Delos

photo courtesy of SV Delos

About a month ago, my husband Mike was watching videos on YouTube, and he clicked on one of the suggested videos. Immediately he was hooked watching a group of people sailing towards St. Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic Ocean. He had never heard of St. Helena, and watching this group film themselves doing their ordinary activities in an extraordinary setting was the kind of escapism that drew him in. A few days later he showed me the video and I became hooked as well. Since then when we learn that the latest episode is uploaded we get excited and can’t wait to virtually go on the adventure with them, whether it’s hiking up a volcanic mountain to exploring historic landmarks to scuba diving with sharks to everyday life on their sailboat.

The YouTube channel is called Sailing SV Delos. Currently, there are six people living on the boat, two of whom are brothers, and they’ve been sailing around the world for several years. Their unconventional lifestyle is an excellent reminder that life should be about experiences and enjoying what our amazing planet has to offer. Mike and I often note that our minds seem calmer after watching an episode, which is why I recently shared one of their videos in the Peace with PTSD Facebook group as well as on my author page.

The episode that I watched today made me deeply appreciate a decision I recently made to go vegetarian. Most episodes are rather light and fun, but at times they consciously bring up important issues people need to consider. While on a fishing trip for an annual contest at Ascension Island, the crew did not catch a single fish. Afterwards they filmed a conversation with the local husband and wife team that took them fishing, and they learned that the waters where they were fishing were once (and possibly still are) ravaged by sport fishing. I consider myself a rather aware person, but I had no idea that sport fishing was even a thing. 

What is it exactly? Simply this….it’s people fishing for the biggest fish they can find for the sake of being able to say they caught and killed the biggest fish. In some cases, these fish are used for food, but many were catching these fish and killing them and tossing them back into the ocean. Sport fishing off Ascension Island became popular thanks to the large sized tuna and other fish people would catch, some of which can take twenty years to reach their size. 

If sport fishing is so popular in these waters, then why did this experienced crew have no luck? It’s hard to know why. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough experts to know exactly what’s going on and those who are experts can’t figure out if the fish migrated elsewhere or if the population has depleted, but the feeling is that the latter may be the reason.

This episode got me appreciating that I am able to live healthfully without animal protein. In this case, it made me feel good about being able to do my part to help improve the fish population that sadly people have taken for granted. I also greatly appreciate that there are others who rely on fish and animal protein to survive. An important food source for the people who live on Ascension Island is fish, and the crew of Delos rely on fishing for food while they make their long journeys over vast oceans. Their activities are hardly damaging the planet.

Though this may sound odd, but part of me wonders if maybe these fish populations were traumatized from sport fishing and in order to survive they migrated elsewhere. I’d like to hope that but I am definitely not a pollyanna to the realities of what humans are capable of doing to life on our planet. Research has shown that animals can suffer from PTSD, so perhaps these fish are suffering as well. Either way, I think we all need to be a lot kinder to life on our planet in any way that we can.

I also think that everyone should be watching Delos.