The deliver plows on with groaning sails, with a heave and a shove, like a fats guy shouldering via a crowd. The movement is fairly stop-and-go, with out ever definitely stopping, or pretty going. In the open cockpit we’ve simply been retaining on and speakme approximately flotsam: matters that locate their manner into the vastness of the seas, and glide and glide, and eventually perhaps wash ashore. Grimmest to be stated thus far through my informed companion—trumping the foot withinside the boot—is the skeleton withinside the survival suit. Those are pearls that have been his eyes! When we pause the verbal exchange to climb up onto the pitching deck to release the trawl, I’m retaining Mr. Bones in mind. The Sea Dragon, a 72-foot spherical-the-global racing sloop, is all taut strains and cleats to ride on, and a fall overboard after darkish might be a probable dying sentence. You’d be a mote, a speck withinside the black night time and wild seas.
It’s the begin of the graveyard watch—2 a.m. to 6—and maximum everyone’s asleep of their bunks, besides the captain, who’s beneath withinside the inexperienced glow of the nav station plotting our course: a knight’s move, 1,2 hundred miles east to the center of the South Atlantic, then 800 miles north to Ascension Island. Above, out withinside the weather, it’s simply Watch Team A: myself, younger Emily from France, and the big name of our show, Marcus Eriksen Ph.D.—“scientist, marine, explorer,” as his Weather Channel gig, “Commando Weather,” introduces him (“Hi! Dr. Marcus right here!”). In the ones TV bits, part Survivorman, part Jackass, Eriksen plays stunts, like overlaying himself with prognosticating crickets or being buried through an avalanche. This task is handiest barely extra ludicrous: cleansing up the ocean.
For the beyond decade, 47-year-antique Eriksen has been an eco-stuntman, drifting on rafts throughout seas and down rivers, in addition to a extreme scientist, commissioning vessels and plying his plankton trawls, amassing data, and speakme to groups—consisting of heaps of faculty kids—approximately the hazard of plastic pollutants withinside the sea. Thanks to environmental gadflies like Eriksen, and emotionally affecting documentaries approximately natural world deaths due to plastic ingestion and entanglement, that is a famous phenomenon—if nonetheless under-studied and hugely underestimated. Eriksen’s task is to maintain poking a pointy elbow and saying, No, definitely, listen! This shit should kill us all!
For the portions in play now beggar the human imagination. Dumped or by chance spilled from ships, blown from landfills, washed down each river withinside the global, plastic trash has been gathering considering that World War II in floating dumps, a number of which exceed hundreds of thousands of rectangular miles. Round and spherical the all-too-long lasting plastic goes, imponderable portions stuck up withinside the first-rate oceanic gyres. These “rubbish patches,” as they're called, are out of sight and out of mind, however now no longer totally inactive. Like all matters the ocean claims, plastic too suffers a sea change. And the last damage our throw-away effluvia would possibly but do, to the fitness of the ocean and the human future, no person is aware of for sure.
That’s why we’re out right here getting thrashed through a squall, because the relaxation of the group of eleven sleep fitfully of their hammocks. The South Atlantic especially is aqua incognita for marine pollutants researchers. Though Marcus has voyaged to 4 of the global’s 5 most important gyres (the North Pacific, South Pacific, North Atlantic, and Indian Ocean), analyzing their respective rubbish patches, that is his first ride to the South Atlantic. In fact no one has ever sailed right here in particular to have a look at this antipodal gyre’s burden of plastic trash. We don’t realize if we’ll discover a Poe-tale horror-whirlpool of algae-slickened detritus or simply bits and jots.
Now, aware of the mainsail boom, and putting directly to strains and cables wherein we can, Emily and I untie and untangle, and Marcus hefts the number one studies device, the high-velocity plankton trawl, a contraption that resembles the starship Enterprise with a tail, and wrestles it to the returned of the boat. We’re like a caricature approximately the evolution of sea legs, sure-footed and athletic Eriksen main the manner alongside the slick deck in turn-flops, even as Emily and I observe nearly on all fours.
“This is a prototype primarily based totally on a prototype,” Marcus says, concerning the equipment with same elements pleasure and skepticism as he hefts it out over the water. “It would possibly sink. It would possibly turn over.” Basically, it’s a swish metal container with a keel and wings, trailing a long, 333-micron-mesh plankton net. With any luck, it's miles heavy-obligation and hydrodynamic sufficient to deal with the Sea Dragon’s modern-day cruising velocity of eight to ten knots. It’s the 20 th trawl he’s constructed, welding them in his storage workshop. “I used to very own a 1950 El Dorado,” he defined earlier, with humble suitable humor. “It become learn how to weld or walk.”
He chucks the trawl into the foam-flecked water. The strains snap taut, the trawl, henceforth to be referred to as the Silver Surfer, gulps a mouthful of Atlantic, increases a beckoning wing, and flips. No matter, apparently. Upside down, it rises to the height of a tall steep sea, almost catching air; then down it swoops into the trough, moving from wing to wing, carving infinite S-turns because it commences its look for symptoms and symptoms that we’ve entered the South Atlantic gyre.
“That’s awesome!” Marcus says, giggling to peer that it capabilities flawlessly properly incorrect facet up.
Buoyed through this success, we go back to the protection and relative consolation of the cockpit to observe and wait, and speak a few extra approximately the matters that glide withinside the sea. The hunt is on for the Great South Atlantic Garbage Patch.
