you and Icarus tumbling through the sky have more in common than not.

So there are few stranger – and wildly liberating – sensations than to pause in mid-ocean, hundreds of miles from any harbor and several miles high up over the seabed, and deliberately plunge from your vessel.

We did this a few days after leaving Bermuda, heading into the heart of the Sargasso Sea, where in light winds we drifted and meandered for a week, becoming so lazy, so unambitious, that at some point it became hard to remember we were ultimately meant to cross the Atlantic.

In other words: perfect swimming conditions.

We were over the abyssal plain that covers most of the mid-Atlantic. The chart told us that under “Moon River” the ocean dropped a staggering 2,900 fathoms. That’s 3.2 miles of water, or 5.1 kilometers. Or 11 Empire State Buildings end on end.

Somewhere down there, the most secretive animals on Earth – giant squid, lamp fish, eels and the rest – were playing their freakish roles.

But our own attention was fixed on the surface, where the bows of “Moon River” eased through mazes of golden sargassum weed, every clump teeming with its own panoply of monsters – miniature though they may have been.

Histrio-histrio, or the sargassum anglerfish, is “pound for pound your worst nightmare,” says Chris Flook, longtime collector of species at Bermuda’s aquarium. The glum-faced little creature swims and walks around the weed, using fins that end in frog-like webbing or what some suggest amount to fingers. We watched him dispatch a shrimp that we unkindly placed with him in a bucket. The encounter was so rapid that the shrimp simply vanished.

Histrio-histrio: bad tempered and quick

Brief encounter between histrio-histrio and a shrimp...

There were other surprises here: juvenile reef fish that arrived as larvae on the ocean currents and which, when bigger, will leave the nursery and return to their coral homes.

There was also a crab with a blue underside and white top designed to blend in with the sky when seen from below and to resemble sea bubbles when spotted from above. Many bunches of sargassum also glittered with sticky nets of flying fish eggs…

In legend, the Sargasso Sea trapped whole ships in its weedy embrace and condemned crews to wander this lost world for eternity.

And that’s the exact fate of many of these small marine creatures. They’re in the most curious of predicaments. On their weed rafts, they can safely navigate the high seas, usually the habitat of great athletes like the tuna or dolphin. Yet, being poor swimmers, they can’t afford to step off – death would soon follow.

So it is that these fleets of tangled ships are doomed to drift around the Atlantic, their crews never sighting land and never entering shallow water, much less the rocky foreshore that a crab, for example, would love.

Free, yet imprisoned: they are a lot like us sailors on boats. Well, except we don’t often have to deal with the likes of histrio-histrio.

Now suspended over this world, it was time to jump from our own raft, the tangle of fiberglass, steel, aluminum, bronze and wood we call “Moon River.”

In I went, smashing the ceiling of the ocean. Sunlight tore down with me, descending in vast parallel columns to incredible depths. Holding my breath, I swam further and further under the boat. The water was so clear I had trouble keeping my sense of distance.

When I looked up, I saw the keel and rudder and propeller in perfect detail, as if through a window.

And all around floated sargassum mats, brilliant gold in the light, hanging like chandeliers over my head. They looked bigger now, viewed from underneath.

Despite having concentrated on learning about the miniature residents of the Sargasso, I was aware that
much larger beasts also frequent these waters. After all, the little attract slightly bigger, and so on. Adele and I took turns: one swam; one kept watch for sharks.

Limited by my lungs, I dove and surfaced, dove and surfaced.

As soon as my head was above water after a dive, I'd become aware of things in an ordinary way. The curve between sky and sea reminded me of the complexity of the world, at once familiar and overwhelming. The sight of “Moon River” drifting away underlined that swimming off your boat in mid-ocean always carries risk.

In fact, each time I surfaced I was surprised at the growing distance to the safety of the boarding ladder. I noted the somewhat anxious expressions of Adele, Zephyr and Looli as they looked down from “Moon River’s” railing.

Underwater, though, everything changed. I felt momentarily as if I could swim forever, that I could follow those sunbeams. Of course, I couldn’t, but a couple times I went down far enough to realize that I didn’t have quite enough breath left for an easy ascent.

After the swim, we set sail again. But only a few minutes passed before something really big did rise from the bottom of the sea: whales.

Spout visible top left

So perhaps they’d been watching us through that crystal water all along.

Floating islands, island hopping, and a submerged world

So where does the Sargasso – this sea with no ports, fixed boundaries or coast – take you?

We were one of the last boats to leave the anchorage in Saint George’s, Bermuda, for the summer’s Atlantic crossing season. When the customs people asked for our next port – they’re very keen to keep tabs – we said “Horta in the Azores,” because it was the first place that came to mind. It’s also where most people do stop at after their crossing.

What we really did on weaving free from Bermuda’s protective coral ring was to head south-east: into the Sargasso.

Our destination: a place with no destination.

By reaching Bermuda from New York, we had technically already entered the Sargasso, but we wanted to go deeper. So we sailed south-east, leaving behind the well-traveled path from Bermuda up to 40 degrees North, the latitude where sailing boats usually go to find steady winds blowing to the Azores.

So began the strangest and most dreamy – and occasionally nightmarish – of cruises. We spent a full week drifting around the Sargasso, seeing only a couple cargo ships and no sailing or fishing boats. Usually, sailing involves stopping in ports or anchoring off beaches. This time the only pauses we made were at windrows of floating sargassum, teeming with tiny, ferocious inhabitants.

We collected sargassum in nets, shaking the golden fronds to check for their camouflaged residents. We played reality experiments in which we placed sargassum creatures in a bucket, then waited to see who ate whom. They often surprised us.

For example, most of the large sargassum shrimps, looking very much like scaled-down lobsters, were dead in a day. But much tinier versions were so good at finding cover in the sargassum branches that they survived. Brains, not brawn won.

Big claws (top right), but little chance

This one lived by its wits

The Sargasso used to be known as the “sea of lost ships,” a part of the Atlantic dreaded and avoided by mariners for its maddening squalls, contrary currents and calms. The Spaniards knew it as the Horse Latitudes, the place where their ships drifted uselessly, water supplies dwindled and the livestock had to be thrown into the brilliantly clear water.

We also wallowed in the swell, sails smacking against the rigging, the cabin’s contents lurching about, and the sea so astonishingly transparent that we might as well have been suspended in the sky.

In daytime, sea and sky mirrored each other in deep blue. But late afternoon and at night, vast squalls marched over, illuminated in the Moon, and spinning wild winds through every quarter of the compass.

As far as our navigational strategy, the idea, after making  that dog leg south-east in the direction of west Africa, was to start tending east, vaguely  in the direction of Europe, if not exactly the Azores.

However, anyone examining our zig-zag course (a curved zig-zag at that) would have been baffled. During our third night at sea, I realized in dismay that our next long tack would take us right back within sight of the Bermuda lighthouse. Wondering at the effect this would have on morale, I discreetly dropped the plan to tack, and kept going the way we were, even if this meant utterly the wrong direction. We could at least enjoy the illusion of making progress.

Then after a week, we finally turned our backs on the Sargasso and sailed up to the 40^th parallel to grab  those westerly winds.

By now we’d become so used to islands – whether Bermuda’s coral, the Sargasso’s floating archipelago, or the miniature platform of “Moon River” herself – that Flores, an out-of-the-way, wave-washed speck in the Azores, felt just right as first landfall on the other side.

We dropped anchor in a deserted bay where a waterfall crashed down from the cliff and a stream of cold fresh water ran right across the rocky beach into the sea.

Wading up that stream, slipping in deep pools, and hopping across boulders, we reached a second thunderous waterfall, a waterfall so photogenic that you almost expected someone to pop out from the bushes to film a shampoo commercial.

Perched half way between sea and land, we cooked on a driftwood fire. At night, we listened to “Moon River’s” anchor chain growl and scrape loudly on the rocks below.

Many look at the sea and notice only the flatness, as if it were some kind of prairie or desert, yet the mystery and power of the ocean lies nearly entirely underneath -- the great exception being the Sargasso Sea and its continent-sized expanse of floating weed forests.

Underwater, however, nothing is ever the same.

The gusting, circular winds in the cliff-lined bay had sent "Moon River" turning so often that her anchor chain became wrapped around a series of underwater boulders. They were huge rocks, the size of cars, and unless I extricated the chain, "Moon River" would be trapped.

Diving down, I thought of the swims I’d made while in the Sargasso. There, I held my breath down to similar depths (about 30 feet). The difference was that here, wrestling with the anchor and the rocks, I couldn’t go a foot further. Yet back in the Sargasso, a place separated from here only by water, the abyss dropped another 17,000 feet or more -- considerably deeper even than the diving range of the greatest whale.

You could say that the sea and the seabed are a parallel world in which the water is equivalent to our sky and the underwater landscape is as dramatic and varied as our own. For example, what we call the Azores islands are really just the volcanic peaks of the tallest underwater mountains in this part of the mid-Atlantic Ridge. And roaming these valleys -- instead of elephants, lions and other great land beasts -- are whales, tuna, sharks, as well as fish every bit as colorful and whimsical as songbirds.

Leaving Flores we sailed overnight to the next island, Faial, and into the great Atlantic yachting crossroads of Horta. The western cliffs of the island rose suddenly at dawn from dense cloud. The Azores are famous for appearing and disappearing suddenly and even in good weather a single cloud can quickly swallow any one of these islands.

It's a phenomenon that recalls the work of Ignatius Donnelly, that genius/quack of an American politician who back in the 1880s came up with the bestseller Atlantis – the antediluvian world. With Atlantis Donnelly singlehandedly transformed an old Platonic tale into a made-for-Hollywood mystery and, with great verve, argued that the location for this lost civilization must be the Azores.

Laugh we might today. Countless submarine expeditions have failed to turn up a single broken column around these volcanic peaks (even if researchers did name one of the many submerged mountains nearby “Atlantis.”)

But of course Donnelly was writing before such underwater research was possible. At the time, his reams of scholarly evidence (most of it brilliantly exploited circumstantial evidence) sounded persuasive. Certainly the Azores have the right look as the setting for such a disaster.

What I do know for sure now is this: the world is above all a watery place and we are only guests.

Landfall!

Mid-Atlantic. Zephyr and Looli under the Atlantic Ocean

OK, you're thinking that "Moon River" vanished in the Sargasso Sea. Or that I simply couldn't be bothered with blogging anymore. Or, perhaps, that I took to the rum.

None of this is true. Not quite.

We have crossed the Atlantic. We are in the Azores, soon leaving for Madeira. Even sooner -- within a day or two --there will be a series of posts.

So please stay tuned. Have faith. And pass the rum.

Mid-Atlantic, above water. All we have to do is hold on. "Moon River" takes care of it all.

And in the meantime, you can find out the French version (better food and better looking people) if you visit Adele's scribblings on: http://nautisme.lefigaro.fr/blogs/adele-smith-6.php

There'll also soon be some of my own stuff on the Agence France-Presse website: http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/ and on http://www.sargassoalliance.org/, the website for the Sargasso Sea Alliance -- folks trying to save the "rainforest of the ocean."