This was all neatly analogous to my broader situation: instead of a nice, short jaunt on a press boat or a proper research vessel, I was going to sea for three weeks or more. A thousand miles from land when I wanted to be at home in New York, when I should have been at home, squaring away wedding plans, preparing for the moment of my good fortune, only two months away, when the Doctor and I would get hitched. And the Kaisei would be sailing in total seaborne isolation. There would be no satellite phone for the crew, no data connection, no way to communicate with my family or with the Doctor. No way even to apologize, once I went, for being gone.
The ship itself was charming, if a bit scruffy, with cabins that were cozy but not claustrophobic, and a pair of lounges ample for a small crew, and decks of faded wood. In front of the wheelhouse, with its radio and its radar display, was an outdoor bridge, where the deck rose into a platform facing a large, spoked wheel. It was the kind of wheel I would have expected to see on the wall of a nautical-themed restaurant.
The problem was not the Kaisei. The problem was us. As the days went by, spent in sanding and painting and offloading unneeded scientific equipment from the previous year’s voyage, I met the volunteers who would be the crew. How many people did it take to sail a 150-foot brigantine? I wasn’t sure we yet had ten. And as we got to know one another, it emerged that very few of us knew anything that would be useful in the safe operation of said brigantine.
There was Kaniela, for instance, an affable young surfer from Hawaii and one of the hardest workers on the boat. He asked me if I knew much about sailing.
I didn’t, I said. Not a thing. You?
Nah, man. I’m hoping to learn.
Then there were Gabe and Henry, two recently graduated Oberlin hipsters. The morning we met, they were standing on deck huddled against the early chill, hands stuffed in their pockets, wearing their sunglasses. A surly pair, I thought, but they turned out just to be badly hung over, and had brightened up by mid-afternoon. They told me they both had degrees, more or less, in environmental studies, or something. Upon moving back to Marin County from Oberlin, they had gotten internships at the Ocean Voyages Institute, the umbrella organization for Project Kaisei. But three weeks at sea seemed a little extreme for an internship. I asked them why they were coming.
With a straight face, Gabe told me that he was here for the adventure. He wanted to be an adventurer. A rakish rogue, he specified. And this was the first step toward his goal.
The ravings of a contaminated mind. I turned to Henry. I asked him if either of them knew how to sail.
He smiled. It was a thin smile, similar to a wince. They had taken sailing in high school, he said. Little two-person boats.
What was that feeling in my gullet? Desperation? I made my way from volunteer to volunteer, making a mental map of our skill set. We had a deep bench in watersports and the teaching of high school science. Otherwise, it was a mixed bag. There was a boatbuilder, a former journalist, a few students. They were all interesting, thoughtful, hardworking people who didn’t know a damn thing about sailing a tall ship.
I put my hope in the second mate, a calm, confident tall-ship sailor…who quit. After a single afternoon on board, he told the captain he didn’t like the look of things and got the hell out of there.
There it was again. That sinking feeling.
The votes of ill-confidence started to pile up. A team of Coast Guard bluesuits came to inspect the boat’s papers. As they left, chuckling, I heard the Kaisei’s captain say, “They’d never seen anything like this.”
The more I learned about the Kaisei, the more I realized that, from a technical point of view, she was an oddity. One evening I sat on the aft deck with the ship’s engineer, watching Richmond’s tugboats go by and listening to him complain. The engineer was probably the most important person in the crew, if it mattered to us that the ship remain afloat, that we have fresh water, and that the navigational gear function. Night after night, he had been up late, coaxing the ship’s systems into fighting shape. He was grumpy, but that seemed like a good sign. You don’t want a laissez-faire engineer.
The Kaisei, he told me with some exasperation, had been built in Poland, only to be refitted and operated in Japan. Everything was in Polish and Japanese. And the electricity. He shook his head. Multiple standards, in a dazzling range of voltages. The irregularity extended literally to the nuts and bolts of the ship: some were metric, some weren’t, and so multiple sets of tools were required, though none of the multiple sets on board were complete.
The engineer sipped from his mug and let out a great sigh. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m into my cup.”
Within a few days, he, too, had quit.
We now had no second mate, and no engineer, and none of us lowly volunteers—the crew—knew what the hell was going on. Every day of delay was shortening the mission: in barely three weeks, the Kaisei was booked to participate in the San Diego Festival of Sail, where we would blow the minds of all those tall-ship enthusiasts with our adventures in deep ocean plastics. So every day tied up at the dock was a day we didn’t spend in the Gyre. We began to doubt that the boat would ever leave the dock. And with experienced crew members disappearing by the day, the rank and file were wondering if we, too, should step off the boat.
Something held us back, though. Something that counterbalanced all the bad omens. A single factor that kept the entire crew from walking.
It was the Pirate King. His name was Stephen, and his position was first mate, but I thought of him as the Pirate King of the Kaisei, a single person so compulsively knowledgeable about seafaring that he made up for the frightening deficits in the rest of us. A compact man, even short, he was trim and strong, with a close beard and two golden hoops in his left ear, and just in case we weren’t paying attention, he wore a black baseball cap decorated with a skull and crossbones.
The Kaisei had a captain, but we mostly ignored him in deference to the Pirate King, who exemplified that very specific kind of manhood that is built on overwhelming knowledge. He knew how to navigate, how to tie knots, how to rig a sailboat, how to walk along the yards with barely a hand to hold himself in place, and how to slide down the stays, Douglas Fairbanks-like, landing himself back on deck in mere seconds. He never wore a safety harness. He knew how to furrow his brow and raise his voice and tell us that, as first mate, he was responsible for us. He had personally circumnavigated the globe in his own small sailboat at near-racing pace, sailing through every kind of sea imaginable, even surviving a rogue wave. He was equal parts Jack Sparrow and Han Solo, and we would have followed him anywhere—across the Pacific in a rowboat, up Everest in our shorts, suitless through an airlock into deep space—as long as he was there to tell us what to do. You can actually survive in deep space without a space suit, he would have explained. You just need to control your exhalations.
He promised us he would walk off the boat if it wasn’t safe, and that was good enough for us. He became our knot-tying, aggressively all-knowing weathervane. And sure enough, a new engineer was found, and a cook, and everything came together at the last minute, and finally, eventually, suddenly—we sailed.
The crew of a ship about to go out of range becomes diligent with its telephones. I texted my friends and family and posted a picture from the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I received one, too: my friend Victoria had gone up on the Marin Headlands to take a picture as we left. On the boat, we looked at it, the picture of ourselves. It showed the mouth of the bay, opening out from the land of the Golden Gate. Our ship was in the center of the picture, our huge steel ship, barely a dozen pixels wide, the merest smudge against the sky-colored sea.
And I talked to the Doctor one last time. She made me promise her something. She made me promise that if I found myself being washed off the ship, I would hang on.
“Promise,” she said. “Promise you’ll hang on with your last fingernail.”
Conversations about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch tend to follow a certain profil
e. First there is the flash of recognition, embedded with a nugget of misinformation:
Right! The giant plastic island! The one the size of Texas!
It’s not an island, you say.
Well, right, they say, moderating. It’s more of a pile.
You narrow your eyes. Seriously, how do you pile anything on the ocean?
Eventually, with coaxing, they let go of the island imagery, of impractical notions of how things pile, of Texas. Sobriety achieved, there comes the inevitable question:
Can it be cleaned up?
A lot of people have considered this question, and have debated it, and have pondered different strategies and possibilities. From this, a broad consensus has emerged among scientists and environmentalists, which I’m happy to summarize:
Get real.
We’re talking about the ocean here. Even assuming that we could just get a big net—whoever we is—and that it would be worth the massive use of fuel to drag it back and forth for thousands of miles across the Gyre, and that there would be an exit strategy for what to do with a hemisphere-size net full of trash…even granted all these impossibilities, there remains the intractable fact of the confetti.
As a plastic object spends year after year in the water, it becomes brittle from the sun. The waves begin to break it into pieces, and gradually it is delivered into smaller and smaller bits, a plastic confetti that might be the most troublesome thing about the Garbage Patch. Nets and larger objects may strangle marine life, and bottle caps and disposable cutlery may fill the stomachs of baby albatross, but the confetti has a chance of interacting with the ecosystem at a more fundamental level. Since it is consumed just as food would be, it has the potential to introduce toxins at the bottom of the food chain, toxins that may be concentrated by their passage up the chain to large animals like tuna and humans. In 2009, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (on a voyage funded in part by Project Kaisei) found plastic in the stomachs of nearly a tenth of all the fish they sampled in the Garbage Patch, and they estimated that tens of thousands of tons of plastic are consumed by fish there every year.
This is a lot like what happened in Chernobyl, where radionuclides followed the same pathways as nutrients to become incorporated into vegetation, and presumably animals. As the journalist and author Mary Mycio has written, in Chernobyl “radiation is no longer ‘on’ the zone, but ‘of’ the zone.” Perhaps we can already say the same of plastic in the oceans. It is not only a fact of life, but part of it.
How then to clean it up? To remove a billion large and tiny pieces of the ocean from itself? A cosmic coffee filter? And then, how to avoid also straining out every whale and minnow in the sea, every sprite of plankton?
It was no surprise, then, to find that organizations devoted to this issue tended to avoid the idea of cleanup. Charles Moore’s Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a leader in the budding field of Garbage Patch studies, has a bent for “citizen science” that hearkens back to science’s roots as a discipline founded by amateurs. Rather than speculate about cleanup, it produces peer-reviewed research for journals like the Marine Pollution Bulletin. Moore has been openly scornful of the idea of cleaning up marine plastic. Appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman, he swatted down his host’s hopeful questions about cleanup. “Snowball’s chance in hell,” he said. (Letterman told Moore his outlook seemed “bleak” and proposed they get a drink.) Other organizations focus on finding garbage patches in the other ocean gyres of the world or on raising awareness to combat the overuse of plastic on land.
So Project Kaisei is special. “Capturing the plastic vortex” is more than its motto. It’s a succinct mission statement. Not content to tilt at the windmill of keeping plastics out of the ocean in the first place, Kaisei has chosen to go after the biggest windmill of them all: finding some way to clean them up.
The force behind Project Kaisei is Mary Crowley, a toothy woman in late middle age with a warm smile and an unshakable belief in the possibilities of marine debris cleanup. She has gone so far as to envision ocean-borne plastic retrieval as an actual industry. “Fishing for plastics, so to speak, is not that different from fishing for fish,” she told me, leaning on the Kaisei’s starboard rail. “And unfortunately, we’ve so overfished the oceans. I think it would be a wonderful employment for fishermen to be able to get involved in ocean cleanup, and give fish a chance to have a healthier environment and restock.”
We can only hope that one day the fishing industry will be rescued by fishing for plastic instead of actual fish. (Indeed, a proposal to subsidize fishermen for debris pickup has even been floated in the EU.) In any case, let’s state for the record that in the early-twenty-first century, when most people said cleanup was impossible, Project Kaisei kept the dream alive. May they be proven prescient.
This summer’s mission, though, had been shrinking in scope almost since it was conceived. There had originally been plans for two trips, in quick succession, as well as a short press voyage that would depart from Hawaii to rendezvous with the Kaisei in the Garbage Patch. Mary had even spoken to me of tugging a barge out to the Gyre, of recruiting fishing boats to help retrieve mass quantities of refuse.
Those ideas had evaporated, and the scope of the mission had narrowed. The goal of the voyage now, Mary told me, was to use ocean-current models being developed by scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and at the University of Hawaii to pinpoint the areas with the largest plastic accumulation. By comparing our observations with the scientists’ models, it would be possible to devise effective ways of finding the plastic, a critical precondition for future cleanup. Think of it as fisheries research for the seaborne trash collectors of tomorrow.
She said we would also be “working on the most effective ways to use commercial ships—tugs, barges, fishing boats—to do actual collection,” or, as a Project Kaisei press release put it, “further testing collection technologies to remove the variety of plastic debris from the ocean.”
The word further alludes to the Kaisei’s voyage of the previous summer. I heard many references to the technology developed as part of that voyage, specifically “the Beach,” a device designed to answer the intractable problem of the confetti. Passively powered by wave motion, the Beach allowed water to run over its surface, I was told, capturing the plastic confetti without the need for impractical filtering, and without catching marine life as well.
As the Golden Gate Bridge sank into the ocean behind us, Mary explained her position. She said it simply wasn’t enough to talk about stemming the flow of plastic from land. Even if we stopped the influx from the United States, there would still be plastic from the rest of the world getting into the oceans. And she had spent her entire life on and around the ocean, building a successful sail-charter business. The ocean was her life’s work. She felt she had to do something.
“So we have to work very vigorously to stop the flow,” she said. “But we also have to effect cleanup.”
Was that so wrong?
14 AUGUST—37°49′ N. 123°29′ W
We were elated to have set out, and relieved that the often-rough coastal oceans were forgiving that day. We watched the Farallon Islands go by—a set of remote, rocky outcroppings that, technically, are part of San Francisco. Then we were done with land. As if to announce it, a whale rose out of the depths, not fifteen feet to port. Staring down on its curling spine as it cut the surface and disappeared, we screamed with the exultation of inland people going to sea.
As with all true adventures, though, ours was to be remarkable for its long stretches of boredom. Soon our lives became an endless series of watches and off-watches—three hours on, six hours off, three on, six off, repeated ad infinitum—and I began to learn a bit about the seafaring life.
Our first duty on watch, unsurprisingly, was to watch: to keep an eye to port and to starboard for anything that might threaten to destroy us, other than boredom itself. During nighttime watches, I would
stare into the darkness and try to see anything at all. On the second evening, tiny birds danced at the edge of our running lights, and I killed entire hours wondering if they were real.
The next task was the hourly boat check. The Pirate King would instruct one of us to walk the length of the deck, fore and aft, starboard and port; then to scout the belowdecks, to peek into the thundering oven that was the engine room (we remained under engine power even when augmented by sails); and finally to report back to him anything untoward or alarming, with special emphasis on whether the boat was sinking or on fire.
“Thank you,” would come the Pirate King’s approval, and we would turn to the main activities of the watch: the telling of stories and the sharing of bad jokes.
I was assigned to Watch B, which I rechristened Bravo Watch. It was, of course, the best of the three watches that made up the cycle. In addition to an official chronicler (me, self-appointed), we had Kelsey, a recent graduate from UC Berkeley, where she studied marine conservation; and both shipboard hipsters, Gabe and Henry, who were revealed to be old friends, inseparable since toddlerhood; and finally our watch captain, the Pirate King himself.
The Pirate King had turned out to be not only a hard-core example of seafaring masculinity but also something of a camp counselor. He seized every opportunity to teach us sea shanties, to recite poems both nautical and otherwise, to point out the constellations and unfold the mythology behind them, to show us how to splice rope and tie knots, how to braid special twine “Turk’s head” bracelets that would mark us forever as tall-ship sailors. On watch, as at meals, as in the lounge, he would break into story or song at the slightest provocation. I came to hesitate before taking a nap in the lower lounge, for fear that I would be awakened by the Pirate King, hanging upside down, splicing a lanyard with his teeth and singing a napping-shanty in twelve verses.
On our first midnight watch, he told us his life story: he grew up poor in Alabama, left home as a teenager, and remade himself in California. It was the tale of a young man enraged by how the world had treated him. Only through the trials and mortifications of sailing had he come to realize that, misfortunes aside, he could still make the choice to be happy. He had followed that revelation for the rest of his life, creating and controlling his environment, living for sailing. He worked as a captain and sailboat rigger and had lived on a boat since he was a teenager. The Pirate King had chosen his destiny.
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