The barrels are literally covered in sand. At first unsure which one to choose, Rémi and I turn one over and let it roll down the beach. It hits the first wave with a loud splash. The force of the approximately 270 kilos pushes the barrel further into the water. We follow, push it away from the shore and try to put on our flippers at the same time. Rémi loses one, but luckily it pops up in the choppy water next to me. I wade back, sit down in the gentle surf, slip into my flippers and walk backwards to the barrel. Together we pull it further out. Slowly, the water gets deeper. I try to swim, but it's not deep enough yet.
Finally, we reach open water. I keep to the right, but Rémi thinks we should swim more directly towards the Tres Hombres, like Sunny and Rosa with their barrel. However, yesterday I was swept to the left by a current when I tried to swim towards the ship. As a precaution, I want to compensate for this by steering to the right. My fins move calmly up and down; tomorrow I'll probably have sore muscles. Rémi's impression that we're not making any progress is refuted by our bearing. Pulling and pushing a barrel like this is surprisingly easy.
Rémy's doubts about my course are confirmed as we get closer to the anchored "Tres Hombres". The current isn't as strong today, so we have to correct our course. The detour costs us extra energy. (Going too far to the right doesn't pay off politically either...) Above all, we are almost overtaken by the group behind us. We took extra care to keep our distance so that, unlike in Martinique, all the barrels didn't arrive at the ship at practically the same time. It takes time to pull the rum onto the deck with tackle blocks and then transport the barrels to the right place in the hold with ratchets and a lot of heaving and pulling. The swimmers have to hold the barrels in place outside for that long, which is almost more exhausting than pulling them through the water. But we can hook the tackle into the barrel, I throw my flippers on deck and climb over the ladder into the ship.
Only half a paradise
When the haze or rain showers don't obscure the horizon, Guadeloupe greets us in the north-west, while the mountains of Dominica can be glimpsed in the south-west, with the outlines of smaller islands in between. With the bow pointing towards the beach and its dense jungle right up to the narrow strip of sand, we are anchored off Marie Galante.
This is probably the most beautiful place we have seen on our trip, even if our first impression is somewhat marred: the nearby town of St. Louis is partly a ghost town, with half the streets lined with abandoned, dilapidated houses. And on the way back, wading partly through water and partly along a jungle path with breathtakingly tangled trees, we suddenly come across a car graveyard with wrecks piled up to ten metres high and an overturned sign prohibiting the dumping of rubbish here. Have the island's 14,000 inhabitants really wrecked so many cars? Or is this the place where the dirt of the French Caribbean is hidden, on the outskirts affected by emigration?
A "different world"
We load a few barrels of rum here. In Martinique, rum swimming was almost a folk festival, with women and older children swimming along, including a special unit of the French army, who then boarded the ship (as did everyone else) and hoisted their pirate flag (which no one else did).
This left me with mixed feelings: it's nice when people from different backgrounds welcome what the "Tres Hombres" exemplify in terms of largely emission-free transport. Some probably just find the ship "romantic". But in the New Year's message Fairtransport talked about how the ship had created a place where conservatives could meet revolutionaries, sailors could meet artists, all kinds of people could meet craftsmen... And the military, who don't exactly look martial in their swimming trunks, had asked beforehand if they could come. But which side will the special forces be on when the climate catastrophe causes the sea to rise and the resulting mass migration has to be repelled? Or when eco-groups' actions to tackle the root causes of the problem violate the laws that were enacted to protect the life-destroying juggernaut?
On the advice of a fellow sailor, I took the book "Drinking Molotov Cocktails With Gandhi" from the ship's library. It belongs to one of the three captains who founded the ship and Fairtransport. Among others, the author Mark Boyle quotes Rosa Luxemburg, who condemned reformism for correcting some of the flaws of a fundamentally flawed system, thereby making it more stable against attempts to overcome it.
The youth climate movement is calling for "system change". Rightly so. "Another world is possible" is the message from the eco-social corner. Not just "possible", but "urgently necessary". The Tres Hombres sails in this field of tension: it shows part of this necessary "other world" in terms of transport, calling for the abandonment of unnecessary transport. But for the sake of economic survival, it finances itself to a considerable extent through the trade in the luxury good rum. To do so, it has to present itself as reformist.
No consumer stress
Here off Marie Galante, we have peace and quiet from the loud party boats off Barbados, whose overpowered bass beats deafen the alcoholised guests and keep us cargo sailors awake. The jet skis, those overpowered floating "motorcycles", will only bother us again in Boca Chica on the Dominican Republic.
On the way here, we sailed along the west coast of Martinique. We paid for its scenic beauty during the first night watch with calm winds in the lee of the island. Countless times we braced the square sails on the other tack when a breath from a new direction awakened the illusion of the wind picking up, only to disappoint us again.
A lot of effort for nothing. The ship is turning pirouettes in slow motion.
My second watch was completely different: during the dog watch (that's the one after midnight), the other half of the crew had overcome the wind shadow. We sailed with full sails in the Atlantic swell. The full moon cast a silvery path of light on the lee side of the sea. Our old lady shuddered with joy as she cut through the next wave, heeling with foam at the bow. For such magical moments, one gladly accepts the sacrifice of superfluous comforts.
The tropics become impoverished
At sunrise, a small, open fishing boat from the island of Dominica crossed our course. It seemed to rise almost vertically in the waves before disappearing into the next trough. The local fishermen have to entrust their lives to the outboard motors of their nutshells. It is foreseeable that they will catch less and less. The oceans absorb over 90 per cent of the heat emitted by humans on land. In this way, they literally buffer global warming. The price we pay for this is that the water is getting warmer and warmer and therefore poorer in oxygen. Mobile creatures such as fish are fleeing the heat, away from the tropics and towards the poles. Scientists have calculated the speed of this migration since the 1950s at 51.5 kilometres per decade. Since I was born just under seven decades ago, many marine organisms in the northern hemisphere have moved around 350 kilometres northwards. The biodiversity of the local tropics is declining.
In general, our economic activities and way of life on land have a massive impact on the world's oceans: only 13 percent of the oceans are still considered maritime wilderness, largely untouched. Two-thirds of marine habitats are suffering from significantly deteriorated conditions due to human influence. In addition to warming and oxygen depletion, acidification is also a factor, as the water absorbs CO2 and carbonic acid is formed. Scientists refer to this as the "deadly trio" – consequences of climate change that are hidden from us. We should almost be grateful for plastic pollution: it has the advantage of making the destructive impact of our way of life on the oceans visible. We need to realise that what we humans are doing to the oceans, we are doing to ourselves: for example, our weather is largely created out there beyond the horizon visible from the beach.
I have taken these figures from the World Ocean Review, which anyone can order free of charge and in which scientists from various ocean institutes present their findings in a way that is easy to understand: highly recommended for all climate activists and politicians, among others.(1) However, these figures also raise the question of how legitimate it is to drop anchor off an island that was named by Christopher Columbus and now enjoy a kind of holiday atmosphere.
But would I have discovered my love for the ocean, that 99 per cent of the planet's biologically habitable space, without the Tres Hombres? And would it be progress to mope in the face of the magnitude of the problems? Or is the joy of life on board at a somewhat lower material level precisely the vitamin for the "other world" that is so urgently needed? Our party with handmade music is the alternative to the electricity- and petrol-guzzling bumbumbum and alcohol-fuelled numbness of the party boats. "Pura Vida" is written on two beams on the bow, "pure life".
That's where we want to be!
(1) Critic: The World Ocean Review often argues on the basis of "ecological services". This is helpful when it comes to showing the function of a living organism, for exampler when phytoplankton produces oxygen through photosynthesis, which is then available to other a living organisms. But the tendency to convert these "services" into money is fundamentally wrong: life networks are much more complex than can be seen with a price tag. And does a price tag mean that parts of the system could be bought and destroy them if you had the necessary billions?