As part of their monthly meetings, Kenilworth All Together Greener, invited me to share my first-hand account about Leg 4 of eXXpedition. The meeting was held on 8th January 2020, exactly 1 month since my trip finished in Aruba and I disembarked S.V TravelEdge.
Well attended by the KATG regulars and my very own fan club - there were approximately 30 people gathered in the Kenilworth Centre to hear me talk about sailing, science and a crew of women.
It was an educated and engaging crowd with BIG expectations and anticipation about the results of the scientific research we conducted on board.
It is far too soon to say as the global research (using strict protocols everywhere water samples are collected, including 4 of the 5 gyres and the Arctic) will continue over the next 18 months. There will ensue a peer review process and any other validation required for the conclusions of a scientific paper to be admissible as evidence.
Whilst we need to be patient I could share with the crowd my own take on what we fished out of the Caribbean Sea : every sample collection, whether on the surface, in the water column or in the sediment at the bottom of the sea contained some plastics.... not as much as was found by Legs 1 and 2 (the brave women who crossed the Atlantic), but still.....
And, once we saw what happens on land on Antigua, Bonaire and Aruba, it wasn't much of a surprise....
unsanitary landfills heaped up high right next to mangroves and the sea,
rubbish laying the streets, gutters, edges (during our Circular Assessment Protocol survey of 3 transects of 100 metres, we found 373 pieces of rubbish that would have inevitably ended up somewhere else than in a recycling station),
litter on the beach and into the water edge (during our Dive Clean in Bonaire as part of Project Aware, we collected 4 kilos of debris in the sea) which was not going to leave the water on their own accord.
The audience, I felt, was deeply passionate about the issue and my experience resonated with them. Perhaps, at times, my knowledge of the entire 'plastics in the oceans' issue was a bit light but together we conducted a healthy debate around where the issue lies and what solutions are available already (as well as what needs to come next).
Special call out to Lewis who abandoned his revision for an hour to come and listen to me - and, in doing so, slightly reduced the average age of the group ;-)