Volvo Ocean Race 2014-15 - Team Brunel - Plastic soup

by Team Brunel on 12 Jan 2015 Volvo Ocean Race 2014-15 - A message from our skipper Bouwe Bekking: 'A bit of a sad message from Team Brunel today to start off with. Why? There was so much plastic in the water. I started counting in several intervals of 10 minutes, for a duration of four hours, to get a good average of the amount of plastic what I could see floating by. A scary result was the outcome.

Every 37 seconds I saw a piece of rubbish floating by. If you also take the smaller pieces of plastic into account which are not clearly visible to my eyes, the result of ocean pollution is devastating. Imagine that I can see only 50 meters to the windward side of the boat, so only covering a tiny bit of the ocean. I am not a scientist or researcher, but the total weight rubbish floating around in this part of the world must be enormous.

It nearly looks like that rubbish has been dumped on purpose in the ocean. Please people get your act together, think about the sea life living here. This in the long run will have a negative effect also on human beings as well, not being able to consume fish anymore.

Besides this negative news, I would also like to bring you some positive news from the Indian Ocean. We have a very proud and happy sailor here aboard Team Brunel after being named sailor of the year in his country Lithuania: Rokas Milevicius. For the time being he is not Rocky anymore, but a true Rockstar. A true ambassador for our sport, putting sailing on the map in his country, with several newspapers and TV following the race.'