#seanomad

[ccohanlon]

unmoored

Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

Sterling Hayden, from Wanderer (1963)

I sense the weather as I wake, even before I open my eyes.

The hull is still, save for a faint, gravitational shift of tension starboard, between it and the wooden pontoon to which it’s tethered. A shift of tide, not wind. The only sound is my wife’s breathing as she sleeps.

The air in the cabin is cold for a summer morning. The moisture in it has substance; you can almost swill it around your mouth. There’s a thin taste of salt, diesel and wood.

Fog.

I open my eyes to peer through a perspex hatch above my head. Sky the colour of stale milk has fallen across it. I sit up, wrap my duvet around my shoulders, and check the small, brass-encased barometer and clock on the bulkhead above the foot of my bunk. 6.30am: four hours before high water.

In an hour, my wife and I will warp our old sloop from its berth and sail a mile or so north-west across the Tamar estuary on the flood to thread a narrow channel edged by mudflats, at the mouth of a nearby tributary, St. John’s River, to reach a ramshackle boatyard where our boat is to be lifted ashore for repairs.

Fog and unfamiliar waters will make what might have been a careless twenty-minute transit more testing. Up-river are commercial wharves and a naval dockyard. Large ships and ferries ply the buoyed, deep-water fairway in the middle of the river, heedless of small boats like ours — mere pin-pricks, if seen at all, on their radar screens. In such poor visibility, the percussive thud thud of heavy diesels will be the only hint we get of their proximity and course.

Our boat has no radar. No GPS either. The VHF radio has seen better days. Wrack is an impoverished vessel, sea-worn and ill-equipped, almost half a century old, but capable enough under sail. With a fair breeze today, we can make do with a salt-stiffened mainsail, steering compass, and a rough plan of soundings with a small section of shoreline that I’ve traced in pencil from a large-scale chart on the harbourmaster’s office wall.

We moved aboard four months ago, at the beginning of what turned out to be a cold, wet spring. The boat was berthed on a listing pontoon, on the lower reaches of another river, the Itchen, 150 sea miles east of where we are now, alongside a bank of coal black mud that dried at low water and smelled of rotting seaweed and industrial waste. The capricious eddies of a semidiurnal ebb and flow tugged at the keel. Mooring lines creaked as they strained against their cleats.

It took a while to get used to the constant movement of the boat and the noises the river — and the relentless equinoctial wind — drew from its hull and rigging, but they were the least of other things we had to get used to: cooking in a tiny galley, pumping waste from the toilet by hand, even moving back and forth in the narrow cabin or outside, along rope-strewn decks. I had spent my youth living and working on the water but that was nearly half a century ago; my wife had grown up in the rural north of Oklahoma, far from any sea. I’m not sure what we expected but our first month aboard was an unsettling hardship. The cabin was gelid and condensation dripped from the deckhead, portlights and hatches. Brown water puddled at the bottom of every shelf and locker. Mildew and mould were everywhere.

Yet the boat was a refuge. We had wandered in search of somewhere to settle — or, more precisely, somewhere we would be allowed to settle — for four years, moving between whatever cheap, temporary accommodation we could borrow or afford to rent in seven countries, until this unkempt but graceful vessel suggested a possibility of shelter, of ‘fixedness’, even as we were compelled by circumstances to remain mobile, unrooted. We saw it — no, not her — as a floating vardo, spartan but functional, and by the time we slipped our lines from the pontoon and headed downriver, with a spring ebb hurrying us towards the open sea, where we would turn westwards, still uncertain of a precise destination, we had accepted the idea of ourselves as waterborne Gypsies, seafarers not yachtsmen, finally cut adrift from a shore that, we felt, no longer had a place for us.

We reach the edge of the ship channel as the sun rises above the low hills inland. A light northerly and the press of a strong spring flood againt the leeward bow fills the mainsail just enough for a slight wake to trail aft from the transom. By the time we’re reach the other side of the estuary, the fog has begun to dissipate but we’re still taken by surprise when a pair of large tugs, steaming seawards in company, materialises suddenly, as if out of thin air, and crosses our track close astern.

My wife and I stand together in the cockpit and peer forward under the boom, hoping to spot small, plastic, red and green buoys that will guide our course towards the boatyard. I study my hand-wrought chart and try to make it fit with the few features we can see: a pub, a car park, jittery water over shoals that fringe the low-lying shore.

Within a few minutes, we are picking our way across those same shoals. My wife calls out readings from an electronic depth-sounder, none of them reassuring. Our keel is close enough to the river bottom that I can feel a swirl of turbulence around it through the rudder. Two hundred metres off the port bow, through haze, I make out the rusted steel hulks of two river freighters, aground on the mud; they suggest a makeshift breakwater. Several metres to starboard, another improvised breakwater: the large, weather-worn wreck of a wooden fishing boat, its seams swollen and seeping rust, also aground and listing precariously against a high concrete quay. I assume the entrance is somewhere in between. My chart, such as it is, ends at these motley barriers.

We douse our sails and start the engine; with the throttle in neutral, we let the tide carry us closer over the murky shallows. There’s a volley of small arms fire. Then an explosion.

“I’ve seen this movie,” my wife says.

When I was a boy I dreamed of pirate utopias.

They were everywhere in the 17th and 18th centuries, refuges for outlaws and dissolute outsiders. From the island of Madagascar, the renegade captains Henry Every and William Kidd preyed on Arab traders and ships of the East India Companies off the coasts of East Africa and southern India; there were corsair strongholds in the Mediterranean — Ghar al Milh in Tunisia and Algiers — and the Muslim pirate Republic of Salé on the Atlantic coast of Morocco; there were a score of well-known Caribbean refuges, among them Port Royal, a British buccaneer sanctuary on the Jamaican coast, Tortuga on the French-held island of Haiti, and New Providence in the Bahamas, the last an uninhabited island until it was claimed by an English privateer-turned-pirate Henry Jennings and became the hideout of a pirate admiral, Benjamin Hornigold, and later the infamous ‘Blackbeard’, Edward Teach.

These were rough, anarchic places, their shores often defended by ramparts arrayed with cannons, behind which lay improvised settlements of victuallers, armourers, shipwrights, canvasmakers, boarding houses, bars, brothels, illicit traders, ‘fences’, and slavers, all in service to the pirate fleet and its crews. During fair weather seasons, the anchorages would swell to become water-bound townships themselves, with ships of all sizes, many of the captured ‘prizes’, lying in close proximity to each other, a steady traffic of oared lighters and cutters navigating the narrow waters between them.

I was forty-two years old when I came across a copy of Peter Lamborn Wilson’s 1995 book, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes, which connected, obliquely, Wilson’s somewhat idealised take on these unruly havens to his by-then-notorious notion of Temporary Autonomous Zones. First published in 1991 under the pseudonym Hakim Bey, just two years after Timothy Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, Lamborn’s book, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, described a “socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control”. It also suggested real and virtual ‘territory’ within which anarchic concepts of unrestricted freedom, beyond the reach of government, might be explored. Similar ideas, sparsely defined, in relation to sea-borne communities, had inspired me as a young man, when I first slipped away from a privileged, if peripatetic, upbringing to live alone aboard a tiny sailing boat.

If my younger self had been pressed to describe what a 21st century ‘pirate utopia’ might look like, he might have come up with the ramshackle, almost dystopian seascape that we are entering, tentatively, on a sluggish flood.

Astern of the rotting wooden trawler on the starboard edge of the entrance, a small, former naval ship of some sort with high freeboard lists against the quay, thin water barely covering its propellors, while to port, a row of aged, fibreglass sailboats are berthed along a rickety pontoon secured to the corroded river freighters-turned-breakwaters; the sailboats’ keels are sunk in a glutinous shoal that, we later find out, is submerged just twice a day, for two hours either side of high water. As we drift deeper within, we pass iron-hulled narrowboats in various states of disrepair, rafted together, but disconcertingly out of place on these tidal flats, far from any canal — two young women in long floral dresses atop one of them, sipping from colorful mugs, which they raise to greet us.

Every boat looks lived in, every deck strewn with jerry cans, pot plants, and mildewed canvaswork, coachtops and rigging draped with laundry and improvised awnings. The effect is of a shanty town, a floating favela thrown together by the vagaries of wind and tide, the disparate vessels caught by the tendrils of a slow-moving gyre that eventually stranded them here, in this shallow rural backwater.

A once graceful, large motor-launch, its wooden superstructure gone to seed and patched with random off-cuts of marine ply and sheets of clear plastic, marks the end of the entrance channel. We turn ninety degrees to port into a rectangular pool of oily, brown water enclosed by cement quays and wooden pontoons. Arrayed along the quays, a handful of buildings, some more permanent than others, in stone, timber, and corrugated metal.

We steer towards a slipway; at the bottom of it, lapped by the rising tide, is a insect-like steel structure, a U-shaped gantry on wheels, from which are suspended a set of canvas slings. Men are perched atop the steel beams above the slings which, as we approach, are lowered and the whole structure moves further down the ramp, into the water. We kill the engine; there is just enough way on to drift the boat into its skeletal maw. The slings are raised, slowly, either side of the keel. The hull ceases to respond to the movement of the water. The deck becomes solid underfoot. Then, like some arcane Victorian mechanical stage effect, the boat begins to rise from the sea into the air.

More volleys of gunfire and the muffled thud of an explosion. A whisp of pale smoke rises above a line of trees on the other side of the harbour. Someone shouts a series of indistinct instructions.

“Bloody commandos,” a young woman says. She stands at a counter at one end of a somewhat chaotic kitchen in a small, open plan shed that serves as the harbour’s canteen.

“Training,” says an old man with arthritic hands and rheumy eyes, sitting alone at one of the few tables. Ex-military himself, the small sailboat he has lived aboard, alone, for six years is berthed just a hundred yards from the grassy foreshore that is the staging ground for a series of practice assaults by armed soldiers aboard rubber boats. He has retreated to the café to get away from the noise and for company.

There are three other customers, besides the old man, my wife and me. One is a former marine in his fifties who was discharged with post-traumatic stress and found insulation from his past and a necessary solitude aboard a different boats over the past decade. The others are a gangly, middle-aged South African guy who does freelance maintenance and refitting for the local yard, and a transexual English shipwright with Barbie-esque hips and bust but large, gnarled hands and a waterman’s weathern-worn face. All live aboard boats here and like the old man, come to the café as much for random social encounters as for food.

Everyone converses with each other easily: there is commonality in our lives afloat. But there is also the impression that we are all untethered and adrift. The lack of individual fixedness (that word, again) is stark. We talk of boats, sea passages and ports of call but there is no sense of place, of belonging. None of us have a home in our heads to return to — maybe this last defines the elemental difference between recreational sailors and sea-dwellers, between the guests of high-priced marinas and the liveaboard outsiders moored here and elsewhere in the obscure reaches of other estuaries and tidal creeks around the British coast — but very few of us have been pressed into this circumstance. It is a choice, or sometimes a lawless inclination, driven only in part by a desire to feel free of some of the strictures and conventions of life ashore.

Disappearance is an art and those drawn to a life on the sea are adept at it. Community among seafarers is temporary and non-committal at best. Even here, among a fleet of decrepit boats that rarely put to sea, the comings and goings of individual liveaboards — some of whom crew other people’s boats for a living — are like hauntings. For all the 20th century theorizing about pirate utopias and temporary autonomous zones — the former focussed on the consensus and lack of hierarchy at the heart of piratical decision-making (and a lack of tolerance for autocratic captains) — and the history of rigid command structurea and iron discipline imposed over centuries on sailing ships’ crews at sea, most seafarers are now, as in the past, introspective proto-anarchists, resolutely solitary, who, when ashore, might be mistaken for ghosts.

At sunset, the quayside is empty. The boatyard’s tradesmen and office staff have retreated to their homes and whatever awaits them there. A few, dim lights can be glimpsed through portholes or perspex hatches but few people. The light winds in the estuary have dissipated and the air has begun to cool. The tide is at its lowest ebb — in the harbour, now empty of saltwater , the keel of every vessel has been swallowed by an expanse of grim sludge

Standing on a short jetty, my wife chats with a much younger woman who is taking in bed linen left to dry along the boom of a small, gaff-rigged, wooden sailboat.

“How long’re you around for?” she asks my wife.

“Until the boat’s done,” my wife says.

“And then?”

We both shrug, not knowing.

First published in Dark Ocean, an anthology from The Dark Mountain Project, UK, 2024.

[puellaumemagica]

the island home that locket lived for the first 10 years of her life was on giant sea snail like creature known as seanomads. they are very attuned to magic and never move unless there's an anomaly and they all suddenly disappear to the far depths of the oce

[southeastasianarchaeology]

Preserving the Heritage of Southeast Asia’s Sea Nomads

Sea nomads in Southeast Asia face threats from climate change and overfishing. Regional cooperation is essential to preserve their cultural heritage and environmental knowledge. #southeastasianarchaeology #climatechange #seanomads

via The Lowy Institute, 19 July 2024: Southeast Asia’s sea nomads, including the Moken, Bajau, and Orang Laut, face an uncertain future due to climate change, overfishing, and unsupportive government policies. These communities, vital for ocean conservation, risk losing their traditional way of life and cultural heritage. Coordinated regional efforts are essential to preserve their unique…

[styletraveler]

Myanmar:

Im Reich der letzten Seenomaden

Eine Segeltour durch das Mergui Archipel führt in die geheimnisvolle Welt der letzten Seenomaden

Von Marc Vorsatz

Die Szenerie hat etwas Gespenstisches. Ein Geisterschiff. Irgendwo im Nirgendwo in pechschwarzer Nacht. Ein großer knarrender Holzpott, der ein giftgrünes Licht auf die Andamanische See wirft. An die 20 mega-starke Glühlampen tanzen an seinen Auslegern über dem Wasser. Aber kein einziger Mann in Sicht. Merkwürdig.

Das wollen wir uns doch mal genauer anschauen, schließlich sind wir nicht auf der Aida oder Mein Schiff 1 bis wer weiß wie viel. Sondern auf einem hochseetauglichen Katamaran unter burmesischer Flagge, auf der Meltemi. Skipper Robby „Ernie“ Devlin ist immer für eine Extratour zu haben und lässt sogleich ein Dingi zu Wasser. Der Australier mit Wohnsitz im thailändischen Phuket, der auf Fidschi das Segelhandwerk erlernte, greift sich sein Walki-Talki, wir unsere Kameras und schon hüpfen wir in unserem Schlauchboot über gallegrün reflektierende Wellenkämme diesem Monstrum entgegen.

Als wir beidrehen, schaut ein Moke verdutzt über die abgewetzte Reeling auf uns herab. Moken oder auch Mawken sind „die vom Meer Verschlungenen“, die Seenomaden. Der Mann hat sich mit einem spitzen Enterhaken bewaffnet, mit dem man lieber keine Bekanntschaft machen möchte. Schließlich wäre das nächste Provinzkrankenhaus, in das man auch nicht unbedingt wollen würde, zwei Tage entfernt. Käpt´n Ernie winkt ab. Alles in Ordnung. Mit dem Haken fischt der Moke Hornhechte aus dem Wasser. Das grelle Licht lockt die Räuber an die Oberfläche. Maung Khine erweist sich als freundlicher Zeitgenosse und bittet uns an Bord. Das lassen wir uns nicht zweimal sagen. Überall Kisten, leere, volle, Kabel, Seile, Netze, ein mächtiger Generator von anno Dutt und zwischen all dem zwei schlafende Kollegen auf den rohen Holzplanken. Fischer Maung lupft ein Hornhecht nach dem anderen aus dem Wasser, ohne sie dabei zu verletzen. Wir probieren es, mit Erfolg. Man muss nur schnell genug sein…

So fischen die Moken also heute. Noch vor ein paar Jahren legten sie großen Wert darauf, als Sea Hunter und nicht als Fischer tituliert zu werden. Jäger der Meere, die mit einem Speer Beute machen. Das ist selten geworden. Die meisten Moken sind inzwischen sesshaft geworden, leben nicht mehr als Nomaden, oder genauer gesagt, Halbnomaden. Ein paar Monate während des Monsuns in ihren Stelzenhäusern am Strand, ein paar Monate mit Kind und Kegel auf dem Wasser in ihren hölzernen Booten, den Kabangs. Das war einmal vor kurzer Zeit. Denn die moderne Festland-Zivilisation mit all ihren Regeln und Gesetzen, mit ihren modernen Motorbooten, Geld, Fernsehern und Handys ist grade dabei, die Moken zu assimilieren. Sie leben jetzt zwischen zwei Welten. Ihre Kultur und Lebensweise ist im Begriff unterzugehen. Unwiederbringlich

Nur zwei Tage zuvor startete unsere Cruise in dieser für uns ganz normalen Festland-Zivilisation…

Wir checken ein auf der Meltemi, einem stattlichen Katamaran mit Kingsize-Betten in geräumigen Kabinen. Das gibt es selten. Die Schiffsjungen Kayin und Zolay begrüßen uns mit einem herzlichen „mingalaba“ - möge Segen über dich kommen. Der erste Segen, der über uns kommt ist ein Gedicht. Und zwar eines für den Gaumen: Gegrillter Red Snapper mit Grünem Papaya-Salat auf Wildreis, dazu ein französischer Chardonnay. Einfach köstlich. Als krönender Abschluss Maracuja an Vanilleeis. Irgendwie schmecken die Passionsfrüchte hier anders als zuhause im Supermarkt. Besser!

Und ganz nebenbei haben wir uns aus der modernen Zivilisation geschlichen. Als ein blutroter Streifen am Horizont die Nacht ankündigt, wirft unser Skipper vor einer unbewohnten Insel Anker. Die tropische Nacht bricht schnell herein so dicht am Äquator. Sanftes Wellenrauschen, in den Palmen das Zirpen von ein paar Grillen. Sonst nichts. Nichts als Ruhe. Kein Auto, kein Mensch. Garnichts. Herrlich.

Den nächsten Morgen lassen wir gemütlich angehen. Urlaub eben. Eine Runde entspannt planschen im türkisfarbenen Wasser, das es locker mit dem der Malediven oder der Karibik aufnehmen könnte. Und dann schon wieder ein Gedicht. Ein Frühstücksgedicht mit Kaffee, Tee, frisch gepresstem Saft, vegetarischem Omelette mit ordentlich Chili drin, Wurst, Käse und exotischen Marmeladen.

Ernie hat Kurs genommen auf Insel 115. Ja, von den über 800 Inseln und noch viel mehr Inselchen hat bei weitem nicht jede einen Namen. Das Festland ist jetzt kaum noch auszumachen am Horizont. Dafür überall Inseln. Kleine karge felsige, größere mit dichtem Gestrüpp drauf, große mit Regenwald, Palmen und versteckten Badebuchten. Die von der Sorte, bei der man am nächsten Morgen nur eine einzige Fußspur im schneeweißen Sand entdeckt: die eigene vom Abend zuvor.

Eine dieser Traumbuchten ist Jar Lann Kyung. Wir landen mit Dingi und Kayak an und können uns gar nicht satt sehen. So in etwa muss wohl das Paradies aussehen. Dem wollen wir Ewigkeit verleihen und knipsen was das Zeug hält. Strand von hier, Wasser von da und Selfis von überall. Doch nach ein paar Stunden scheint die Meltemi viel spannender als das Paradies. Denn sie wird uns zu unserem Ziel, den letzten Refugien der Seenomaden führen. Außerdem haben Kayin und Zolay sicher schon feinstes Sashimi zubereitet. Am Morgen ging ihnen nämlich ein stattlicher Wahoo an den Haken.

Am nächsten Tag laufen wir das Moken-Dorf Ma Kyone Galet auf Lampi Island an. Kinder rennen uns entgegen, begrüßen uns freudestrahlend mit einem herzerfrischendem mingalaba. Wir Fremden scheinen eine willkommene Abwechslung im Inselalltag zu sein. Sie laden uns gar in ihre Schule ein. Niedlich sehen sie aus mit ihrer gelben Farbe im Gesicht, die viel mehr schmückt als vor der Sonne schützt.

Die schöne Thet Thet Zon strahlt ein wenig schüchtern, dabei auch ein bisschen stolz in unsere Kameras. Ob ihr Schule Spaß mache. Sehr sogar. In welche Klasse sie gehe und wie alt sie sei. In die erste Klasse. Wie alt sie sei, wisse sie nicht.

„Für Moken spielt Zeit keine Rolle, sie zählen keine Jahre. Noch nicht“, erklärt Dr. Rossella Rossi. Sie ist die Direktorin des Instituto Oikos, einer italienischen Non-Profit-Organisation, sie sich auf Lampi mit Rat und Tat für die Rechte der Moken stark macht, sich für Nachhaltigkeit und den Erhalt des einzigartigen Ökosystems über- und vor allem unterwasser einsetzt. Das ist auch bitter nötig, überall liegt mittlerweile Plastikmüll im Sand. Feuerzeuge, Tüten, Bonbonpapier, einfach alles. Eine Müllabfuhr gibt es nicht. Brauchte das „wilde Volk obskurer Herkunft“ in der Vergangenheit ja auch nicht. So wurden die Moken in der historischen Enzyklopädie des British Indian Empire einst beschrieben.

Die späteren Kinder von Thet Thet Zon werden sicher wissen, wann sie geboren wurden und wie alt sie sind. Und Maung Khine auf seinem giftgrünen Boot ist schon heute kein Jäger mehr, sondern ein Fischer. Etwas nachdenklich segeln wir wieder zurück in unsere Welt. Wir sind Zeitzeugen geworden einer untergehenden Kultur.

© 2019 · Marc Vorsatz / MEDIA CREW MITTE

Infos

Anreise: Täglich mit Thai Airways von Frankfurt nonstop nach Phuket, Specials ab 490 Euro retour, www.thaiairways.com. Individuelle Übernachtung in Phuket oder Khao Lak, Pkw-Transfer nach Ranong (Thailand), zehnminütiger Bootstransfer nach Kawthaung (Myanmar).

Unterkunft Land: Unschlagbares Preis-Leistungsverhältnis: Mövenpick Resort & Spa, 5 Sterne, am lebhaften Karon Beach, ab 88 Euro inkl. reichhaltigem Frühstücksbuffet, www.movenpick.com; 

Ruhig, edel, luxuriös, absolut empfehlenswert: Anantara Mai Khao Phuket Villas, direkte Strandlage, 5 Sterne, exzellenter Service ab 575 Euro, www.anantara.com.

An Bord:  An Bord des Katamarans Meltemi herrscht legere Wohlfühl-Atmosphäre, Kabinen sind großzügig geschnitten. Zuvorkommender Service, abwechslungsreiches und schmackhaftes Essen mit frisch gefangenem Fisch. Wer will, kann aktiv mit segeln und angeln.

Pauschal: Myanmar auf dem Wasser erleben heißt die 24-tägige Reise mit Andamanen-Segeltörn, Flusskreuzfahrt Irrawaddy mit Bagan, Mandalay sowie Inle See, Yangon und kurzer Badeverlängerung Thailand. Inklusive Flügen, Pkw-Transfers, Top-Unterkünften, Verpflegung und abwechslungsreichem Programm ab 8.490 Euro. Individuell auch als Nur-Segeltörn buchbar. Geoplan Privatreisen, Telefon: 030/346498-10, www.geoplan-reisen.de

Bildband, Kinofilm, Ausstellung, Vorträge:  Im opulenten Bildband „Lost“ dokumentiert der Fotograf Markus Mauthe Menschen an den Rändern moderner Zivilisation, auch aus Myanmar. Knesebeck Verlag, September 2018, 50 Euro, http://an-den-raendern-der-welt.de/. Unterwegs im Land der Weißen Elefanten: Myanmar. Gründlich recherchierter Reiseführer von Tobias Esche aus dem Berliner Verlagshaus Trescher. 19,95 Euro, www.trescher-verlag.de 

[deepfreediving]

I had a great time diving with Writer and Director of award winning documentary film “No Word for Worry” Runar Jarle Wiik and his family during the Fii level 1 freediving course!! If you haven't watched the amazing film about the Moken sea-nomads of Burma and the threats that impose to their indigenous lifestyle then you'll definitely have to check it out! For more information visit their website www.projectmoken.com 📷 kristin kuba #freedive #freediving #oceanlove #underwater #aloha #spearfishing #spearing #lethawaiihappen #moken #luckywelivehawaii #deepfreediving #bigislandlove #oceanlife #bigisland #seanomads #venturehawaii #hawaiianairlines #travelstoke #onebreath #fii_freedive #apnea #explorehawaii hawaii #travelhawaii #staysalty #saltlife #oahuhawaii (at Hawaii (island))

[verticalego]

Seanomads (hier: Burtscheid, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/CCcnc6oJFxS/?igshid=ap8kq64liva6

[chiokedmachi]

' #SeaNomads' Are First Known #Humans #Genetically Adapted to Diving - National Geographic @natgeo https://apple.news/ApiA8J1i2TViQ5hJBBGQJKQ (at Los Angeles, California)

[clairebennie]

My gorgeous feature from PrivatAir’s Spring 2017 issue on the Badjao tribe of Borneo - the world’s last remaining sea nomads. These incredible people are born, live and die on lepa lepa, houseboats that move in the wind and ebb with the currents of the sea.

Read it online at http://ink-live.com/emagazines/privatair-magazine/2696/spring-2017/

[saltpeanutslive]

(Via r/science.)

[ccohanlon]

sealand

The first foreign yachts turn up in the Pittwater, north of Sydney, Australia, around the end of September, just as the warm nor’easterly breezes set in and coastal dwellers are reassured that the winter has ended. Most have made the long passage non-stop south from Queensland harbours, standing well off the rock-strewn New South Wales coast to take advantage of the fast, south-flowing East Australian Current. Some have sailed further — from the Solomon Islands or Vanuatu or Fiji – and have had to beat a couple of thousand nautical miles to windward against brisk south-easterly trade winds to get out of tropical latitudes before the cyclone season begins.

It’s easy to recognise the long-distance cruisers. They have a rugged, purposeful aspect, with short, sturdy, over-rigged masts and wide decks to which are lashed anchors, boat hooks, small dinghies, surfboards, gas bottles and rows of plastic jerry cans. Their cockpits are shaded by wide sun-awnings, their hatches by weather-worn, folding canvas dodgers that look like old-fashioned pram hoods. Above their transoms, makeshift stainless steel structures support angled arrays of solar cells and propeller-driven wind generators, as well as radar reflectors, and radar, radio and GPS antennae. Faded ensigns flutter from backstays or short flagstaves to signal the vessels’, if not always the crews’, nationalities.

Foreign yachts tend to congregate, three or four at a time, on the western side of the wide, sheltered bay, where there are a few anchorages and fewer moorings designated by the state’s Maritime Services as suitable for ‘live-aboard’ visitors – as long as they don’t over-stay their welcome. Even if the authorities turn a blind eye, and they do, sometimes, the welcome is unlikely to last long. Crews are allowed to live aboard for just two weeks consecutively in the same anchorage. The half dozen suburbs that surround the Pittwater are some of Sydney’s wealthiest, and their ratepayers, especially those with high-value waterfront properties, are loathe to share their views (or anything else) for too long with scruffy interlopers who don’t pay utility bills, let alone local rates and taxes.

It’s a sentiment — and, increasingly, a set of by-laws — they share with shore-dwellers around Sydney Harbour, Port Hacking, Port Melbourne and along the Swan and Brisbane Rivers.

The petty squabble between urban shore dweller and visiting seafarer in Australia’s coastal suburbs is really just a recasting of the bitter, millennia-old conflict between settler and nomad, a social, economic and spiritual rift that in other parts of the world see-saws between bloody skirmish and nervous stand-off.

The nomad isn’t an indiscriminate traveller. Although the name is derived from the Greek word nomos (pasture) and the Latin nomas (those who wander in search of pasture), the nomad doesn’t wander, but rather follows a well-established, cyclical route to a series of temporary campsites next to pastures or water sources that can support a small tribe and its animals for all or part of a season. As the late Bruce Chatwin observed in his untidy essay, Nomad Invasions, in the collection What am I doing here? (Penguin, 1990), "Nomadism is born of wide expanses, ground too barren for the farmer to cultivate economically – savannah, steppe, desert and tundra, all of which will support an animal population providing it moves."

Later he notes, "a nomad’s territory is the path linking his seasonal pastures." But the very notion of territory is born of settlement. It is necessarily somewhere defined not just by boundaries but by claims of ownership. When nomads’ traditional routes intersect anywhere claimed (by settlers) as territory – whether it’s the fenced perimeters of private property or an invisible state or national border – it is interpreted as trespass or, worse, invasion. The nomad’s innate disregard for territory is almost incomprehensible to the settler, whose first instinct is to restrict or refuse access. The nomad is characterised by a stubborn insistence on wide-ranging movement with few encumbrances and little desire for prolonged occupation, let alone possession, of any one place. Such lack of containment is almost spiritually troubling to the settler for whom the acquisition, development and protection of land and goods are intrinsic to his sense of self, security and belonging.

Long-distance seafarers are, and always were, a type of nomad too. The safety of their voyages, especially under sail, is dependent on seasonal shifts in monsoonal wind directions or the strength of trade winds, the intensity of temperate latitude depressions, the locations of permanent anti-cyclones with their persistent calms and fog, and the risk of cyclones, typhoons or hurricanes. Except for large, engine-powered, commercial ships — their movements determined only by trade and the efficient, economic transport of heavy cargoes regardless of season — the ideal timing and routes for ocean passages have been the same for more than two thousand years.

Hundreds of generations of seafarers have recorded their observations of the sea surface, wind and sky, as well as the arc of stars and planets along these routes. They’ve passed them on in narratives — Polynesian mele, Icelandic sagas, Arabic instructional rahmanis — or as notations in log books and on charts, even as diagrams constructed from intricately bound sticks and shells. For example, in a passage from a rahmani known as Fa’ida of the Kitab al-Fawa’id, near the end of a section titled 'Seasons for leaving the Arabian coast', the renowned fifteenth century Arab mu’allim (navigator) and poet Ahmad Bin Majid warned of the intensity of the South-West Monsoon during summer in the Arabian Gulf:  "Intelligent men never make this journey during the three months when the Dahur is at full strength for then it is a gamble … For these ninety days the sea is closed and he who would cross it deserves to be unhappy. From the agony of loneliness and remorse, so much anxiety and suffering."

Today, the routing charts, tidal atlases and sailing directions published by various governments’ hydrographic offices are simply the ongoing refinement of knowledge gathered and shared over several centuries by navigators around the world. This sharing is probably the oldest, maybe the only, ongoing tradition upheld by every nation with maritime interests. Part of the reason it endures is that the seafarer’s ‘territory’, the vast, refuge-less oceans beyond national territorial waters (and other, more arbitrary demarcations), doesn’t really belong to anyone.

Men first took to the sea in prehistoric times, but they learned to navigate – and so became seafarers – between four and five thousand years ago. Since then, man has headed out into deep waters to fish, trade, explore, migrate, invade, plunder, colonise, compete, conduct research and look for adventure. However, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that living on the sea was explored as an alternative to land-based urban or rural settlement. A word for it, ‘seasteading’, was coined in the 1970s to evoke the spirit of nineteenth-century pioneers who first settled the wide, open plains of the central and mid-western United States under the land grants of the Homestead Act.

Water-borne communities, both fixed and mobile, aren’t a new idea. They have existed on inlets, estuaries, canals and other sheltered waterways around the world for longer than men have sailed offshore. However, those which survive today – the river people of the Mekong, the Hoklo and Tanka junk communities in Hong Kong, the Uros who weave the floating tortora reed islands of Lake Titicaca, even the bargees who ply the canals and rivers of northern Europe – rely on proximity and inextricable social and economic connections to shore-bound communities.

Seasteading is about living alone or in small groups or communities with little dependence on shore-bound resources, mainly on the open sea but also off isolated reefs, islands or coastlines. How this is actually accomplished lies at the heart of an ongoing argument between two fundamentally divergent traditions: seafaring and sea-settling.

"The model of seastead I suggest is based upon a sailboat that has been built or modified to provide an individual or family a home on the sea,’ writes the American author and former ‘live-aboard’, Jerome FitzGerald, in his book, Seasteading: A Life of Hope and Freedom on the Last Viable Frontier (Universe, 2006). As he points out, "The oceans are truly vast. Hundreds of thousands of miles of coastline remain uninhabited because the skills have not been acquired to live within this sometimes harsh environment. Thousands of islands as well remain empty due to lack of infrastructure and modern conveniences … Properly and thoughtfully equipped, a modest sailboat can be a very nearly self-sufficient entity suitable as a life-support platform for exploring these areas.”

James Wharram, a renowned English designer of sailing catamarans inspired by traditional Polynesian designs and techniques, and the first man to sail a multi-hull across the Atlantic, agrees with Fitzgerald. Thirty years ago, in an essay entitled The Sailing Community, he proposed a nomadic, 20th century tribe of ‘sea people’: handfuls of individuals and families living on their own catamarans to avoid, as he put it, "proximity difficulties which can lead to social stress", with a much larger ‘mother ship’ owned by all the families as its hub. The mother ship would be regarded as shared space or ‘territory’, not as an extension of each family’s ‘home’. Manned by a crew made up of members of each family, he suggested it would carry additional victuals, fuel, tools and spares, as well as accommodate communal spaces, an office and workshop for use at anchor.

The sea-settler’s preoccupation with ‘freedom’ is less easily understood by the seafarer.

"Seasteading means to create permanent dwellings on the ocean," Patri Friedman, one of the participants in the San Francisco-based Seasteading Project, argues. The project aims "to build sovereign, self-sufficient floating platforms, thus creating new territory on the oceans" – in other words, to colonise what is still referred to in inter-governmental legal terminology as ‘the high seas’, the wide tracts of ocean over which no nation has sovereignty. To seafarers, the Seasteading Project and others like it that propose purpose-built permanent or fixed structures on the sea’s surface or beneath it – civilian and military researchers have been living and working for extended periods in underwater ‘habitats’ since the 1960s, mainly inshore, at depths above fifty metres – are simply an expression of an archetypal shore-bound ‘settler’ mentality. Comparatively spacious, stable emulations of an island, they’re designed for a few to live on at first and then, following a pattern of scalability apparent in nineteenth-century North American home-steading communities, to expand with additional components, platforms and population to become a fully fledged sea-borne colony supported by what Friedman dubs (a little too cutely) a ‘seaconomy’. Inherent in the creation of such a colony is the ambition to proclaim it an independent ocean state, or what James H. Lee refers to in his paper Castles in the Sea: A Survey of Artificial Islands and Floating Utopias, as a ‘microtopia’ – in some ways, a virtual concept: a self-governing micro-nation founded atop a man-made, geographically non-specific fixed or floating space.

None of this is of much interest to seafarers. They have long known how to work around governmental strictures and retain a large measure of freedom. For example, the seafarer’s ‘floating space’ is required by international law to be ‘flagged’ – registered in the country in which its majority owner is either a citizen or resident. In practice, this is subverted by ‘flags of convenience’: the legal owners of many vessels, including yachts, are corporations set up in countries where taxes are lower or government maritime regulations less strict. As a result, a vessel can sail under the sovereignty of Panama, the Channel Islands, Mauritius or Thailand, for example, without ever having visited the home port inscribed on its transom. Moreover, its captain and crew will probably be a mix of nationalities, none  the same as the vessel’s. Their certificates of competency, the seafarer’s equivalent of operating licences, might be issued by yet other nations.

Even a seafarer’s tax status can be moot. Although a tax domicile (the country to which one reports and pays taxes) is not normally something workers get to negotiate, seafarers who rarely set foot in their own countries – and have no property or other holdings there – and whose income is derived entirely from foreign or ‘offshore’ sources (especially those in opaque tax havens), are deemed by many nations to be ‘residents of the high seas’ and legally untaxable.

The sea-settler’s apparent preoccupation with ‘freedom’ is less easily understood by the seafarer. The rural nomad’s migration is, as Chatwin describes it, "a ritual performance, a 'religious' catharsis, revolutionary in the strictest sense in that each pitching and breaking of camp represents a new beginning". The pelagic nomad’s succession of voyages – during which, according to tradition, a course is never set ‘to’ a particular port but rather, less precisely, ‘towards’ it – are an actual and spiritual disconnection from the enervating sameness of settled life. The disciplined, ceaseless routine of working a vessel at sea can be hard and dull, but there is always a jittery awareness of possibility, of change, just beyond the horizon. At sea, nothing remains the same for very long – and every landfall is another opportunity.

The current British Admiralty chart, Singapore to Song Sai Gon and the Gulf of Thailand, is one of the few still published that uses fathoms and feet rather than metres, although it is modern enough to have surrendered soundings inside the ten-fathom line to an insipid pale blue – preferred by a generation of mariners who find older, more detailed and beautiful, monochromatic engravings hard to read. The chart is commonly used by vessels en route between the world’s two busiest ports, Hong Kong and Singapore, and two of its most congested sea passages, the Singapore Straits and the pirate-infested Malaccan Straits. A large-scale survey of 1:500,000, it covers nearly three thousand square nautical miles of sea.

A cursory look at this chart underscores the stark difference between seafarer and sea-settler. Sea-settlers are looking to the sea for room to establish new physical, social and political structures. Seafarers are just looking for sea-room, uncrowded, easily navigable open water with only the vagaries of the weather and sea-state to worry them. For the seafarer, sea-room – not a fixed structure, not the shore – is where safety, rest and freedom are found. And yet within this one relatively small, enclosed area of sea, which is similar to many others, such as the Mediterranean or North Seas, the Persian Gulf, or the Gulf coasts of Texas or Louisiana, real sea-room is hard to find, even without the hundreds of islands, drying reefs, sandbanks, isolated rocks and shallows that are natural hazards to navigation. More than seventy nautical miles offshore, on a line extending north-west for nearly five hundred nautical miles along the east coasts of Malaysia and Thailand, there are more than a dozen gas and oil fields. Associated with each of them are scores of production and pipeline platforms, tanker moorings and storage tankers, as well as uncharted exploration rigs. Inshore are marine farms and fishing stakes, few of them charted and none of them lit, all frequented by motor-driven, undecked canoes and outriggers – as well as a score of military exercise areas and firing ranges. Even the relatively shallow sea bottom is encumbered with wrecks, pipelines, telecommunication cables, submarine exercise areas and explosive dumping grounds.

At night, in these tropical waters, there are so many tankers, cargo-carriers, warships, trawlers and long-liners, pilot boats, tugs (many with barges under tow), ferries and pleasure boats that the diffused glow of their navigation lights resembles a city sprawling across the seaward horizon.

The last thing any seafarer wants is another structure, permanent or mobile, impeding a safe passage offshore. Yet the sea-settler, whose understanding of the sea is less practical and probably more romantic, dreams of man-made islands. These would more closely resemble an oil rig – if only because the complex engineering required to anchor a large, liveable structure in deep water and protect and its occupants – rather than the Disney-like artificial atoll developed as retreats for the rich off the coast of Dubai. Such structures, however they look, will be regarded by seafarers as an unwelcome hazard, interfering with safe navigation to and from adjacent coasts, fouling fishing grounds and probably requiring vessels – as vulnerable offshore oil and gas platforms do – to stand at least half a kilometre clear of them.

The piratical tradition appears to be what inspires the most passion in modern sea-settlers.

If the plethora of seasteading documents to be found online is any indication, sea-settlers are a lot less taken with the stolid quotidian routine of living and working on the sea than they are with the idea of reconfiguring the autonomous island state as an anarchic, or at least extra-national, social, political and economic experiment, akin to the ‘pirate utopias’ described by the cultish American political writer Peter Lamborn Wilson in his 1995 book, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (Autonomedia, 1996). Wilson, who is also known as Hakim Bey, envisaged, "Remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned … some of these islands supported  'intentional communities', whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life." One seventeenth-century enclave, the tiny, self-proclaimed Pirate Republic of Salé in Morrocco, was so successful as a safe haven for Muslim corsairs – the so-called ‘Barbary pirates’ – it became a sea power in its own right and negotiated treaties and mercenary alliances with various Mediterranean powers. This piratical tradition appears to be what inspires the most passion in modern sea-settlers. In Seasteading: The Second to Last Frontier, an article published three years ago in The Yale Free Press, Ben Darrington wrote: "Seasteading would provide an easier way for people who do not like their governments to set up new countries at sea where they could make new rules. Mobile ocean settlements would allow these new states to locate in more useful or less contested waters. This means more experimentation and innovation with different social, political, and economic systems and more competition to create efficient government. Certain businesses are perfectly suited to platforms: material industries such as oil and aquaculture can be self-governed and tax-free, and service industries such as casinos, offshore banking, and data havens avoid some of the existing domestic problems with vice laws, copyright restrictions, and government intrusion or revenue-seeking. Just as pariah individuals and groups seek the freedom of the frontier, pariah industries can ply their trade there, taking the benefits as well as the consequences upon themselves." Unfortunately, Darrington ignores the almost insurmountable legal intricacies of establishing a legitimate micro-nation offshore today. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty (LoST) rejects claims of territory or special economic standing by private owners of extra-national human-made islands or structures. Even before the ratification of LoST in 1982, the few ill-advised and makeshift attempts to create offshore micro-nations all ended in failure. REM Island was a floating platform built in Northern Ireland and towed to the North Sea off the coast of the Netherlands, in 1964 – the same year that the infamous ‘pirate’ Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a ship anchored in international waters off the English east coast port of Felixstowe. REM housed a ‘pirate’ broadcaster, Radio and TV Noordzee, for four months until the Royal Dutch Navy shut it down. The Republic of Rose, established in 1967 by an Italian engineer, Giorgio Rosa, on a four hundred square metre platform he erected in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Rimini, was destroyed within a year by Italian Navy sappers after Rosa was arrested for tax evasion. In 1972, a wealthy Las Vegas-based real estate developer, Michael Oliver, tried to raise foreign investment to turn Minerva Reefs, a group of semi-submerged coral reefs 260 miles south-west of the Pacific kingdom of Tonga, into a two and half thousand hectare atoll and micro-nation, the Republic of Minerva. A luckless Australian contractor had managed to dredge enough coral, shell and sand to create a couple of hectares of barren cay above the high-water mark when a Tongan prison labour gang, dispatched by King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, landed on it and claimed it as Tongan sovereign territory. In the aftermath of these episodes, the Administrative Court of Cologne in West Germany held that "a man-made artificial platform … cannot be called either 'a part of the earth’s surface' or 'land territory' and only structures which make use of a specific piece of the earth’s surface can be recognised as 'State territory' within the meaning of international law." The court referred to the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States which outlined four very broad criteria for statehood: a permanent population; defined territory; government; and capacity to enter into relations with other states.

They emerged from a russet haze at twilight, just five nautical miles from the coast of Suffolk — a pair of grimy cement towers spanned by a rust-flecked steel tabletop. A fast, flooding tide churned the cold, mud-brown North Sea around them, and low waves edged with wind-blown spume spilled away like the wake of a ship. In the dying light, the persistent impression was that the whole structure was moving.

We were aboard a thirty-eight-foot, schooner-rigged catamaran on a passage ‘down Channel’ from Lowestoft, running fast before an easy nor’easterly that we prayed we might carry as far as the Scilly Isles and out into the Atlantic.

All afternoon, the low coastline to leeward of us had been a thin, grey-brown smudge, pierced here and there by a sliver of church spire or chimney. As much to relieve our boredom as to satisfy a mild curiosity, we plotted a course inshore towards a tiny symbol on the chart marked ‘fort’. This was all that indicated the existence of Sealand, the only surviving, man-made microtopia, a pioneering seastead that had somehow clung to independence and crypto-sovereignty for over forty years.

We caught a whiff of something dank and fishy on the wind.

Paddy Bates, an entrepreneurial pirate radio broadcaster, took over what was then a decommissioned World War II gun emplacement and fortified barracks in 1967. HM Fort Roughs had been built above the Rough Sands bank off Harwich to deter the Germans from mining the approaches to this strategically important port. Renamed Sealand by Bates, who renamed himself ‘Prince Roy’, its history since then has been colourful – armed stand-offs with the British Navy, court challenges to its self-proclaimed sovereignty, armed invasion by German and Dutch civilians and the kidnap of Prince Roy’s son, indirect links to passport scams and other crimes, failed business ventures and even fires. A decade or so ago, Sealand finally established a modest ‘national’ economy when a data-hosting company, HavenCo, set up its servers within the fort and turned it into a discreet, secure, offshore data haven. Tourists are rarely welcome. There was plenty of water beneath our shallow keels so we circled the fort at a distance of a cable or so before rounding up down-tide of it. We let the boat fore-reach slowly into the flood for a few minutes as we took a closer look. A squat, flat-roofed bungalow straddled the tabletop. The shadowy lip of a helicopter pad hung out over the sea. Tendrils of green-black marine vegetation and crusty barnacles clung to the mottled cement and we caught a whiff of something dank and fishy on the wind. It was drear and foreboding, with scant evidence of any human presence. I tried to imagine how grim an urban dystopia would have to be to compel me to take refuge in this outpost, even for a day. It was more like a prison than a version of paradise. We put the helm a-lee and let the catamaran drift astern before turning away from the wind. Slack sheets rattled in their blocks as the sails filled again. The hulls lifted and the wide decks flexed a little as the catamaran began to make way. Sealand fell away astern. For a moment, it felt as if we were fleeing for our lives.

First published in Griffith Review, Australia, 2006.

[airicwolff]

Everything's better down where it's wetter 🦀🌊#underthesea#seanomad#hawaii#endlesssummer#maui#oceanlife#coral#mermaid (at Maui)

[projectmanaia]

Last one of the crew to leave the boat gets to take the flag home. And today is the day. Goodbye sea nomad, have a good rest and see you in September! ................................. #mergui #projectManaia #seaNomad #sailing #conservation #exploration #explore #research #island #beach #sailboat #boating #saltlife #offTheBeatenPath #patreon #www.projectmanaia.at #explorationLife #saltWater #oceanConservation #protection #safeourseas #coral #reef #marineProtectedArea #NoTakeZone #snorkeling #diving #underwater

[sciencealert]

If you want proof of how adaptable the human body can be, look no further than the Moken people - a nomadic seafaring tribe that lives in the island archipelagos on the Andaman Sea, and along the west coast of Thailand.

Also known as sea-nomads, the Moken were once entirely dependent the ocean, and the children spent much of their time diving for food on the seafloor. Experiments have shown that they could see underwater with total clarity - a unique adaptation that other children can learn within weeks.

"Normally when you go underwater, everything is so blurry that the eye doesn’t even try to accommodate, it’s not a normal reflex," vision researcher Anna Gislen from the University of Lund in Sweden told the BBC. "But the Moken children are able to do both - they can make their pupils smaller and change their lens shape. Seals and dolphins have a similar adaptation."

[khair-mispan]

#vscocam wa jeles dgn hangpa semua #travel #borneo #seanomad #malaysia

[mydiogenes-blog]

[projectmanaia]

The boat is getting shiny again - the crew less so... ................................. #mergui #projectManaia #seaNomad #sailing #conservation #exploration #explore #research #island #beach #sailboat #boating #saltlife #offTheBeatenPath #patreon #www.projectmanaia.at #explorationLife #saltWater #oceanConservation #protection #safeourseas #coral #reef #marineProtectedArea #NoTakeZone #snorkeling #diving #underwater