We were at The Bight in Norman Island BVI's with our friends Tim and Kim this past week. We decided to take a hike up and over to the other side of the island. This would be the south side of Norman Island. I don't think many people do this hike as the path was very overgrown. It took us about 30 mins.
Once we got down to the rocky beach, what we found was tons and tons of trash, most of it plastic and wood. While it was sad to see all this trash, it was also interesting to see what it was comprised of.
Tom found a roll of tape that looked like police tape but had the name of a Korean Fish company (I looked them up when we got back to the boat). There were lots of fishing floats and nets as well as plastic bottles of every shape and size.
Then he found something very interesting.....a handheld Garmin 78. It was in among the trash. It didn't have any batteries or data chip. It was scuffled up, with sand in the batteries compartment and a partial shell in the area where the power plug goes. We took it back to the boat. Tom cleaned it up, dried it out and put a couple of batteries in it.
The moment of truth....he hit the power button and it fired up! We all cheered. It ran through it's start up and found our position. There is a track that shows St John and St Maarten as well as a trip through Drake Channel here in the BVI's. Pretty amazing! This is one tough little unit!! Too bad he can't talk...oh the stories he could tell, starting with how he ended up washed up on a beach on the south side of Norman Island. I smell a novel and movie rights!
We have named him Norman because that we where we found him. Norm for short. He is now spending time happily with the rest of our Garmin family of units on board s/v Honey
Cool treasure! Hate seeing all the water bottles though. Kind of pisses me off.
ReplyDeleteThe trash situation is pretty much the same on the south and east of every island, The northwest flowing Caribbean Current is the delivery system. What doesn't end up there finds its way to the beaches of the lower Yucatan or gets picked up by the Florida Current and then the Stream and ends up circling the Sargasso. Wear thick soled shoes -- lots of long line hooks and hypodermics in that trash.
ReplyDeleteFor a minute I thought you'd found the GPS handheld stolen from our boat at Cooper River Marina -- the thieves were headed that way. But that was 2008, and the GPSMAP78 came along in 2010. Looks increasingly like we will stow the lines and head south Thursday. House is sold(!) and major boat jobs are done.
stowing the lines - yay!
Delete"Yay," Verily ;-)
DeleteThe beaches of Belize are covered with TONS of that same plastic trash (no GPS units that we saw, though!) The resorts employ beach rakers to clean it up daily, but in places where the owners are absent, it piles up and up. It's a huge scourge and very sad. We cleaned it up a few times, filling lots of big trash bags in just an hour or two, but our efforts were just a drop in the bucket and quickly for naught as it would just wash up again. Such a shame.
ReplyDelete