BACKParis to look into how to 'save the whales'
By Adrian Robson in Newport, Rhode Island
| A painful encounter with two whales has prompted Around Alone Race sailor Alan Paris to think seriously about his next ocean “mission”. A day after crossing the finish line to become the first Bermudian to successfully sail solo around the world, Paris confessed one of his immediate goals was to explore technological avenues that might help prevent such collisions in the future. While his own experience with the giant mammals left him with ribs badly bruised, possibly even cracked, he insisted he was more interested in the welfare of the whales. Soon to take up the post of director of Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, his research, he says, would fit well with his new role. “It’s probably politically incorrect for the new director of the BUEI to be running around the world bumping into whales,” he said yesterday. “And I’d seriously like to see what could be done to prevent this kind of thing happening. “The closest thing which allows you to see or find whales which is available on the market right now is forward-looking sonar which people basically use for fish finding. It’s used by fishermen who are trolling along at two knots. “But if you’re an ocean freighter and you’re going along at 15 knots or a sailboat going at ten, you might only have time to hear the second beep before you collide. “There’s this fallacy ... people think if you leave your depth sounder on that that pinging sound will alert the whale. It doesn’t.” Paris told of how on the the Around Alone leg from Cape Town to New Zealand five of the boats encountered collisions with sea life, most likely all whales. “But there’s nothing commercially available to prevent this happening,” he explained. “There’s something out there that’s been talked about. I’ve read an article about somebody trying develop something, and I’m definitely going to look into it when I get back. “It sorts of fits in with what I’m going to be doing. It fits personally because I’ve been around the world damaging whales which is not a good thing to do . . . and I’m only the tip of the iceberg. “I want to find out about the technology and maybe find some investors and get something on the market. “I would have no trouble putting my name behind the importance of having such a standard piece of equipment on board based on my own experiences. “And as much as we love whales, there’s two sides to it. I injured my ribs but it could have been much worse. If I’d hit my head on a sharp corner no one would have ever have known and I could have been drifting around off the coast of Brazil and nobody would ever have found me. “There’s a human cost, we love the whales, but we love ourselves as well.” Recounting his own experience, Paris said he believed he was lucky not to have suffered more serious injury. “I was on day two out of Salvador, sailing along in flat water. It was 12 noon local time, which is sort of a sailor’s time to write down their daily log, what they’ve done for the last 24 hours, how far they’ve gone, etc. “Then all of a sudden when I was doing about seven and a half knots in about ten knots of breeze in beautiful flat water, hot as crazy, the boat hit something hard and I heard that noise that you don’t want to hear . . . like flexing fibreglass, a cracking sound. “It’s a sound you don’t want to hear offshore. “As I got up there was a secondary hit and the boat stopped dead in the water. The first hit was a glancing blow and then the second was head-on. As I got up I lifted a lid, my navigation table lid. It’s about an inch wide and it just got me right across my ribs and side section. “But with the adrenaline, I didn’t feel it at all. I ran up to the deck to see what was going on, and unfortunately there was blood on both sides of the boat. I’d really done quite a lot of damage to this whale. “There was one whale going east-west and the other north-south. I saw them very clearly. I let the mainsheet out to stop forward movement of the boat because I didn’t want to keep butting into them. “And then, somehow the whale went either below the keel or to the side and boat started moving again and as I looked over my left hand shoulder, one whale was following the boat. “It’s not unknown for whales to ram boats and that’s what was running through my mind, that I had damaged his partner and he was chasing after me.” Paris, however, escaped any further collisions, although as he soon discovered the initial crash left him unable to perform the simplest of tasks without enduring considerable pain. “The Ibuprofen helped, but it was still pretty uncomfortable,” he said. Now resting in Newport, Paris will be attending this Saturday’s official Around Alone prize presentations before returning to Bermuda early next week. |