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Dec 29, 2006: Christmas in Lanzarote

22°C / 72°F

Position:29° 2′ 56″ N-13° 37′ 12″ W

Wind: 20km/h

Christmas in Lanzarote – Waiting for a replacement part
An electronic component of the display indicating the battery’s state of charge could not be repaired by the crew on site. For this reason, the solar catamaran stayed in the port of Puerto Calero (Lanzarote) during Christmas and it will only continue its journey after the delivery on New Year’s Eve, heading towards Cape Verde.

After a press conference on 21 December and subsequent media reports, several visitors boarded the ship, including typical Lanzarote-dropouts and noble alternatives such as the fetching "Diogenes from Töss". That is what the editor of the island’s weekly paper (which is written in German) calls himself since his arrival at the Canary Islands. The longhaired blond man in his thirties comes from the Swiss city of Winterthur. The city’s main stream is Töss.
In the meantime, more than a kilo of daily press has piled up at the WWF office. We have made it to the front page of the magazine "Lanzarote 7". The reports on us are detailed and positive, mostly with pictures. A lot of attention is paid to the sea research and our worried bulletins concerning the garbage and fragments of rope and nets sighted even on the high sea. The latter blocked one of our engines for two nights. On reaching the mainland, we were thoroughly disgruntled and intended to get rid of the trash which was stuck in our propellers. However, we changed our minds: from now on, we would always show the rubbish during press conferences and also display it to visitors and reporters.
The content of our speeches ties in very nicely with the excellent priorities which are maintained by the campaigns and work of WWF Canaria and the sea museum.
This is what strikes us as positive today, especially when we recall environment-warnings being rejected, ignored, nagged at and denied for centuries. The question of realisation remains open; it rarely becomes a subject of discussion. There are plenty of very simple and directly changeable examples: At night, we pass dozens, even hundreds of glaring candelabras (no one is around); all the buses wait at the bus stations for fifteen or even thirty minutes with running engines and so on.
Among the entourage of the press conference, the question of tanker "cleaning" was discussed at great length with the attending WWF and sea experts. The real situation is the following: Infrastructures are not at all available (waiting periods, deficiencies etc.) for legal cleaning (this term being more or less appropriate in this case). During all this time, an illegal practice, global and strikingly conspicuous for everyone, is in operation; plans for efficient satellite surveillance are rudimentary, faltering repeatedly.
The WWF-people are fully aware of the places where the tankers clean illegally and are just the same powerless in the face of a continuous practice which is juristically recognised as illegal. What becomes clearer during such events: The entire weight of the communication workload should be globally shifted from pure information to extensive and binding realisation strategies. For a little project like ours, for our tiny crew of five people, which will continue its trip after this sojourn in Lanzarote, it is actually frustrating to have pointed out all this (and to have had these facts received affirmatively by the media) and to encounter the same depressing scenario again: On the high sea, miles away from the mainland, bottles, containers, large plastic bags and small ones, garbage and dirt, and, worst of all, cords, ropes, strings and fragments of nets float past us – waste which one would expect to encounter in a harbour basin (where its presence is equally unwished for).
Hope lies in the certainty that, from today onwards, measures are being put into operation in order to change the state of things! The agreeable knowledge of being able to ride on the sea without pollution and "cleaning" problems already pleases us now. These are the things which we see in our working environment every day and which flit through our minds at night.
We are grateful to be able to share our thoughts with you, the reading public.

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