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| Sunset 20th April toasting Jeff´s birthday, gennaker still intact |
An hour after opening the bottle for yesterday´s toast to
Jeff´s birthday my gennaker abruptly shredded.
And it really, really shredded. I
presume it must have torn near the top of the sail. The whole of the sail seemed to have unzipped
down both sides leaving just two tapes running to a small patch of sail near
the sock and halyard, plus a mass of sail in the water. It was almost dark, and with the lack of
forward movement from the lost sail the boat was rolling significantly. OK, on with the harness, drag the remnants
onto deck, secure it overnight to hopefully dry a bit, and then up with the
genoa, a considerably smaller sail. Repacking
the sail in daylight, the level of destruction I saw makes me wonder if the
gennaker is even worth repairing, but I will wait until talking with a
sailmaker, hopefully in Guatemala, to make a decision.
It will take a bit longer to get to Honduras but this is not
a problem. It is several years since I
stopped trying to sail to a schedule – a futile activity resulting only in
distress and regret. Passages have to be
flexible in time and to some extent destination, and Otra Vida is now moving
along at a leisurely 4kts rather than the 6kts that the gennaker would have
given, but life is fine indeed with a glass of wine and a bite of cheese, and a
playlist of Lou Reed, Crass, Ani di Franco and others playing in the background.
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| Underway with regular sails, at this point slowing down to arrive in Honduras at dawn |
One afternoon in the 1930s Bertrand Russell, by then in his
50s, was staying at the house of a friend in France. Sitting in the garden, quite possibly with a
glass of wine and a piece of camembert, contemplating life, he noticed an
apricot tree. His sparkling mind thus
stimulated, he decided to spend the afternoon learning about apricots, and
among the facts discovered that apricot has the same root as precocious because
it fruits early in the season. He
learned many other things about apricots that day, and commented that at the
end of the day the apricot tasted all the sweeter and more enjoyable for the
knowledge he had gained. That idyllic
day became a part of one of his wonderful essays, “On ´Useless´
Knowledge”. It is a classic Russell
essay, an argument for education rather than training, for a festival of intellectual
growth and discovery as a pleasurable and worthwhile end in itself. (One can only wonder what he would have made
of the celebratory anti-intellectualism prevalent in many areas of contemporary
western life. I think it can be said
with certainty that he would not have remained on the sidelines).
Apricot trees in a garden in France might at first glance
seem a long way from the fairly remote part of the Caribbean Sea I am now on,
or from the jungle rivers of the north east South America, Otra Vida´s sailing
grounds in late 2014, but there is an interesting parallel in the concept of
uselessness.
Almost all the land of French Guiana, Suriname and Guyana is
useless. The rivers that run through the
land are mostly useless. And this part
of the Caribbean, a hundred or so miles west of Jamaica, several hundred miles
north east of Nicaragua is most certainly useless. Too deep for hydrocarbon exploitation, and
far less useful for fishing than the shallower banks south of Jamaica.
It is specifically uselessness that has allowed these places
to remain largely pristine and flourishing, undamaged by the prevailing
economic system.
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| Sunrise on the approach to Roatan, Honduras after 5 days at sea |
In first world countries useless land is often assigned some
sort of designation: National Park, Wildlife Refuge, Wilderness, Tribal Land,
Reservation, and so on. Sometimes the
initial move for classification and protection was by visionary individuals
with genuinely high ideals, in other cases by indigenous people desperate to
stop cultural genocide. But sadly high
ideals and moral appeals are insufficient when there is economic activity at
stake. In a number of cases, as soon as some
economic use for the land was found there were concerted efforts to chip away
at protections. Several particularly cynical
political figures come to mind, loudly proclaiming their green credentials for
“protecting” land that was considered useless, then promptly fighting that
protection when oil, shale, gas, “useful” timber, or some other means of
economic exploitation is found. Remember
“drill, baby, drill“? And should anyone
be imprudent enough to protest this, the time honoured tradition of
incarceration is invoked for the unforgivable crime of camping in a place
inconvenient to the establishment.
Guyana´s wealthiest town, Bartica, where Otra Vida spent
some time at anchor, is a gold mining service town. Wealthy is relative, and no one would call
Bartica a wealthy place by western standards, but by Guyanese standards it has
money flowing in abundance. The town is
gritty and edgy, a frontier town of short term profiteering, feeling like it
could become violent quickly, although it remained calm while we were
there. The gold miners, legal and
illegal, come into town from the goldfields to reprovision, sell their gold,
and let off steam in the bars and brothels.
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| Gold trading in Bartica, Guyana |
What does this type of gold mining look like? Well, a large barge, say 25m x 10m, will have
a huge dredging pump on it, driven by an equally large diesel motor. The dredge, somewhat similar to a monster-sized
vacuum cleaner, sucks up the sediment and grit on the bottom of the river and
passes it over a series of riffles which allow the gold dust to separate out
from the mud and grit. The mud and grit
go back into the river at the back of the barge, while the gold is collected by
the miners. A typical barge will consume
1100l of diesel in 24 hours, employ two dozen or so miners on a share basis,
and produce 20-30oz of gold dust a day.
In other words 1100 litres of diesel (5 large drums) and a huge amount
of river bed torn up yield less than a handful of gold dust. One can only imagine the impact of this on
the local ecosystem, not to mention the environmental costs of production,
transportation and consumption of so much diesel. For a handful of gold dust.
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| Bartica, wealthiest town in Guyana |
The upper parts of the rivers are now no longer easily
navigable because of the spoil piles.
The jungle nearby is being destroyed when a natural depression is found
as gold dust is likely to have accumulated there over thousands of years. The first thing is to clear cut the
depression, then dam and flood it, and then use the same dredging technique,
but with the equipment brought in on large ex military vehicles on one-time-use
roads cut through previously untouched jungle.
Local tribes who have lived in the area from pre-Columbian
times have from time to time objected to the destruction of their land. They have been threatened and sometimes
killed.
All of this makes complete economic sense – it is
profitable. But from any other
perspective it is insane. The desperate focus worldwide on GDP growth hides
within it many situations which are utterly nonsensical viewed in any other
context.
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| The jungle will recover - islands in the Essequibo River, Guyana |
Thankfully the rainforest jungle is resilient and regrows
quickly. Islands that had houses are
quickly overgrown when people leave.
Hopefully, if nothing else “useful” is discovered, in a generation or
two gold mining will be just a traumatic memory.
It is such a privilege to be able to see and experience
“useless” places on the planet. Get a
hundred miles offshore and you are usually in a world unchanged by man. Follow a jungle river upstream and you find
untouched nature. Sail to an
economically useless island and it remains pristine. In 1899 the last unclaimed lands, the terra incognita, were annexed by the
then dominant empires, and the real frontier died. Jerome Fitzgerald, an interesting and
somewhat controversial sailing author, talks about cruising on a sailboat as
the “last viable frontier”. On the best
days, in remote places, it is easy to agree with his view.
Time for another glass of wine.
(Oops, a couple of seconds after that first picture a wave hit
beam on, knocking me just enough off balance to let the bottle fall over,
hitting the wine beaker, splashing wine over the camembert and making my leg look like I had been
crushing grapes in a vat. The Kindle is
thankfully OK. Such is the sailing
life).
