LINDSAY Dines has been watching dead mutton birds wash in at Teewah for more than a month.
He knows death is part of their migratory fate.
Their long, figure eight of the Pacific that starts in Tasmania, touches the northern hemisphere Aleutian Islands and then California before the long journey home.
But Lindsay fears something more is at play.
The avid fisherman and environmentalist has deep concerns about the numbers dying.
"I'm told that a month ago a count was done by someone - 25,000 between Noosa North Shore and Caloundra,'' he said.
"And there are media reports of dead birds extending from Bundaberg to southern coast of Victoria, plus Tasmania and the New Zealand's west coast - in abnormally large numbers and along all beaches creating great concern in communities all along the coast.
"All birds tested by vets were found to be emaciated and starving.''
Given the range of the death and numbers being reported, Mr Dines fears as many as five million birds may have died.
When conditions are calmer, they seek out baitfish herded to the surface by tuna and other predatory fish.
"Feeding on migration is essential and is totally dependent on there being both predatory fish and baitfish along the migratory path,'' Mr Dines said.
"This year has been different to past mass deaths.
"The shearwaters are frantically trying to feed inshore in large numbers before they land on the water in the surf or not far beyond and wash in mostly alive.
"There are insufficient predatory fish present inshore to herd the baitfish for the shearwaters to feed.
"I've been watching all seabirds, including shear waters over the last few months constantly searching for food, but they are rarely finding any."
University of Canberra's Professor Nick Klomp, now deputy vice-chancellor for education, spent 20 years
IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.Not the absence of sound, exactly.
The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.
And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.
What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat. The birds were missing because the fish were missing.
Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.
"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.
But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.
No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all."In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.
"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."
But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.
North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.
"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.
And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.
"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."
But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.
"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.
"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.
"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.
"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."
Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.
No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.
The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.
"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.
"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.
"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."
In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.
"Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere you look."
Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.
Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.
"In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.
Not this time.
"In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.
"If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.
"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.
"We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.
"We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.
"Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw."
Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.
And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.
BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage.
"The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.
Recognising the problem is vast, and that no organisations or governments appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about it, Macfadyen is looking for ideas.
He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.
More immediately, he will approach the organisers of Australia's major ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.
Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.
"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," he said.
"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."
1 million tons of Fukushima debris floating near US West Coast?
Published time: November 05, 2013 17:53
Over a million tons of Fukushima debris could be just 1,700 miles off the American coast, floating between Hawaii and California, according to research by a US government agency.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently updated its report on the movement of the Japanese debris, generated by the March 2011 tsunami, which killed 16,000 people and led to the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown.
Seventy percent of an estimated 5 million tons of debris sank near the coast of Japan, according to the Ministry of Environment. The rest presumably floated out into the Pacific.
While there are no accurate estimates as to where the post-tsunami junk has traveled so far, the NOAA has come up with a computer model of the debris movement, which gives an idea of where its highest concentration could be found.
That area is crosshatched at the NOAA model below and resembles an island quite near the US shore.
The NOAA graphics have led to numerous media reporting about an island of rubbish moving towards the US.
The agency was forced to alleviate the concerns in an article saying there was “no solid mass of debris from Japan heading to the United States.”
“At this point, nearly three years after the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, whatever debris remains floating is very spread out. It is spread out so much that you could fly a plane over the Pacific Ocean and not see any debris since it is spread over a huge area, and most of the debris is small, hard-to-see objects,” NOAA explains on its official webpage.
The agency has stressed its research is just computer simulation, adding that “observations of the area with satellites have not shown any debris.”
Despite the fact the tsunami debris is scattered and does not form a solid mass, the researchers still believe it’s a serious matter to keep an eye on.
Scientists are particularly interested in the organisms that could be living on objects from Japan reaching the west coast.
"At first we were only thinking about objects like the floating docks, but now we’re finding that all kinds of Japanese organisms are growing on the debris," John Chapman of the Marine Science Center at Oregon State University told Fox News.
"We've found over 165 non-native species so far," he continued. "One type of insect, and almost all the others are marine organisms … we found the European blue mussel, which was introduced to Asia long ago, and then it grew on a lot of these things that are coming across the Pacific ... we’d never seen it here, and we don’t particularly want it here."
The worst-case scenario would be that the trash is housing invasive organisms that could disrupt the local environment's current balance of life. Such was the case in Guam, where earlier this year it was announced that the US government intended to parachute dead mice laced with sedatives on to the island in order to deal with an invasive species of brown tree snake that was believed to have been brought to the American territory on a military ship over 60 years ago. In a little over half a century, a few snakes spawned what became an estimated 2 million animals, the likes of which ravaged the island's native bird population and warranted government intervention.
Other concerns such as radiation, meanwhile, have been downplayed. On its website, the NOAA says, “Radiation experts agree that it is highly unlikely that any tsunami-generated marine debris will hold harmful levels of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear emergency.”
Independent groups like the 5 Gyres Institute, which tracks pollution at sea, have echoed the NOAA’s findings, saying that radiation readings have been “inconsequential.” Even the release of radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear reactor shouldn't be a grave concern, since scientists say it will be diluted to the point of being harmless by the time it reaches American shores in 2014.
The boat washed ashore at Cape Disappointment on June 15, just more than 15 months after it was swept out to sea by the tsunami in Japan on March 11, 2011.、
The Japanese Consulate in Seattle confirms the boat was originally from the Tohoku region of Japan, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Officials at the consulate told NOAA the owner does not want to get the boat and is okay with officials in Washington disposing of it.
The boat broke into several pieces as it rolled through the surf before ending up on the beach. However Washington Department of Ecology officials said it did not spill any fuel on the beach.
Health officials also scanned it for radiation and other contaminants but found nothing.
So far, NOAA has tracked 404 reports of Japanese debris washing up on the West Coast between California and Alaska. | Track tsunami debris
On Tuesday, Oregon Parks and Recreation Department officials said they hired a Vancouver, Wash. company to dismantle the dock on the beach and remove it in pieces by land.
The process is expected to cost the state around $84,155.
Parks officials considered bids that involved towing the dock elsewhere by sea before dismantling it but couldn’t guarantee invasive species wouldn’t make it into nearby Yaquina Bay.
Marine biologists removed two tons of plants and animals from the dock but there are concerns some invasive organisms are still living on the bottom or interior of the dock.
Species on the dock included the northern Pacific sea star and wakame, which are both of the global list of the 100 worst invasive species.
Portions of the dock will be saved and used in a local memorial.
Also on Tuesday, researchers in Washington said they found parts of a house that appeared to be from Japan. It washed ashore on a remote beach west of Seattle.
