Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pected, was merely a tool for self-soothing on the part of all the sailors and yachtsmen of
the world. They had to justify why they bothered.
Mary was waiting for my answer, her eyes bright. I laughed. “Well, it's certainly differ-
ent, Mary,” I said.
She smiled and handed me a piece of chocolate. I thought of something she had told me
back in California, advice for someone who had never been to sea. The trick, she'd said,
is not to think of yourself as limited by the confines of your boat. You have to believe that
you are limited only by the edges of what you can see
from
the boat. And the indignities of
being at sea had let me realize the truth of this. The solution to every misery was to open
your mind toward the horizon. To know that you were not on the ocean, but of it.
19 AUGUST—35°05′ N. 138°42′ W
On our fifth day—sixth? twelfth?—we got our first real taste. The air warmed, the clouds
disappeared, the ocean became settled and smooth—and we caught the propeller on a ghost
net.
Ghost nets are fishing nets and tackle that have been cast off or lost by commercial fish-
ermen. As nets and their attached gear wander and float, they find each other, tangling into
ungainly masses of net and rope riddled with fishing floats and other debris. They have the
largest bodies of any species of nonlife in the Garbage Patch. Synthetic men-of-war, they
continue to fish, entangling and killing animals as they roam the ocean for years, perhaps
decades. And they're hell on propellers.
I awoke in my bunk to the sound of—what was that sound? Robin, another retired sci-
ence teacher and a friend of Art's, was crouched next to me, nudging my shoulder.
You might want to get on deck, he said. The propeller got fouled on a net.
I realized what the sound was. After five days of constant motoring, the propeller was
no longer spinning. “Where away?” I gurgled, tumbling out of bed.
We came on deck to find the Pirate King fresh from the ocean, stripped to the waist,
droplets of saltwater glinting in his beard. I want to say he had a knife in his mouth. He
had gone over the side to free the propeller. His quarry lay at his feet: a young ghost net,
long and narrow, uncomplicated by other nets and ropes, not yet tangled into itself beyond
recognition. The excited crew clustered around. We had only just reached the Gyre, and
already the Garbage Patch had reached out, striking us a glancing blow!
I had my video camera with me and began recording Robin and his collaborators as they
untangled the net. Mary was there, watching it unfold, oddly separate from the crew, as she
always seemed to be. She picked up a corner of the net and turned it over in her hand.
