Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“It's so hard to believe people throw stuff like this in the ocean,” she said. I wasn't sure
if she was talking to me or to my camera.
There was debris in the water again. Someone brought out a long pole with a basket
of netting at its end, and we started hunting. There was a trick to it. If you left the net in
the water, it became difficult to maneuver; instead, you had to stab the water just aft of an
object as it passed. In this way, like Vikings spearfishing from the deck of a warship, we
brought several scraps of trash aboard.
Meanwhile, Kaniela and Nick took the dinghy out, buzzing around to pick up bits of
debris spotted by people aloft. Nick was on board as a representative of the Ocean Con-
servancy and was the closest thing we had to a professional marine biologist or ocean
debris specialist. Every year, the Ocean Conservancy leads a gigantic volunteer effort
called the International Coastal Cleanup, and this year Nick's efforts on the
Kaisei
would
be the cleanup's symbolic beginning.
Bravo Watch began. I grabbed a walkie-talkie and took bow watch, calling sightings in
to Gabe, in the wheelhouse, who would note them in the log. Nick and Kaniela also had a
radio in the dinghy. If any of us saw something particularly interesting—a bucket, a large
piece of tarp—Kaniela would gun the motor and the dinghy would skip across the ocean in
hot pursuit.
I climbed out onto the bowsprit, watching the water stretch past, eyes peeled for plastic
crates and buckets. The dinghy zipped forward with Nick in the bow, a figurehead in
sunglasses.
Something was bugging me. I keyed my radio.
“Gamma whiskey breaker, this is bow watch alpha bravo comeback, over.”
Bravo Watch liked its radios, and its nonsense.
“Loud and clear, bow watch,” came Gabe's crackling reply. “This is the bridge. Can I
get a two-five on your niner, over.”
“Roger, bridge,” I said. “Bridge, we are cleaning up the Pacific Ocean…
by hand.
Over.”
Robin came forward to the bow to say hello. People liked to say hello when you were
in the bow, not only because it was scenic and quiet but also because it was one of the few
places where you could talk without being overheard.
I told him I didn't think our work was very useful.
“It's a joke!” he said, making a face. “The one thing is testing the ocean-current models.
That's the one thing that could be real.”
But as far as I could tell, the only thing Mary knew of the ocean-current models was a
pair of GPS waypoints—one from NOAA and one from the University of Hawaii. Was that
