Quite a mild afternoon, and the 14 degrees C at 2pm was most certainly not forecast. As per usual. I am now looking out across the basin towards a placid cloud scene. Although the sun is not out, it is looking very springlike. The hooded crows are smashing shells by dropping them from a great height. Yet another Norwegian trawler called into port this afternoon - the Ronge. Within the space of a week, we have seen more than half a dozen fishing vessels from Norway in this port, one as a result of an emergency when its nets fouled the propellor.
In August 2007, I mentioned on the old Northern Trip blog the plight of people trying to cross from Africa to Europe by boat. Until a few years ago, the main route was from northwest Africa to the Canary Islands (Spanish territory), but a surge of refugees is also using a route between Libya and Italy. Today, it is reported that more than 200 people drowned in a boat when this was affected by severe weather.
I remember that in the late 1970s, many people fled Vietnam as 'boat people', and I have met Vietnamese people in Western Europe in the early 1980s who had come that way. The Africans I mentioned above are coming from south of the Sahara, fleeing grinding desperate poverty, trying to get a better life. An even more atrocious story keeps emanating out of Yemen, when refugees of the lawless nation of Somalia are put across the Gulf of Aden, and more often than not abandoned on the high seas.
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