If last month’s tsunami wave was less than threatening to boaters in our particular corner of the Pacific Northwest, don’t get too complacent just yet: a subtler, more ominous wave is still approaching. The enduring image of the disaster in Japan is of a massive wall of water churning implacably inland, sweeping everything loose and man-made before it like a ravening monster chasing fleeing inhabitants up the littoral plain. Less shown in the media was the slower retreat of those waters, moving more slowly back toward colder depths… and taking with them much of the rubble they had created.
That massive, unprecedented debris field, driven by ocean currents slower but every bit as implacable as the tsunami wave itself, is now headed inexorably our way. Still fighting to control other after effects, searching for dead, and working to distribute aid to the injured and displaced, Japan has neither the time nor the resources to attempt any cleanup, if such a thing were even possible on such a scale. Spreading out as it comes, the detritus of disaster is forecast to reach our shores between one and three years from now, with lighter, smaller objects arriving first and larger, semi-submerged debris coming later.
While the density won’t be anything like it currently is off the coast of Japan, you have to imagine that a pile of junk that is causing concern for nuclear aircraft carriers and massive freighters is going to pose some increased risk to the recreational boater. Something that is going to put a dent in a freighter prop traveling at speed is going to do a lot worse to the hull, keel, and other hanging parts on the average cruiser.
Enough study has been done on ocean currents and the so-called Pacific Gyre of late to attach a fair degree of confidence to the prediction on the timing of the arrival. Even without all the science, the not uncommon finding of intricately blown Asian glass fishing net floats along our shores is enough to tell you where items lost at sea in the Orient eventually end up. What is less certain is what a debris field of such magnitude and variety will look like once it arrives. There is a lot of research that has gone into what happens with the odd bit of styrofoam that gets tossed into the ocean; none that I am aware of has looked seriously into what happens when a whole intact house goes in the water.
Houses might show up on radar but it seems more likely that by the time it all gets to us, it’s going to be in smaller, and more waterlogged, pieces. In some ways, this is bad news. A semi-submerged dishwasher is harder to spot than a whole roof.
Fortunately, we here in the Pacific Northwest have been well-trained for this coming onslaught by the natural features of our region. If you haven’t had to slalom through a field of massive logs in poor visibility around here, you’ve been staying tied to the dock too much. I don’t know how it is in other parts of the country, but slash and debris are such a regular feature in the waters here that keeping watch out for them often takes precedence over watching out for other vessels; that is to say, we watch out for other vessels while we’re at the helm, but the real concern is crab traps, deadheads, loose nets, and the like.
Still, household items are unusual and may prove more difficult to spot until our eyes are trained. Beyond that, sailing in poor visibility may become much more risky than it ever has been. There have been passages we’ve made at night or in heavy fog where we could count on radar to keep us clear of other vessel traffic, but where we’ve simply had to play the odds when it came to debris… in the inky blackness, there was no spotting logs and we could only hope not to run across any. Those have been reasonable odds in many places at many times in the past here. Starting next year, particularly out along the coast, they may be much worse.