with Lisa Blair

Alone in a 15-metre boat awash with crashing waves, Lisa, seasick and exhausted, battled seven metre swells and 40 knot winds a thousand miles south of Cape Town, when, deep in the night, her mast snapped and all was lost. Refusing to issue a may-day, she issued a pan-pan alert to Cape Town search and rescue that she’d suffered an incident. Aged 32 at the time, Lisa was on target to break the record for the solo circumnavigation of Antarctica.

That was 2017 on board her 15 metre vessel named Climate Action Now.

“I thought I was going to die.”

Her story is being told in the 2024 movie Ice Maiden, shortly to be released at the end of June for its world premiere at the Doc Edge Film Festival in Christchurch, New Zealand. Here’s the trailer.

Ice Maiden’ is a feature length documentary charting the uncompromising determination of Australian Queenslander Lisa Blair, who became the first woman in history to sail solo around Antarctica, a jouney of 16,000 nautical miles in only 92 days. She’s broken three world records in almost as many years — fastest solo circumnavigations of Australia and Antartica, first woman in both cases.

Lisa’s journey began at only 25 years old when she got the job as cook and cleaner on a in a clipper boat race to Hawaii and witnessed first hand the sheer volume of garbage ammassed past the coast of Indonesia and the South China Sea. 

“There was so much rubbish we had to take shifts to lean over the bow and push it ahead of the boat.”

And this was nowhere near the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a floating gyre of plastic in the North Pacific roughly the size of Queensland and 2000 metres deep. 

“No, this was just North of Australia and awash with the detritus of consumerism, a heart-breaking thing to see.”

Lisa began work with the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences to start collecting microplastic samples on her voyages. Her microlab collections on ocean health now provide the world’s most comprehensive data for Antarctic waters

They found plastics in every single sample they collected. Even at Point Nemo — the most isolated place on Earth roughly 45-60 degrees in the Southern ocean — there was more plastic on average than all other areas sampled. They found 58,000 plastic particles for every Olympic sized pool of water, with 35% degraded to the more dangerous secondary fragments, some containing microbeads from banned skincare products, and 64% containing microfibres from clothing textiles.

“Even though it’s the most isolated piece of water in the world, it’s not prisine. Fed by the ocean currents, it collects swathes of rubbish from all around the globe. So, what we’re doing on land is affecting the most distant places in the ocean.”

Lisa explains that the average Australian household releases 300 particles for every load of synthetic clothes washing and this is released into waste water that ends up in the sea. Multiply this by the number of Australian households washing clothes every week and the plastics released amount to 14 trillion particles every year. 

Lisa asserts we need to mandate microplastics filters on every new washing machine and we must apply a Pigovian tax on all virgin plastics. A third measure she suggests is complete transparency on waste recycling.

“People try to do the right thing with recycling but a lot of councils don’t have the infrastucture to recycle properly, a lot of disinformation gets shared, and people just give up because they cant rely on their councils to do anything but dump recyclables in landfill.”

Lisa says councils and LGAs should provide full public disclosure and states could incentivise recycling with Clean Street Awards. As to secondary plastics, Lisa says a tax on new plastics would incentivise recycling such that second, third and fourth uses would become increasingly cheaper to reuse and the taxes raised could be used to support recycling infrastructure. At present, it remains cheaper to make new plastics than to recycle; so a tax would go a long way to disincentivising putting more rubbish into the natural system.

Another huge source of microplastics is car tyres. Fully 30% of microplastic sources now come from erosion of car tyres in the normal course of useage on the roads. As recently as two years ago it was found that 70% of people now have plastic in their blood and last year it was found that geological samples from thousands of years ago contain traces of plastics.

Lisa says the average fish will be 18% plastic by the year 2050, adding a new dimension to the claims that there will be more plastic in the ocean than actual fish by the same year.

“This is not that far off,” warns Lisa. “There is a crisis in plastics choking our oceans and we’re effectively killing ourselves.”

The next big issue for Lisa will be fibreglass. She says there are 35.4 million boats reaching the end of life in the coming year and some sort of free disposal amnesty is needed to ensure glass fragments don’t end up adding to the plastics crisis. 

At present, they are mostly scuttled or abandoned. About 100,000 are abandoned in Europe every year. A local study in an oyster farm in Chichester found they had to shut down because there were 7000 shards of fibreglass in every one kilogram of oysters, merely because the farm was co-located with a nearby boat launch.

Lisa says boats will need to be built from alternative materials in the near future. “Such materials do exist — volcanic fibre and bio resins can replace fibreglass and liquid epoxies to build more ecologically friendly boats.” Volcanic Fibre (otherwise known as Basalt rock) is 10 x stronger than fiberglass but only 15-20% more costly and holds much lower environmental impacts.

Working on a vision statement to be launched in late June in time for the Ice Maiden release, Lisa outlines her next voyage. She now aims to set yet another world-first record, as the first person in history to sail solo, non-stop, and unassisted around the Arctic, passing through both the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage, in one season. Sadly, this project is only possible due to the continued impacts of climate change. 

Building on the citizen science research she undertook during her Antarctica record, Lisa also aims to complete an array of citizen science projects throughout the record, as well as develop and build the required vessel from Volcanic Fibre as a test case. Lisa’s vision is to coordinate a global collaboration between industry professionals, universities, researchers, and passionate professionals. The idea is to provide a proven alternative to fibreglass vessels, including the end-of-life closed-loop options and environmental impact assessments, and then educate through storytelling and using the entertainment narrative of Lisa’s world record around the Arctic Circle.

After successfully setting her 4^th and 5^th world records as the fastest person to sail solo, non-stop, and unassisted around Antarctica and the first woman to do so, Lisa Blair is now turning her attention to the Arctic Circle.