‘THE SARGASSO SEA’ by James R Hart

I’m not into borrowing other people’s quotes. Instead, I’d sooner think of something original, but at an ENG appointment at Merseyside Medical Centre, Cunard Buildings, there’s an inscription: ‘They that go down to the sea in ships truly see the works of the Lord’ (or similar).

It’s still there, inside on a stone balustrade in gold-leaf lettering and whether noticed by an old hand or someone fresh out of sea school, it’s stuff to ponder.

Sea school didn’t mention much about winter storms, the enormous waves and greyness, but southbound below latitude 25C there was almost an instant shift into the blue placid Sargasso Sea.

Whether believing in the ‘works of the Lord’  bit or not, most would say it’s like a deliverance into another world of calmness and inner nature.

The Sargasso is a sea within a sea, ie, not bounded by land masses and it roughly aligns with the infamous Bermuda Triangle area, an expanse of two million square miles of ocean.

A calm, high-pressure zone, it’s notable as a living ecozone of Sargassum seaweed which, in turn, supports an ecology of green and loggerhead turtles, spawning European eels, plus 10 other endemic species found nowhere else.

 Sailing through the Sargassum is akin to voyaging through a floating rainforest which indeed it is, absorbing huge quantities of carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere. 

In history books sailors from Christopher Columbus’ ships feared that the lush seaweed would drag the vessel down – maybe that’s why it took him so long to discover America…….

Anyway, apart from the feel-good factor of leaving the storm it was helpful that the old salts knew some facts of the Sargasso: it was unique, turquoise-blue and home to crabs, plankton and fish roe; we did zoom in on some of the Sargassum mats with binoculars but apart from flying fish it was impossible to see marine organisms – an old bosun recounted that ‘all these “wee beasties” are there, out of sight, underneath the seaweed.’

So after the storm the ship took on a gentle rolling motion through the Sargasso: the golden mats drifted by in a swaying, rhythmic fashion. It was mesmerising and years thereafter I never tired of watching this miracle of nature; during smoko from a hot and sweaty engine room it was a joy to sit and watch the ocean’s biodiversity……. but don’t worry, people at sea do stranger things than that.

Of course, this was pre-internet time and the only shipboard info I could find on the Sargasso and Gulf Stream amongst old paperbacks was Ernest Hemingway’s novel Islands in the Stream.

A great yarn, but hardly an academic work so I didn’t learn much; later finding the bridge’s excellent reference, Imray North Atlantic Passage Guide, the skipper thought it was going to marked by oily engine-room hands so that was the end of that – old-school skippers had their own ideas.

But all experienced deck crew, including the skipper, mates and AB’s knew of the Sargasso circular current advantages – southward-bound to gain speed and vice versa on a northerly track; so decades later I was surprised to discover that two successive second mates had never even heard of the Sargasso Sea. Oh, dear!, I thought – maybe I’ve mispronounced Sargasso. Anyway, this was only two years ago (2022) and without naming the ship, I figured the Maritime Colleges aren’t teaching all they should these days. 

This disappointing encounter was best forgotten though. After all they may just have been kidding me along. Who knows?

But in any case this was in sharp contrast to a third off’ I sailed with in 2009 who was also a first-year marine biology student with the Open University. Of course, this isn’t a pre-requisite for an officer of the watch; but a personable bloke, he would chat away to anyone interested and after watch on that vessel, as it chugged along at slow speed from Panama, we used nets and drag-ropes to haul in clumps of Sargassum weed.

We inevitably got called ‘skivers’ (what else!), or a favourite ‘what’s wrong with the galley food then, eh?’; but had the real researchers from Greenpeace, World Wildlife Foundation, etc, been aboard this ship they would have been ecstatic to catch, identify and photograph these little marine critters.

We didn’t have credentials – I believe these days such efforts would have accorded us the title of ‘citizen scientists’ – but did find that this oceanic ‘rain forest’ was indeed a habitat to zoo plankton, tiny crabs, other crustaceans and aquatic life.

Above all I hoped to find some European river eel larvae – elvers, they’re called – but without success.

And  the presence of birds over the golden Sargassum mats also indicated marine life and after seven days outward bound from Panama were a welcome sight – mostly these were skua, the birds of the real open ocean.

However, about 60% of the net loads had waste plastic: cups, drinking straws, wrappers, etc; there was a plastic carrier bag from a Florida supermarket which had ceased trading several years ago, so years of UV rays hadn’t broken that down at all.

There were also lengths and pieces of green fishing line and, as a merchant seaman, I really can’t understand what goes through trawlermen’s heads: surely there’s enough space aboard to stow broken line instead of jettisoning it.

For sure, in my own experience, most dumping of garbage from ships has long gone – huge fines under MARPOL have changed that. So it’s fair to say most plastic is river-borne into the ocean.

The UN Environmental Programmes has a guesstimate of 75 to 199 million tonnes of plastic waste are found in the ocean at any given time. A very approximate assessment; worse still, the UN also states this number increases year on year. ( source: unep.org (12.05.2023) Our planet is choking on plastic).

So at this point people would ask: what’s this got to do with me? Well, not much if they ignore the fact that the Sargasso absorbs CO2 from Earth’s atmosphere; and unless they routinely throw plastic waste in the road or rivers where, eventually, it carries out to sea to break down into microplastics and ingested by fish. Also this plastic drifts into the Sargasso to entangle and reduce aquatic life 

But there is light at the end of the tunnel, and a 2023 UN treaty to reduce ocean pollution was signed by 68 states including the UK. The basis is that signatories agree to reduce use of single-use plastic. But if there has been any UK reduction in use I must have missed out on the news.

Furthermore, only four countries have ratified the treaty: Belize, Chile, Palau and the Seychelles and this is notable because it’s only by ratifying the treaty that enshrines it into international law.

Maybe the UK governments’ slowness to ratify, ie, not putting their money where their mouth is, is due to this summer’s General Election. For once, maybe we should throw them some slack on this issue.

As stated I’m not one for bandying other people’ quotes, but the 2002 line from the previous Conservative Environment Minister Rebecca Pow: ‘we are putting environment at the heart of our policy-making’ is memorable for the fact that these were just empty words when instead we want action. Let’s hope the UK and other nations get moving soon.