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

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.

Watch was also a time for gossip. Ships run on gossip, and it is the most reliable way to spread information among the crew. Boredom creates such a powerful suction in the mind for anything interesting, anything new, or anything related to your situation—the situation, that is, of being marooned on a small, steel island. Night watches, when the rest of the crew were sleeping, were especially productive. Entire shifts were spent reenacting the captain’s social gaffes and speculating about whether Mary’s goals for the voyage were achievable. We wondered how long the voyage would be, and mused about what, exactly, we were supposed to be doing.

The space between conversations, normally reserved at sea for quiet reverie and communion with the mysteries of the deep, was instead filled by Gabe, who for the duration of the voyage maintained a running series of food fantasies. Night and day, becalmed or in high seas, Gabe would welcome us into his inner restaurant, a sensual wonderland of Thai green curries and simmering stews and more green curries —always with the green curry—and hot liquored drinks to ward off the cold air that chased us almost all the way to the Gyre.

At times it seemed Gabe had no other way to approach the world. Once, during a discussion of the myth of the Garbage Patch as a “plastic island,” I caught him staring into space, licking his lips.

“It’s more like…like a thin minestrone,” he said.

Oh, and then you also have to steer the boat, taking turns at the Kaisei’s tall, spoked wheel. You can pull off such feats of steering as you’ve never imagined: driving without being able to see in front of you (thanks to the masts, and the structure of the upper lounge, and whatnot), driving in the dark without headlights, driving in the dark without headlights while looking backward, with your hands off the wheel, drinking coffee, and telling bad jokes. These maneuvers and more, I personally executed.

All this is made possible by the absence, on the high seas, of anything else but the high seas. There is nothing to steer around, nothing to crash into, indeed no things whatsoever, except for you and your ship. If, within a ten-mile radius, so much as a rain squall or a tall wave threatened to violate our monopoly on thingness, the radar would sound an alarm.

All that mattered when you were steering, then, was the heading, which would be provided by the watch captain, in our case the Pirate King.

“One-eight-five,” he would say.

“One-eight-five, aye,” we would respond, duty-bound to get over the silliness of saying “aye” all the time.

You would then peer at the points of the compass as they wavered in the gimbaled steel housing of the binnacle, just beyond the wheel, and ponder how to make a five-degree course correction to a heading that wandered a good ten degrees back and forth, according to the swell and the wind and the whimsy of Poseidon.

16 AUGUST—36°55? N.129°27? W

In the afternoon, we saw our first piece of debris. The honor went to Charlie Watch. Art, a retired science teacher both crusty and jovial, said he thought it was a net, although it was too far away to be sure.

Around eight thirty the following morning, I spotted Debris Item No. 2: a large bundle of synthetic yellow rope, to starboard.

After only three days at sea, the mind was already so tuned to the featurelessness of the ocean surface that a bundle of rope was cause for major excitement. Even a fragment of kelp would have been a thrill, and this was actual rope. We went thronging to the rail. I wanted to cry “WHERE AWAY?” but restrained myself, as it would have made no sense. It had been me that spotted the rope, so someone else should have been crying “Where away?” so I could then call, “TWO POINTS ON THE STARBOARD BEAM!”

It was Patrick O’Brian syndrome. I had read too many of his rousing tales of early-nineteenth-century naval adventure. Now, on a large sailing vessel for the first time, I was afflicted by the urge, barely stifled, to scream “WHERE AWAY?!” whenever I had the chance, in rude imitation of the indefatigable Captain Aubrey. (The strange counterpoint to this urge was that I never got used to shouting “LAYING ALOFT!” before climbing into the rigging, as instructed by the Pirate King.)

The bundle of rope slid out of sight. “Where away?” I whispered.

There was more trash that day, small pieces here and there. We had no illusions that we were anywhere near the Gyre, though. We hadn’t traveled far enough, and the weather was still cool and windy, not the warm doldrums we could expect once we reached the Gyre. But it whetted our appetite. It sharpened our eyes. People