As with a former pet dog, a German Pointer, whom we did just the once find, majestic but confused in classic rigid, directional gun dog pose, I have no idea what my senses and instincts are telling me.
It may be a bit of a Thor Heyerdahl moment, you know, the intrepid Norwegian explorer turned conservationist who was one of my childhood heroes alongside Neil Armstrong, Peter Bonetti and the collective Thunderbirds.
I remember reading in a school project about his Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947 when in a balsa wood raft he crossed the vast Pacific Ocean. His description of the environment was one of remoteness, beauty and purity.
Imagine his dismay some 24 years later when, in leaning over the side of his latest papyrus boat in the Atlantic Ocean to clean his teeth he came up against lumps of solidified fat as hard as asphalt, plastic bottles and squeezey tubes. It was no better some 10 months after that when on making a day to day record of the type and quantity of waste he recorded visible pollution on 43 of the 57 days.
Disturbingly, even the empassioned evidence of the great Heyerdahl has had no influence on our continued use of the global oceans as a dumping ground for the detritus of modern life.
Take the latest documentation of the phenomena of "Nurdles".
It is a cute sounding name which could as easily describe a mischievous children's book character, a cuddly bear or a comforting foodstuff.
In reality I would not put it past some slick advertising executive to have thought up "Nurdles" on the instructions of a multi-national petro-chemical corporation as a distraction from its true identity.
A "Nurdle" describes a lentil sized pellet of plastic in its rawest form.
It is light enough to blow around like a dust and as such spills out of the factory sites, trucks, trains and metal containers, the thousands of such shipping containers that criss-cross the world's oceans between supplier and manufacturers of all manner of plastic goods.
The seemingly innocuous pellets have an unfortunate characteristic in that their molecular form has a tendency to attract oils. Consequently the persistent organic pollutants ( POPS- another cosy acronym) which drift about in the oceans attach themselves to the Nurdles and form supersaturated poison pills. Such materials as DDT and PCB's were banned in the United States in 1970 but the foresight of that country was not adopted by many others.
A futher freakish factor is that a Nurdle resembles a fish egg and as such is devoured by the large oceanic population of, for example, tuna and salmon.
Nurdles are very difficult to clean up because of their size which also helps them to mix in with beach sand. They are now thought to make up around 10% of the plastic debris in the worlds oceans. The combined plastic coverage across the seven seas is around 40% by area.
Modern plastics are durable and not easily degraded and so the existing waste floating about will stay there for decades. Scientists predict that around 70% of the plastic will eventually sink and create a man-made ocean floor with wider implications for the ecology and environment of the planet.
It is conceivable in this way that archaeological excavations of the sea bed in say 10,000 years will reveal a thin layer of plastic. Our generation, long since gone may be deemed to have perished after eating their own plastics, a strange thing to do for a seemingly cultured and advanced society.
Perhaps, on this gloomy note I should sign off in tribute to my hero Thor Heyerdahl.
Upon realising the extent of ocean pollution back in 1970 he said that he "set out to get a glimpse of man's past but got just as much of a glimpse into man's future".
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