Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Kelsey, who had done her Berkeley thesis on marine debris, piped up before I did, point-
ing out that it was consistency that mattered, not a higher number per se. Nikki made an
impassioned counterargument, centered on what a rare opportunity it was to be here in the
Gyre. Then Art and Henry joined in, and Kaniela, and in this way, aboard the briganti-
ne
Kaisei,
near latitude 34°36′ North and longitude 143°21′ West, at approximately 1930
hours, the scientific method was reinvented from the waterline up. Had there only been a
high school science class present, it would have been one of the purest, most spontaneous
moments of experiential education ever to unfold.
Empiric consistency won the day. The two-member debris watch was reratified, and
the scientific community resumed its celebrations. By dark, we were sitting on the storage
lockers on what Kaniela called the “poop deck,” where we debated the etymology of the
term, and whether this actually was one, and whether a non-poop deck could be conver-
ted into a poop deck by way of pooping, and so on. Then we were checking the sternlines
Kaniela had set in hope of catching fish, and there were clouds of aromatic smoke, and we
greeted every unfamiliar footfall with the paranoia of teenagers, even though some of us
had not been teenagers for more than forty years.
I went to bed before it got very far. I had learned my lesson in Chernobyl, and was pree-
mptively horrified at the idea of being hung over for our next watch, which started in four
hours. So I missed the moment when someone realized that the fishing line had gone unnat-
urally taut, missed the moment when the monster was heaved on board: a mahimahi, easily
three feet long, glistening and prehistoric. I slept through it all, slept through the commo-
tion of Kaniela and George, the young assistant engineer, wrestling the incompletely killed
mahimahi down the corridor, past my cabin, to the freezer; slept through the sounds of
them mopping down the corridor, which even in their drunken state they realized had be-
come a crime scene spattered with fish blood. I woke only for the watch change, every one
of team Bravo late on deck, and one or two of us still badly drunk. At the helm, Kelsey
responded to an order for a five-degree course correction with wild spins of the wheel to
starboard, then compensated with even wilder spins to port. Walking forward to check the
boat, I found George passed out with his fly open, lying on the netting below the bowsprit,
his safety harness duly clipped in, a strangely beatific sprawl, the dream-like ocean flying
by underneath.
23 AUGUST—33°36′ N, 146°36′ W
We were in it.
Nick raced back and forth in the dinghy, in full Ocean Conservancy mode, fishing out
buckets and detergent bottles and jugs, laundry baskets and the odd hard hat. He filled
out reports for the International Coastal Cleanup, typed the debris log into his laptop, and
