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摘要：Penny Palfrey，48岁，创造了新的单人海洋游泳世界纪录，67.25海里，用了40小时41分。她的脸在上岸后肿得几乎无法辨认。在一家当地医院修养两天后，她仍然不能说话。
这个新纪录比她保持的原记录长了4英里。但是在创造记录的过程中，有三条接近她的鲨鱼被其助手杀死。总共有4条Ocean White Tip遊到她身边来探个究竟。在夜里她也好几次被什么大型动物撞上。
这引起了环保主义者的指责。开曼群岛共和国的环境部长也表示了关切。主流媒体则大多赞美她的成就而对鲨鱼事件闭口不提。
Penny Palfrey, a 48-year-old Australian ultra swimmer and grandmother, set the world record last weekend for unassisted solo ocean swim, logging 67.25 miles between Little Cayman and Grand Cayman islands. She was in the water for 40 hours and 41 minutes, and when she walked onto a Grand Cayman beach her face was so swollen she was nearly unrecognizable. She was released from a local hospital on Tuesday after two days of recovery, but still could not speak.
Palfrey was hailed for her accomplishment, which was four miles longer than the previous record, but was criticized by conservationists for the killing of three sharks that approached her during the swim. Four oceanic white tips came near her, and several times at night during her swim she was bumped by something large. One of the members of her support team traveling in a small inflatable, a local fisherman named Charles Ebanks, distracted the sharks with dead fish, then killed three of six- to eight-footers with a machete.
“It was not in any of our plans for that to happen,” said Chris Palfrey, Penny’s husband. “I was not aware it was going to happen until after the event. Our goal was to do a swim. It was not to do anything to the environment.”
Media reports generally have praised Palfrey for her brave swim through “shark-infested” waters, with little but passing acknowledgment to the killing of the sharks. And even the criticism by environmentalists has been muted.
The director of the Cayman Islands Department of Environment, Gina Ebanks-Petrie, said, “Given the importance of sharks as a top-level predator in the marine environment, the DoE would have preferred to have seen this incident handled differently.”
Um, hello? Three full-sized sharks were chopped to death so some woman could achieve personal glory by swimming for almost two days? Let’s have a little perspective here. Imagine an ultra runner wants to set a new record racing across the bear-infested northern Rockies. Four bears approach her while she’s running along the trail and her support crew uses some manky bilious road kill to lure them away, where they’re shot dead. Sharks might not be the friend of swimmers or surfers, but the fact that they’re predators and this took place in the ocean, where bloody deeds quickly fade from sight, makes it no less of an abomination.
Oceanic whitetips are classified as “vulnerable” under the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s assessment of species, and one-third of the world’s sharks are “threatened”, according to IUCN. In the Gulf of Mexico, it’s estimated that their population fell 99.3 percent from 1950s to the 1990s. The main culprits are drift nets, longline fishing, and overfishing, and their fins are prized for shark fin soup.
Palfrey’s crew certainly had reason for concern. Whitetips are responsible for more human deaths than all other shark species combined — although not fast swimmers, they stay close to the surface cruising for food and are quickly on the scene in shipwrecks and downed aircraft. But the recommended response if one comes within the vicinity of a diver, swimmer, or surfer is not to hack them to death. It’s simply to get out of the water. Apparently, Palfrey’s desire to break the record (it was her third attempt) was more important than that.
http://www.adventure-journal.com ... she-can-set-record/ |
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贝贝用过的系列 护肤品 (2007-4-30) 贝贝 
发表于 2011-6-18 08:58
