Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The sightings soon died down and by the following day the water was trash-free. We
readied ourselves for its return. A logbook for debris was established—it lived in the
wheelhouse, on the desk underneath the GPS/radar display—and a new task was added to
our watch duties: debris lookout. Two members of the active watch would sit in the bow,
one looking to port, one to starboard, using a walkie-talkie to report anything they saw to a
third member of the watch, who would note its latitude and longitude and the time of sight-
ing in the logbook. The fourth watchmate would man the helm, and several times during
the three-hour shift, at the word of the Pirate King, we would rotate.
I was underwhelmed by this debris-watch system. Mary had already said that this voy-
age wouldn't have the scientific focus of the previous year's, but if we were doing the work
of debris watch anyway, it seemed a waste not to do it in a methodical or standardized way.
But no. There would be no real data collection, no pulling of nets through the water to
quantify debris density at different coordinates. There wasn't even any consistent method
for eyeballing it. Should we be looking everywhere and anywhere? Or should we be look-
ing at a defined area, so that the debris count from one watch might be meaningfully com-
pared with that of the next?
And how should different objects count? We would of course radio in large items to
the wheelhouse.
(I've got half of a green plastic bucket. I've got a two-foot square of yel-
low tarp.)
But what about a two-inch fragment? A half-inch one? Only through the gradual
buildup of a debris-lookout culture, transmitted orally from one watch to the next, did even
vaguely standardized practices emerge. Our observations, it seemed, would be of little use
to anyone else once we were done.
Soon, a pair of work lights were strapped to the netting underneath the bowsprit, and
debris watch extended around the clock. Now we stood at the rails even at night, staring
into the pools of light that trickled forward onto the rising, falling, onrushing ocean. In act-
ive seas, the prow of the ship became a mesmerizing twilight zone, where I stood watching
bow waves crash aside and looked up at the
Kaisei
's great square sails, taut against the
night.
But when we couldn't find this reverie, some of us grumbled. What, exactly, was the
point?
The point was that our goal was not to measure debris or to record it in any useful way,
but simply to
find
it. We were looking for what Mary referred to as “current lines” of trash,
narrow bands of high density. Mary spoke again and again of the current lines, and I saw
that if we could bring the
Kaisei
back to port heavy with trash, it would validate the dream
of cleanup. But for that, we would have to find the mother lode.
