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

Mary was waiting for my answer, her eyes bright. I laughed. “Well, it’s certainly different, Mary,” I said.

She smiled and handed me a piece of chocolate. I thought of something she had told me back in California, advice for someone who had never been to sea. The trick, she’d said, is not to think of yourself as limited by the confines of your boat. You have to believe that you are limited only by the edges of what you can see from the boat. And the indignities of being at sea had let me realize the truth of this. The solution to every misery was to open your mind toward the horizon. To know that you were not on the ocean, but of it.

19 AUGUST—35°05? N. 138°42? W

On our fifth day—sixth? twelfth?—we got our first real taste. The air warmed, the clouds disappeared, the ocean became settled and smooth—and we caught the propeller on a ghost net.

Ghost nets are fishing nets and tackle that have been cast off or lost by commercial fishermen. As nets and their attached gear wander and float, they find each other, tangling into ungainly masses of net and rope riddled with fishing floats and other debris. They have the largest bodies of any species of nonlife in the Garbage Patch. Synthetic men-of-war, they continue to fish, entangling and killing animals as they roam the ocean for years, perhaps decades. And they’re hell on propellers.

I awoke in my bunk to the sound of—what was that sound? Robin, another retired science teacher and a friend of Art’s, was crouched next to me, nudging my shoulder.

You might want to get on deck, he said. The propeller got fouled on a net.

I realized what the sound was. After five days of constant motoring, the propeller was no longer spinning. “Where away?” I gurgled, tumbling out of bed.

We came on deck to find the Pirate King fresh from the ocean, stripped to the waist, droplets of saltwater glinting in his beard. I want to say he had a knife in his mouth. He had gone over the side to free the propeller. His quarry lay at his feet: a young ghost net, long and narrow, uncomplicated by other nets and ropes, not yet tangled into itself beyond recognition. The excited crew clustered around. We had only just reached the Gyre, and already the Garbage Patch had reached out, striking us a glancing blow!

I had my video camera with me and began recording Robin and his collaborators as they untangled the net. Mary was there, watching it unfold, oddly separate from the crew, as she always seemed to be. She picked up a corner of the net and turned it over in her hand.

“It’s so hard to believe people throw stuff like this in the ocean,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to my camera.

There was debris in the water again. Someone brought out a long pole with a basket of netting at its end, and we started hunting. There was a trick to it. If you left the net in the water, it became difficult to maneuver; instead, you had to stab the water just aft of an object as it passed. In this way, like Vikings spearfishing from the deck of a warship, we brought several scraps of trash aboard.

Meanwhile, Kaniela and Nick took the dinghy out, buzzing around to pick up bits of debris spotted by people aloft. Nick was on board as a representative of the Ocean Conservancy and was the closest thing we had to a professional marine biologist or ocean debris specialist. Every year, the Ocean Conservancy leads a gigantic volunteer effort called the International Coastal Cleanup, and this year Nick’s efforts on the Kaisei would be the cleanup’s symbolic beginning.

Bravo Watch began. I grabbed a walkie-talkie and took bow watch, calling sightings in to Gabe, in the wheelhouse, who would note them in the log. Nick and Kaniela also had a radio in the dinghy. If any of us saw something particularly interesting—a bucket, a large piece of tarp—Kaniela would gun the motor and the dinghy would skip across the ocean in hot pursuit.

I climbed out onto the bowsprit, watching the water stretch past, eyes peeled for plastic crates and buckets. The dinghy zipped forward with Nick in the bow, a figurehead in sunglasses.

Something was bugging me. I keyed my radio.

“Gamma whiskey breaker, this is bow watch alpha bravo comeback, over.”

Bravo Watch liked its radios, and its nonsense.

“Loud and clear, bow watch,” came Gabe’s crackling reply. “This is the bridge. Can I get a two-five on your niner, over.”

“Roger, bridge,” I said. “Bridge, we are cleaning up the Pacific Ocean…by hand. Over.”

Robin came forward to the bow to say hello. People liked to say hello when you were in the bow, not only because it was scenic and quiet but also because it was one of the few places where you could talk without being overheard.

I told him I didn’t think our work was very useful.

“It’s a joke!” he said, making a face. “The one thing is testing the ocean-current models. That’s the one thing that could be real.”

But as far as I could tell, the only thing Mary knew of the ocean-current models was a pair of GPS waypoints—one from NOAA and one from the University of Hawaii. Was that going to be it? Get to a waypoint and take a quick peek around? I had heard Mary say that her NOAA contact had suggested we “call him when we’re out there.” But now even that would be difficult. There was a satellite link on board, reserved for nonpersonal use—but it had stopped working before we even made it out the Golden Gate.

And what of “further testing collection technologies”? So far, we were innocent of any such initiative, except for Robin’s project on the wheelhouse roof. He was working—at Mary’s suggestion, I think—on jury-rigging a wide, rigid net that, were we to drag it through a dense swath of garbage, might snag a share. This was technology development on the Kaisei: a warmhearted, wisecracking retiree gamely slinging a screw gun.

I had noticed something else on the wheelhouse roof. It was the Beach, stored from last year. This was the innovative wave-action device purpose-designed by Project Kaisei to isolate plastic confetti from the ocean water.

It was a slope-topped plywood box. Someone on the ship had built it during the previous summer’s voyage. Now it was tied down just aft of where we stood at the wheel, steering the ship. For a long time I hadn’t noticed it. Because it looked like a plywood box.

The dinghy zipped by on an intercept course for another scrap of debris. Robin reached out with two fingers together, as if he were going to pinch the ocean.

“It’s like you’re standing on the beach and picking up one tiny, tiny bit of sand,” he said.

20 AUGUST—34°42? N. 140°19? W

In the middle of the night, I dream that I am at the wheel of a great ship, sailing the Pacific Ocean. The cold air is thick with moisture. The rigging creaks with the roll of the ship. Water hisses along the lee rail.

In the afternoon, Mary told us that we had passed the NOAA waypoint. It had gone by without fanfare, earlier that day or the previous night. Aside from the debris watch, no measurements were taken that I knew of. We had found no mother lode there, and so had moved on, setting course for the University of Hawaii waypoint.

The water, choppy and gray, was free of trash. We appeared to be having trouble finding not only a good stretch of garbage but also the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre itself. We were sailing on strong winds, which suggested that the high-pressure zone that is associated with the Gyre was farther west than usual. Would we never get to sail the seas of plastic? Mary maintained that there was trash in the water here, but that we couldn’t see it because it had been pushed below the surface of the water by the increased wind and higher waves.

Nikolai Maximenko, the University of Hawaii oceanographer with whom Mary was working, later confirmed