Sailing towards conservation awareness
I wrote the following article for TOPO journal a few years ago, with permission to share the text elsewhere. Following this experience (and another week guiding in Scotland), I was invited to speak on the RGS Oceans Panel at their annual Explore conference, to talk about how we can better connect to the plight of the ocean through adventure.
The coastal waters of Cornwall are home to some of the richest and most extraordinary marine life in the United Kingdom. Its shorelines, inlets and creeks teem with colonies of oysters, seaweeds, sponges, crabs, curlews, cormorants, and an extensive network of rock pools. Meadows of seagrass and beds of kelp sway in the shallows, whilst offshore, porpoise, dolphins, sharks, and even whales are commonly sighted.
In September of 2021, shortly after a national covid-19 lockdown was lifted, I was lucky enough to spend three weeks working as an expedition leader and wildlife guide with Sail Britain, exploring the rugged south Cornish coastline. Sail Britain was founded to reconnect people with nature and the ocean through sailing, and our crew came from diverse backgrounds, with most having never set foot on a sailing boat before.
It’s no secret that our oceans are under threat, yet these threats can be hard to relate to. We’ve become so disconnected from nature, that it’s easy to feel separate from what’s going on.
Living on a boat immediately brings you closer. Whether it’s relying on the winds and the tides to travel by or being rocked to sleep at night by the waves, you’re immersed in, and reliant on, a world that many don’t get to experience. David Attenborough once hypothesised that “no one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced”. Yet with an estimated one fifth of people in Britain having never even been to a beach, how many of us have never had the opportunity to grow to care about the ocean?
With this in mind, I — along with skipper Oliver Beardon — tried to integrate the principles of conservation and ocean restoration into every aspect of our sailing adventures, as a means of engaging crew members with these issues.
British waters are home to nearly 26,000 square miles of kelp forests, although this is probably a fraction of their historical extent. Large areas have been lost to activities like destructive bottom trawling. Kelp supports complex ecosystems and provides a home and shelter to a vast range of wildlife. Some of us were lucky enough to snorkel through swaying kelp forests, which danced in the dappled sunlight off Looe Island. We all stayed in the water, transfixed by this underwater kingdom, until we got too cold to move. We marvelled jewel-like blue rayed limpets, and curious grey seals. These ecosystems are now recognised as key in mitigating climate change, and like other coastal ecosystems they store far more carbon per unit area than terrestrial forests. Kelp alone is thought to remove 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, so it is crucial that we not only protect kelp forests but allow them to regenerate.
We also scoured nautical charts to seek out seagrass beds, of which there are only around 32 square miles left in the UK. We have lost over 90% of our seagrass beds in the last few centuries because of human activity and pollution. Thankfully, there are now some active efforts to restore it, by organisations like Project Seagrass. This is important as seagrass also draws down a huge amount of carbon and supports a wide variety of wildlife. Our efforts to snorkel amongst the seagrass were sadly less successful than our kelp escapades. Each time we tried, the sediment on the bottom had been whipped up by windy weather, so we had to dive within a metre of it before we could see the fronds appear out of the murk. However, the glimpses of large fish streaking through the gloom and sights of bright green snakelocks anemones, were enough to give a hint at what lies within these meadows.
Conservation, at its heart, relies on people. Because of this I was keen to visit sustainable local initiatives working with the ocean. At Mylor Harbour near Falmouth, we met with (Chris) Ranger, who is both an oyster fisherman and a conservationist. Since the 19th century we’ve lost around 95% of our native oyster population, again, largely because of destructive bottom trawling as well as disease and pollution. Naturally, oysters can build vast underwater reefs, which form the basis of another complex ecosystem and support a huge array of wildlife. Being filter feeders, they are very effective at improving water quality and removing pollutants, with a single adult oyster being able to filter around 200 litres in a single day. It is also vital that we work to restore oyster beds.
One of the last native oyster fisheries operates in Carrick Roads and the surrounding rivers, near Falmouth. Here, fishermen still fish using traditional low-impact methods, with wooden boats and a hand-hauled dredge. However, even in Carrick Roads it’s thought that the oyster population is collapsing. Ranger is trying to reverse this decline by campaigning to increase minimum catch size and working to find ways to restore the oyster stocks through his project Saving Ester. At the end of our three weeks, we helped him haul his oyster cages from the riverbed to clean and sort adult oysters for his experimental oyster hatchery. Being so hands-on really gave everyone an appreciation for the work involved and allowed us to see the oysters up close.
On a bleak day on the beach at Coverack we also met Caro. She is one of the founding members of the Cornish Seaweed Company, which has helped shift perspectives on eating seaweed in this country. She explained to us how they harvest seaweed sustainably and showed us how to identify some species, such as dulse (which provided us with dinner that evening). She also talked to us about the amazing potential of seaweed. It’s one of the most productive and nutritious plants in the world and could go a long way to feeding the world population, without the need for chemicals or freshwater. Studies are also showing that seaweed farms could help lock down a significant amount of carbon, and seaweeds can also be used to make bioplastics and organic fertiliser — all things to be excited about.
As we sailed between wild anchorages and these beautiful ecosystems, we were sometimes accompanied by pods of common and bottlenose dolphins, particularly around the Lizard peninsula. On occasion they would bow ride for ten minutes or more, turning to look at us, or leaping clear out of the water — unforgettable moments. We also spotted harbour porpoise, diving gannets, razorbills, various gulls, compass jellyfish and curlew.
In terms of the threats facing the ocean, marine noise pollution is one that is little talked about, yet a major problem for underwater ecosystems. Many ocean-dwelling species rely on sound to communicate, and to find each other. Human noise, from boat engines, infrastructure development and seismic surveys are wreaking havoc on behaviour, physiology and even reproduction of marine wildlife. Despite this, current frameworks to improve ocean health ignore the need to mitigate noise as a prerequisite for a healthy ocean.
As human ears are not well adapted to hearing underwater, the best way to illustrate this issue was by using a hydrophone (an underwater microphone). The first time we listened to the hydrophone, was when sheltering overnight from a gale in Newlyn harbour — one of the last active fishing ports in Cornwall. With our 41ft yacht dwarfed by the metal hulks of the Newlyn fishing fleet, we hooked it up to a loudspeaker inside the saloon and lowered it into the water. Whilst the main sound above deck was waves lapping and the clinking of chains against the harbour wall, underwater was a different story. The sound of engines and equipment was deafening — even with the volume turned down low. It was stressful and unrelenting. We breathed a collective sigh of relief when it was turned off. Yet marine life has no off button, and what we heard was merely a hint at what much marine life has to live with constantly.
The following evening, we anchored up in Mullion Cove. Far from any harbours and with no other boats around, we lowered the hydrophone into the water once again. Immediately, we were plunged into a magical underwater soundscape. It sounded for all the world like a crackling campfire, yet the bristling crackles and pops that enveloped us were actually made by shellfish and shrimp. One of the crew members remarked that “this is something that everyone needs to hear — I had absolutely no idea that the ocean was like this”. The stark difference really threw the idea of marine noise pollution into perspective.
Another much better-known marine conservation issue is plastic pollution, yet most of the plastic in the oceans isn’t visible to the naked eye. There are approximately 51 trillion pieces of microplastic (less than 5mm in diameter) in the ocean, which is roughly 500 times the number of stars in our galaxy.
To see if we could find any, we lowered a microplastic net from the spinnaker pole when cruising in calmer waters, and dragged it beside the boat for around ten minutes, before emptying the contents beneath our onboard microscope. Despite the waters looking pristine, depressingly we always found several pieces of microplastic in our trawls. The most common pieces were microfibres, many of which would have been released from synthetic clothing in our washing machines before being flushed into the ocean.
Although this was sobering, we were also enthralled by everything else we found in our trawls. The microscope gave us access to a completely hidden world. Over the three weeks we spent many long afternoons pouring over ID guides, trying to work out what all the weird and wonderful planktonic creatures swimming below the microscope were, before returning them to the ocean.
Finally, having lived in Cornwall before, I was keen to introduce my fellow crew members to one of her best kept autumn secrets. On many evenings after long days of sailing, a few hours after sunset, we would launch ourselves into the cold inky black water. Upon our touch, the water around us sparkled to life with miniscule flashes of light, as bioluminescent plankton lit up, sensing our movement in the water. Our skin appeared to be twinkling with thousands of tiny stars. It’s a phenomenon that many of the crew had never seen before, never mind in British waters.
Swimming in bioluminescence, under the milky way, was incredibly magical. It’s one of those phenomena that fills you with wonder for the natural world, and to me, that feels like falling in love. It’s something that I wish everyone could experience, for how can we care about nature if we haven’t fallen in love with her first? By getting to experience these moments first-hand, it allowed everyone on the sailing trips to do just that.
