Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

The Gyre had seen several expeditions from researchers and activists the previous summer, in 2009, so I took to the phones, beginning a campaign of sustained pestering that I hoped would be my ticket onto one of this year’s voyages. And that’s how I met Project Kaisei.

I found the Kaisei docked in Point Richmond, across the bay from San Francisco. A steel-hulled, square-rigged, 150-foot-long brigantine, it was a striking sight. Think metal pirate ship and you will have the image. The ship is the namesake and floating linchpin of Project Kaisei, a nonprofit venture dedicated, as its motto reads, to “Capturing the plastic vortex.” I had somehow convinced Mary Crowley, one of its founders, to let me come along on a three-week voyage to that plastic vortex, a thousand miles away, but I had my doubts about capturing it.

Especially if we never left. We had spent more than a week without a clear sense of when we might set out to sea. A departure day would be announced, only to dawn with the new radar unit still absent, or with provisions yet to be delivered, or with a cook not yet hired, and we would not sail.

In the meantime, a subset of the crew would show up each day to help clean the boat, patch its rust holes, touch up the blue paint on the hull, or install an extra life raft, and I had time to develop my mixed feelings about the Kaisei. From the moment I first stepped aboard, I had tasted that flavor of excitement that has a note of terror. She had two great masts, the forward one boasting four spars: the yards, from which majestic square sails would drape, sails that belonged in a biography of Lord Nelson. Dozen upon dozen of cables and ropes—lines, we learned, not ropes but lines—led from wooden pins on the deck to points above; this set of lines to pull a sail down, that to pull it up; lines to orient the yards to starboard or to port; lines to raise and lower the spar of the gaff sail; lines to raise and lower sets of pulleys that were connected to still further lines.

Was I going to be asked to climb those masts, to edge out along those yards, approximately a thousand feet up? Like most sensible people, I don’t really have a fear of heights—only a fear of falling to my death. Which is not a fear at all, but a sensible attitude. On the other hand, what is the point of being on a tall ship if you don’t experience the tallness? I knew that when asked to go aloft, I would overcome or at least bypass my fear and force myself to do it. And so what I really feared was that I wasn’t afraid enough.

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