Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
press voyage that would depart from Hawaii to rendezvous with the
Kaisei
in the Garbage
Patch. Mary had even spoken to me of tugging a barge out to the Gyre, of recruiting fishing
boats to help retrieve mass quantities of refuse.
Those ideas had evaporated, and the scope of the mission had narrowed. The goal of
the voyage now, Mary told me, was to use ocean-current models being developed by sci-
entists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and at the
University of Hawaii to pinpoint the areas with the largest plastic accumulation. By com-
paring our observations with the scientists' models, it would be possible to devise effective
ways of finding the plastic, a critical precondition for future cleanup. Think of it as fisher-
ies research for the seaborne trash collectors of tomorrow.
She said we would also be “working on the most effective ways to use commercial
ships—tugs, barges, fishing boats—to do actual collection,” or, as a Project Kaisei press
release put it, “further testing collection technologies to remove the variety of plastic debris
from the ocean.”
The word
further
alludes to the
Kaisei
's voyage of the previous summer. I heard many
references to the technology developed as part of that voyage, specifically “the Beach,” a
device designed to answer the intractable problem of the confetti. Passively powered by
wave motion, the Beach allowed water to run over its surface, I was told, capturing the
plastic confetti without the need for impractical filtering, and without catching marine life
as well.
As the Golden Gate Bridge sank into the ocean behind us, Mary explained her position.
She said it simply wasn't enough to talk about stemming the flow of plastic from land.
Even if we stopped the influx from the United States, there would still be plastic from the
rest of the world getting into the oceans. And she had spent her entire life on and around
the ocean, building a successful sail-charter business. The ocean was her life's work. She
felt she had to do something.
“So we have to work very vigorously to stop the flow,” she said. “But we also have to
effect cleanup.”
Was that so wrong?
14 AUGUST—37°49′ N. 123°29′ W
We were elated to have set out, and relieved that the often-rough coastal oceans were for-
giving that day. We watched the Farallon Islands go by—a set of remote, rocky outcrop-
pings that, technically, are part of San Francisco. Then we were done with land. As if to
announce it, a whale rose out of the depths, not fifteen feet to port. Staring down on its curl-
