Let’s make Ireland a world leader in recycling
Annalise Murphy felt blessed to see pods of whales as she sailed around the world, but the plastic pollution has energised her to issue this clarion call
IT must have been a rare sight for anyone who recognised the Olympic silver medallist. Just a few weeks after returning from the Volvo Ocean Race, a wetsuit-clad Annalise Murphy jumped into the waters of Dún Laoghaire Harbour and began scooping up plastic bottles out of the brine.
It was something she just couldn’t stand to see, she says – the mess left behind by her fellow human beings, spoiling the beauty of her Olympic training ground.
‘During the summer I was sailing in Dún Laoghaire Harbour,’ Annalise
explains. ‘I came in and there were just hundreds of bottles floating in the water. So I went in in my wetsuit and I picked up all the bottles. It looked so much better and the harbour looks so much nicer now,’ she says with no small amount of satisfaction.
‘But there are loads of bins and recycling bins around Dún Laoghaire. It would be so easy for people to put their stuff in those bins but they don’t. It’s better for everyone if we have got a cleaner environment. It looks nicer, we can be proud of our country and of doing the right thing.’
It’s no wonder, then, that Annalise spent months on board the Clean Seas boat as a member of the Turn The Tide On Plastic team who took part in the 2017-2018 Volvo Ocean Race. It’s an experience not for the faint-hearted, but one that Annalise felt she couldn’t turn down. ‘I got given this opportunity to be in a race and I thought I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t take it,’ the 28-year-old Dubliner says.
‘I knew it was going to be extremely hard and challenging but it is not very often that you get offered to race round the world with a great team. So I decided I would just deal with how hard it was going to be when I got there and go for it.’
Annalise spent almost a year on board, carrying out round-the-clock four-hour shift patterns in some of the most challenging seas.
But she says it was the isolation that was the most difficult thing.
‘To be honest, I don’t think I was ever scared – you don’t have time as you are just too tired. You are kind of sleep-deprived the entire time, so when you aren’t trying to get some sleep you are up on deck trying to make the boat go as fast as possible.
‘Mentally it was probably the most challenging. Even though I was on a team with nine other people, I still sometimes felt very lonely.
‘When everyone is tired and finding it hard, they retreat into themselves and then you are by yourself for three weeks at a time really. That was the toughest time for me really – feeling very alone in the middle of the ocean.’
Clean Seas operated a watch system with four hours on and four hours off.
‘Four hours on you are up on deck doing a few different jobs, trimming sails, turning sails driving, moving sales round the boat and so on.
‘In your four hours off you only ever got about two hours sleep, and that was where you got to eat your freeze-dried food and if you had other jobs on the boat you got to do them as well, like packing food bags which was one of my jobs every day.
‘I had to make sure that all the food was in the daily food bag for everyone and sometimes what I needed to get would be at the bottom of 300 kilos of bags and I’d have to lift them all off to get this one bag of food.
‘Then you would get into your
bunk for a few hours. If you were really cold, hopefully you could warm up a little bit. If you were really hot you just had to kind of deal with it.
‘I don’t think there was ever a moment when I felt I was the right temperature. And then you just repeated that. There was nighttime and daytime but the rest of it was all a bit of a blur. You didn’t have much idea what day of the week it was.’
IT’S a journey that it seems, only the toughest survive and Annalise admits there were times when she thought about giving up.
‘Multiple times a day I thought: “Why am I here?” There were good moments as well but the race I think is one of the most challenging things you can ever do. You spend a lot of your time questioning your own sanity on the boat. There are really big highs and really big lows and it is just a matter of trying to stay level through them.
‘That’s what I learned throughout the race and I got much better at doing that towards the end. One day I would be loving everything I was doing and the next I would want to jump and swim to the nearest container ship I saw going by.
‘But then you would see a pod of whales or a few dolphins would come up alongside the boat. Seeing the stars in the sky at night is the kind of thing that nobody gets to see. There were lots of amazing moments.’
As well as racing, Clean Seas wanted to spread the message around the world of the need to reduce plastic pollution, to get people to increase recycling and stop microplastics ending up in the ocean and so in our food chain.
And Annalise was horrified at how the scourge of plastic is insidiously creeping to cover all areas of our world. ‘We saw bits of plastic everywhere in the oceans,’ she explains. ‘One of the biggest shocks was seeing bottle caps and bits of plastic just floating in the sea, thousands of miles from the nearest land. That showed me how much as people we are polluting the earth.
‘On our boat we had a GEOMAR science project where we were filtering water samples from around the world. And there were microplastics in oceans nearly everywhere in the world. ‘Out of around 180 samples only three didn’t have microplastics and one of those was on the west coast of Ireland.’
So does that mean we still have time to clean up our act here?
‘There’s still some hope for us, maybe,’ Annalise laughs. But it’s a serious subject and one which Annalise is still tackling now that she is back on relatively dry land.
She has signed up as an ambassador for recycling organisation Repak’s Team Green, which aims to encourage Irish people to up the ante when it comes to tackling their waste.‘This is a pretty cool campaign for me to be involved in because I am passionate about plastic pollution,’ Annalise says.
‘We want people to join Team
To be honest I don’t think I was ever scared – you don’t have time as you are just too tired
I thought I was pretty good at recycling but then I realised that I could be so much better
Green and sign the pledge to recycle more. We want to try and get people to be much more aware of how to recycle your plastics.
‘Things that go into landfill can end up getting into the sea so it is better to recycle for all of us. I thought I was pretty good at recycling until this time last year and then I realised actually I could be so much better.
IT’S about creating better habits, like getting people to realise shampoo bottles can be recycled, or making sure people wash their yoghurt pots before putting them in the recycling bin.
‘There are small habits, little things that if everyone does it will make a big difference. At the end of the day the greater population has to be onboard to try and make our environment a better place.’
It’s also about taking pride in your own environment and Annalise hopes other people will take the initiative to clean up their own areas – the same way as all those plastic bottles floating in Dún Laoghaire spurred her on to take action herself.
‘It’s really not very much effort,’ she says. ‘If lots of people do things like this then that’s what is going to change things at the end of the day. If you see a bottle on the ground, pick it up and put it in the recycling bin. If there’s no bin then bring your rubbish home with you.
‘It’s upsetting to see our beaches and countryside littered with plastic so it is about trying to set an example to the people around you. If you are down on the beach, pick up a few pieces of plastic, bring it home and put it into your recycling bin.
‘Hopefully more people will want to make a difference and Ireland can be a world leader for just being a much cleaner country and having less pollution and plastic litter lying around the place.’
As far as her career goes, Annalise has now changed tack and it’s back to the not-so-lonely seas again. ‘At the moment I am training full time to try and qualify for Tokyo Olympics, that’s my goal now,’ says the silver medallist.
‘I am sailing in a two-person boat now as opposed to a oneperson boat which is what I have been doing for the last ten years of my life. So it is a big change but it is really nice having a new challenge and it is really great just being back home.
‘I have had such a nice summer just being home in Ireland with all my friends and family and everyone around me.
‘It made me realise how great it is to have good support around you when you don’t have any for a year and you are on your own.’
As you might imagine, the training schedule of an Olympian is a tough one.
‘I’m sailing five to six days a week and I am doing gym work on top of that nearly every day,’ Annalise says. ‘I am having to learn a new set of skills for the boat I am sailing so it is changing my skill set from being in a oneperson boat to a two-person boat and learning to communicate a lot more with Katie [Tingle] who I am sailing with.
‘Before I was able to just think about things and do them but now I have to say out loud what I am going to do. I can’t just change the direction of the boat without telling her. It’s really fun but it’s also hard and very different.
‘It’s great having someone else to go training with, it makes such a big difference because I am not on my own any more I have someone else to go through the hard times and the good times with. It makes a big difference.’
Outside of sport though, Annalise is yet to find that significant other to go through those hard times and the good with.
‘I’ve got my family and friends and I am trying to find time to have some sort of normal life outside sailing.
‘It’s about finding someone who has a similar lifestyle and understands the sacrifices you have to make to try and be one of the best in the world.’
But with the Tokyo Olympics less than two years away, there is, Annalise says, plenty to look forward to. And all thoughts of being back on dry land for good have ebbed away for now.
‘I have learned that’s how it is,’ she says of her life on the ocean waves. ‘Sailing is something that I love and I am really good at so I might as well keep on doing it while I’m able.
‘I know that I am not going to be able to do this for the rest of my life so I may as well make the most of it while I can.’ ÷For more information on how you can join Team Green and become an environmental champion, visit www.repak.ie/teamgreen, Repak Recycling on Facebook or @RepakRecycling on Twitter.