Algalita Marine Research Blog

If you've got a hankering to join the 5 Gyres team, you're in luck. Here's the down-low for joining one of our upcoming expeditions: Reposition of Sea Dragon: Cape Town to Walvis Bay (6 days) Following the completion of the first South Atlantic Gyre plastic pollution expedition, Sea Dragon will make her way north up the coast of Namibia to Walvis Bay. Be part of the team to sail the 750 miles to this unique location, gain first hand experience of this incredible ocean-going expedition vessel, and interact with the full South Atlantic Expedition crew before they depart again. Price: $1500 USD pp includes gear, food, accom, plus a ‘send-off’ dinner with the full crew Trans-South Atlantic Gyre Expedition: Walvis Bay to Montevideo via St Helena (31 days) We’re looking for a few lucky individuals to take on the challenge of the full Trans-Atlantic expedition led by the 5 Gyres team. It’ll be an action-packed month trawling for plastic, analyzing fish, running the sensors and sharing life changing moments. Sea Dragon will stop in at St Helena (weather dependent) to survey beaches and meet with locals. Price: $7000 USD pp includes gear, food, accom, plus a ‘send-off’ dinner with the full crew Route Dates/Days/Price: Cape Town - Walvis Bay 28 Dec 2010 - 02 Jan 2011 6 $1500 USD Walvis Bay - Montevideo 04 Jan 2011 - 03 Feb 2011 31 $7000 USD Proceeds will go to the Two Oceans Aquarium, South Africa. To confirm your place contact info@pangaea-explorations.

The weather has been great for science, but the wind is a bit slow for sailing. We're a bit crunched now, having to make up some miles that we lost when when hove-to, during the storm. Now, however, the seas are calm and the sky is cloudless. Life aboard is much easier though we're starting to run out of food staples. Soon, it'll all be rice, beans, and pasta with olive oil. Most of the fresh vegetables are gone, and we're onto the canned goods. That's okay for me though, I've long quit eating normally. Something about being at sea saps my hunger almost entirely. The science work has been much easier in the calm waters. We're working with three different trawling devices now and Marcus is working to callibrate the two new designs in order to compare them to the standard Manta. Our protocol has become rigorous, trying very hard to minimize as many variables as possible, as our samples are the first ever from this part of the world. Every sample is plastic positive still, and some are more prolific than others. We've also started to see some large plastic garbage now. I counted about 15 pieces in a hour while one watch yesterday - buckets, plastic bottles, etc. Occasionally, we'll divert course to check these objects out, but for the most part, we're staying steady, trying to minimize the time we dilly-dally, as we have to make miles to get to Capetown on time. What we have come upon is a large, collected patch of garbage like we did in the North Pacific and the North Atlantic. But that doesn't mean it's not here. We're a small needle transecting a massive haystack. Seeing 15 pieces of garbage float by in an hour from a 72 by 15 foot platform is pretty alarming when one considers that scale that we're talking about. Personally, I'm getting excited for doing some outreach in Capetown. I love chatting to people about this issue. Many of our crew are people who haven't been to the gyre before and I'm a bit jealous of them as everything is a discovery. Jealous and also I'm jaded. Even though this is a new gyre I know philosophically that this plastic pollution would be here. I knew that we'd find all manner of the human stain in these waters. I would have bet my life on it. For many of our crew, it's exciting to see what this pollution actually looks like and understand the scale of it. Half of the motivation I have for this work is because we take ordinary (well, to me they're extraordinary) people out to the middle of the gyres to see with their own eyes exactly what we're talking about. Over and over again we hear about great ideas for cleaning the gyre up from people who have never been into the deep ocean and been witness to the scale of space that comprises it. Slowly but surely, we're showing the world that it's crazy to think you can clean this up, that gyre cleanup starts on land, that The American Chemistry can't scream 'recycle more' and pass the culbability for this marine eco disaster that their product creates off on the taxpayer anymore. If recycling worked, the sum total of virgin plastics being produced in the world would be going down, not up. 3% of plastic is recycled. Does that sound like a system that's working? Even if it's 12%, 19% who gives a crap? It doesn't work and at best all you can do with recycling is make plastic pollution last for one more generation where it will either be littered or landfilled. And here's the pill I swallow every day when I wake up, go on deck and look at ocean - plastic particles, just below the surface, cover 75% of the surface of the earth. Yes, they're dispersed, but we're 1700 miles from land and everywhere we look, we find it. Everytime. Without exception. And the good companies we buy it from sponsor conferences and say that's okay. Well, it's not okay. It's not okay that convenience can break the entire ocean. And it's not okay that the people who make it know this and won't admit it. Won't do anything about it except for spend millions of dollars to protect their product. Isn't it odd that the same people who paid a lot of money to defeat California's AB1988, the California bag ban, are also sponsoring the NOAA Marine Debris Conference in Hawaii in March of this year? I smell a rat. Today Chelsea, Rich and I saw a whale breach. It was pretty far away, but it came entirely out of the water. I'd never seen this before. It affected me. It reminded me of the awe and wonder I have for the sea. And why we're here doing what we do, and why I'm writing this message to you. 5 Gyres wouldn't be possible without your support. Please consider supporting our ongoing work and help us do the research and be the change the world needs to end plastic pollution by donating. Every amount makes a difference. Click here to learn more. 

We’re here!  After 2 weeks of punishing storms, pelting rains, 40-knot winds, and life at a constant 45 degree angle, we’re here, in the western edge of the accumulation zone in the South Atlantic Gyre (SAG). We all feel a bit like we’re emerging from a time warp, crawling out of our cocoons and remembering why were here. Man does it feel good... The day began auspiciously, with our first dolphin sighting at 5:00 am. Marcus, James, Mary and I were on watch, pulling up the manta trawl when James spotted a pod of 20-30 dolphins off the starboard side, flying through the water in a breathtaking succession of airborne arcs. Before I had time to wake the crew (all had requested a wake up at the first sighting of dolphins or whales) they were gone.  “At least we know they’re out there” said Mary. “I was beginning to feel like were all alone here!”It's remarkable how little life one sees on the ocean's surface during a crossing like this. We know that just below our line of sight, an entire world opens up – a planet almost as foreign to us as outer space. Billions of organisms, from the microscopic plant life that helps regulate our climate, to the bizarre, alien life of the deep. Yet from our boat, we see nothing but open water.  SLIMEHEADS IN THE SAG Our daily trawls are our only hint to the wonders that live below. Today we found a fascinating creature – one we saw often in the Sargasso Sea: juvenile eels, also called “Leptocephali” or “Slimeheads.” These eels swim all the way from Europe and North America to spawn in the Sargasso Sea, after which the adults likely die and sink. Once the babies are born, they begin an epic journey, swimming thousands of miles to return to their birthplace – freshwater ponds and rivers on either side of the Atlantic. This homing pilgrimage takes 1-2 years! Very little is known about these eels in the open ocean...  ENTERING THE GARBAGE PATCH Today’s trash sightings leave little doubt that we’ve entered the “accumulation zone,” the region Nicolai Maximenko’s computer model predicts will have the most dense accumulation of trash based on drift buoy data.  This morning, we pulled up a fishing float covered in barnacles, and a plastic bottle, also fouled with bryozoans and goose-necked barnacles. The bottle was a bit harder to grab with our nets – after circling the bottle three times, Marcus finally jumped overboard to grab it – not an experience any of us want to repeat again. Jumping overboard in the open ocean is no joke... By now, the entire crew was on deck, looking for trash. Bonnie took a firm stance on the bow, gazing out to sea for hours, and counting at least 20 objects float by. Rich counted another 15-20. We tried in vain to net a blue bucket, which quickly drifted out of reach. We’re seeing more fragments in our trawls, and are hoping that the seas calm even more in the coming weeks. We’d love to collect enough plastic for our pro surfer James Pribram to build a custom “gyre board” using recycled trash...  Less than 2,000 miles to go till Cape Town. Now it's time to prepare for our Thanksgiving feast on board. Jody is prepping, and Stiv has assigned a list of sous chef duties for the big day. We will surely be giving thanks for this change in the weather! 5 Gyres wouldn't be possible without your support. Please consider supporting our ongoing work and help us do the research and be the change the world needs to end plastic pollution by donating. Every amount makes a difference. Click here to learn more. 

We’re as far from land as we could possibly be in all directions… in the middle of nowhere… one of the most remote locations on planet earth. What do you expect to see? How about a plastic water bottle?  Dale raced to the wheel and spun the Sea Dragon 180 degrees. The crew dropped the yankee sail and jib. The engine roared and Anna yelled, “I still see it!” Bonnie Monteleone and Rich Owen are standing by with long nets. Our first passed missed by a meter, then we turned around for a second pass and missed the bottle when a wave slammed against the bow. “I’m jumping in,” I yelled to Dale. I hit the water, disappearing under the sea, and felt the surface of my skin go instantly numb. We’re much further south than we were in Rio de Janiero. The cold waters of the Southern Ocean that circumnavigate Antarctica flow into the South Atlantic, and now flow around my bare skin, stealing warmth from my core. I come to the surface and gasp. “I got it,” I yell, referring to the bottle, not my breath. I can’t catch my breath. I can only fill my lungs halfway. The shock of the chilly water is more than I imagined. The boat drifts away. “I’ve got to relax,” I think as I gasp, sucking in another mouthful of seawater. Lying on my back I watch the cirrus clouds float like parallel feathers in open sky. “Just relax,” I think. The boat spins around and comes back. Stiv throws me a seat cushion for floatation, as I kick my way to the ladder on the port side. Dale reaches his arm down to grab mine, and with the strength of a horse hauls me aboard. “I’m not doing that again,” I say, echoed by my wife Anna, “You’re not doing that again.” But maybe I would if it were a 3-ton tangled ball of fishing net, or a shipping container lost from a ship in stormy seas, but not a single bottle. We’ve entered the accumulation zone of the South Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, and today alone we’ve made nearly 20 sightings of large pieces of plastic pollution.  We’ve entered the high pressure system that dominates the gyre’s center. We’ve arrived. With the bottle on board, we pull up the hi-speed trawl. There are more plastic fragments in this trawl than every one before. There’s one thumb-size net float in the cod end, several large flat multi-colored fragments, a black piece of thick film with the small triangular bitemarks, a few long pieces of fishing line, and well over a hundred colored fragments.  Our goal is to trawl the seas continuously as we travel through this new garbage patch. With the hi-speed trawl and manta trawl, alternately deployed, we will get a cross-section of the gyre, and possibly see the waxing and waning concentrations of plastic pollution as we enter and exit the area. Anna is back on the bow with Bonnie spotting plastic and the occasional dolphin. I’m down below, having changed into warm clothes. Rich and Stiv are preparing lunch. Dale is at the helm sailing us into fair skies.

“One thing you can be sure of,” consoled Captain Clive yesterday at our 6:00 gathering, “all bad things – including weather - will eventually come to an end.” Though one could also apply this logic to all good things, the point remains...  Marcus and I climbed up the stairs this morning to a new sight – sunshine and blue skies! Mary Maxwell stood at the helm, smiling from ear to ear as she steered the boat under Dale’s teasing guidance. “Hey smiley, can you even see over that wheel?” Jody and Mike dropped the manta trawl in the water and kicked back in the sun, while Bonnie filmed the scene on her Go Pro. “This is what I’m TALKIN’ about!” yelled Jody. Seeing the trawl in the water lifted Marcus’ spirits considerably – this is our first trawl in a few days. And despite days of wild, choppy seas, the sample yielded the same mixture of plastic particles, Portuguese Man O War, and assorted zooplankton we’ve come to expect. We’ve now pulled out 18 surface samples, and every last one contains plastic. We’ve been drifting since Sunday, when we “heaved to” – shutting off the engine, turning into the wind, and letting the Sea Dragon bob along at the currents’ mercy. Which is a rather surreal experience, somewhat akin to being lost in space. At least that’s how we imagine it might be...Despite the frustrating nature of the situation – and knowing that all the careful planning in the world still can’t account for unexpected weather – everyone continued doing their best to both entertain and be entertained. Meals became more elaborate – huevos rancheros with homemade tortillas, beef stroganoff, roasted carrots with a balsamic reduction sauce, apple crumble, and Marcus’s famous pumpkin soup. (The one meal I might add, as his wife of three years that I have ever seen him prepare...) Chelsea even led Marcus and I in some “deck aerobics” on board – an awkward, graceless session of hopping up wearing harnesses and full foulie gear. We were quick to do this before any of the photographers or videoographers were awake!  Our 2-day delay seems to have been a good choice – the bulk of the storm is racing East just ahead of us, and the 15-20 foot waves are now a manageable 5-10. The setback means we will have to make a consistent 7 knots per hour to get us to Cape Town on time – doable, but not a lot of wiggle room.....send us your best weather thoughts from California and beyond!  5 Gyres wouldn't be possible without your support. Please consider supporting our ongoing work and help us do the research and be the change the world needs to end plastic pollution by donating. Every amount makes a difference. Click here to learn more.

We’re back underway! After 30 hours of being hove-to, we awoke to half the wind we’d been experiencing (now down to about 20 knots). Lovely.  The crew was on deck, the sun out, sails up, frowns were replaced by smiles and we are moving. The sea is still a bit chaotic but the frequency of the waves is spreading slowly, so the ride should get smoother. In a couple days time, it might be entirely flat and now wind. We’ll see. One issue is that we need to make some time. We’ve already extended our landing date by 24 hours due to inclement weather. We can’t push much beyond that. As of now, we need to average 7 knots for 22 hours of the day giving us two hours a day to conduct our science work. If all goes according to plan, this should suffice. But nothing ever goes according to plan on the open ocean. This I know from experience. If we can get the mainsail sewn again, we’ll be able to increase our speed by an average of two knots. I’d like to think that Rich, Chelsea and I willed the sun into coming out during our night watch. For a solid half an hour we sang every song we could think of with the word ‘sun’ in it. Truly amazing how many songs actually have the word ‘sun’ in their lyrics. Almost as many as ‘baby.’ Best of all, we’re able to conduct some science work again. Though the seas are still heaving and are not ideal for getting a good quantitative feel for plastic pollution, our trawl still came out fairly dense with photodegraded plastic and nurdles.  For a moment, if you will, try looking at the photo and begin to think of scale. When we trawl, we travel at about 2 mphs. The opening to the trawl is 60 by 25 centimeters, not all of that underwater, and the trawl is dragged for 1 hour. So essentially, you’re looking at a 60 by 25 centimeter swatch of ocean of over 2 miles. That’s an infinitely small swatch water with respect to the size of the ocean. This of course, isn’t accounting for all the plastic stratified in the water column below, driven down by big seas.  To add to the perspective, there are roughly 315 million square kilometers of ocean surface in the world. When you think about how remote we truly are, and how much ocean there is, and how much plastic we’re finding, that makes for some solemnity aboard our ship. In the coming weeks, we’ll send more photos of our trawls to give you, our readers a better idea of what we’re really looking at out here in the wild blue yonder. 5 Gyres wouldn't be possible without your support. Please consider supporting our ongoing work and help us do the research and be the change the world needs to end plastic pollution by donating. Every amount makes a difference. Click here to learn more. 

5:30 am. 5th straight day of screaming southern seas. We’re still heading South East to try and escape a bit of this weather system, but the charts show at least another day or so of nastiness. Still, we’re sticking to our trawling schedule of every 60 miles - which at times seems ludicrous. Like last night...“Marcus, are you sure about this?” I poke my head out of the hatch, gripping the side rails as gale force winds hurl sheets of rain at my face, sideways. I wonder if it’s even worth it. In a sea state this turbulent and agitated, plastic tends to be pushed down just below the surface. To say nothing of the danger of deploying and retrieving the manta trawl, while sliding along the wet deck as the boat pitches and slams wildly. A rainbow of shin bruises illustrate this point.  “Yes, we need the data points.” On our last expedition to the North Atlantic, gale force winds drove a 600-mile gap in our sampling. We called it the “hurricane gap.” From a research perspective, this was a real disappointment. Still, there’s not much one can do about the weather. This time, we’re simply pushing through it.  And the results have been fascinating. Even skimming our trawl along these frothing, angry seas, we’re still finding the usual synthetic suspects - larger fragments of plastic amidst shredded salps and small, silvery juvenile fish.  We’d expected going into this expedition to be sailing straight through a high pressure system that normally hovers right over our current position. Unfortunately for us, this high has scooted much further south, tempting us with visions of flat, windless seas. And its beginning to take a toll.  Tight quarters are made even tighter when weather drives us into the galley, 13 tired, anxious bodies. Patience wears just a wee bit thinner, and more of the crew begin to sass back at Dale, our resident Kiwi with a relentless repertoire of wise ass remarks. Still, given the conditions, I’m amazed by everyone’s efforts to keep their spirits up. Chelsea keeps us constantly entertained with her infectious laugh and her truly remarkable tongue tricks – you’d have to see this to believe it... Both Mary’s are always ready with a cheerful smile. Mike has officially bounced back from a wicked run of debilitating seasickness, and takes on bread-making with a vengeance. Stiv continues whipping up masterpiece after masterpiece in the violently swaying kitchen. Rich tapes up a daily reminder from his pack of 4 agreements cards – today: “be impeccable with your word.” James somehow maintains his laid back good-natured attitude, even after slipping dangerously close to the edge during a trawl episode – his harness keeps him on board. Jody is truly a jack of all trades, energetic sailor, chef, Irish-accent impersonator and master photographer. Clive and Dale maintain order amidst the climate chaos – making sure we all keep to a healthy routine.  And Marcus has one thing on his mind: TRAWL.  I’ve just taken off my “foulies,” which are beginning to live up to their name. Despite a dehumidifier in the foulie locker, our outerwear can’t quite get dry between our watches. The entire locker smells like feet. It's time for a shower – a slip and slide adventure in and of itself. One or two more days of this (we hope) and things will calm down a bit... though as Clive keeps reminding us about weather, (read with a lovely British accent), “she’ll do what she wants now, really”.

Trawling the sea surface in 30 knots of wind and a high sea state is a challenge.  The deck of the Sea Dragon rises and falls, tips and turns, in random directions. We slow down the ship to 1-2 knots and trawl for 1 hour. We're sampling a tiny slice of the sea, roughly an area the size of a football field. Now imagine the entire South Atlatic is a football field. The linear area of our trawl would look like the edge of a razor blade on that field. So, it's surprising that we find a few large pieces of plastic in such a tiny space. It's alarming, and the knee-jerk response is that we should clean it up.  Is cleanup possible? Yes, but it doesn't start in the sea. Cleaning the ocean of plastic marine pollution with nets, is like trying to clean smog over your city with a vacuum cleaner. It's not impossible, just etremely impractical. What we find is that islands in the gyres, like Hawaii, Bermuda, Azores, Mauritius, Easter Island, and natural nets that collect many thousands of tons of plastic pollution along their exposed coastlines. Also, subtropical gyres kick out debris to mainland beaches over time. With efficient coastline cleanup and and nearshore monitoring, the plastic pollution in the sea will wash ashore, where recovery and waste management is prractical. But it will still keep coming. It will still flow down streets and streams to the sea, so the tap must be turned off. What is working around the world today are better plastic products designed for recyclability instead of waste, better post-consumer applications of recovered plastic, better recovery systems, and product bans targeting the most wasteful plastics, like bags and foamed polystyrene.  If we can turn off the tap of plastic waste entering our seas, the the ocean will regurgitate the waste it's received.5 Gyres wouldn't be possible without your support. Please consider supporting our ongoing work and help us do the research and be the change the world needs to end plastic pollution by donating. Every amount makes a difference. Click here to learn more. 

Last night on my watch the wind was audible. Like a cacophonous convention of witches, all shrieking at once. Watching the wind speed was like a game; Rich and I would cheer the wind on. It vacillated between 35 and 52 knots. Sea Dragon sailed at 6 knots with only a small sail up in the front. It's amazing to think of the power of the wind like this: a 43 tonne ship moved at 8 miles an hour only from the resistence of the rigging and about 30 square feet of canvas. At this wind speed it ceases to matter if it's raining or not. Water is airborne always. Waves continue to break over the boat sending spray that accelerates as the wind picks it up, pixelating it and shoving it across deck in explosive sheets. Crossing an ocean by sail is no joke, as the ocean constantly confronts you and wears on you and it takes a training in the mind to find beauty in the ferocity. One must transcend her own condition, the cold, the wet, the bruises and look at her for all her glory. Her raw, intense power. It must strike awe in you, for if it doesn't, then you'll just find misery.  For me, to bring my mind to this place of wonder is at times difficult, but to do so is to touch the hand of god herself. But seeing the pollution in our trawls and again doing the mental math of where we are, and where this plastic trash is, astonishes the senses physically, aesthetically, morally, and philosophically. It's like finding an antifreeze bottle in outerspace.  Oh industry wonks! We can't recycle our way out of this hell! Your product is in fragments in the middle of nowhere in pieces! Quit the bait and switch, our liquid mother can't take much more! Your wonder material is scattered across the earth like poision absorbing poision! Let's look beyond next quarter's earnings and quit buying PR. Do something now damnit! Admit your folly!  This morning the barometric pressure is varying somewhat wildly from hour to hour which means we're passing through very tight isobars of low and high pressure. For now, it's on the climb which means gusty winds until it stabilizes. But I saw a patch of blue in the sky for a moment about as big as a pocket knife hole in a blanket. But it's something. The wind, too, has fallen a bit, gusts now are only to about 35 with an average in the mid 20s. Still a lot of wind, yes, but relatively speaking this is an improvement. We're going on seven days of this. We haven't been able to get the cabin very dry because all hatches are battened down. It's damp and humid. Below deck it's warm and constant cleaning ensures that bacteria doesn't grow in the moisture. Our course is taking us a bit farther south than we had anticipated. Our entire trajectory is based on one of our advisors, Maximenko's, model for the South Atlantic accumulation zone. The gyre is created by the rotating dominant high pressure systems in each of the oceans, but like the wind, they move a bit.  Not in a one to one fashion; water is a thousand times denser than wind, so the gyre will react to metric wind changes sluggishly. But from a wind perspective, the high pressure system here is at a much lower latitude than normal. Still the science work continues unabated. Even in heaving seas, we're dedicated to getting a solid transect as we can apply vectors later for sea state and wind to make an educated guess on the volume of plastic in this new gyre.  We've discussed sampling at lower depths in the upcoming expeditions, using a trawl to capture plastic as it stratifies in the water column due to increased sea state. This technique was used by SEA Education in their summer mission to the North Atlantic and hopefully Giora's model due to be published in a forthcoming paper will help us determine concentrations of plastic a lot more accurately. This paper is extremely important to the science of plastic pollution; it will show once and for all that calculating density and volume by mere surface trawling is only one piece of the picture. The ramifications of it are staggering; plastic pollution in the known gyres could be a hundred times worse than the current data indicates.  But to my astonishment and chagrin, even in these heaving seas our surface trawls are still finding a higher concentration of plastic to biomass in the samples. Even in this horrendous sea state. If only the sea were calm; I wonder what we'd find. I wonder what this gyre would reveal to us. That's what's so amazing about this voyage: no one knows. No one has ever studied this area before.  Let's hope the pressure stabilizes and I will let you know in full detail. At this rate however, we won't have the dramatic photographic evidence until the second transect in January which is an equally important mission. But for now we carry on, inching our way towards Africa, battered but with a strength of character and spirit informed by our mission, never whispering die and still shouting onward! 5 Gyres wouldn't be possible without your support. Please consider supporting our ongoing work and help us do the research and be the change the world needs to end plastic pollution by donating. Every amount makes a difference. Click here to learn more. 

Noontime position: 27 32.25 South, 26 34.51 West  Day 3 of gray skies, blustery winds, and a steady drizzle. It’s too choppy to trawl, so those of us not getting soaked on watch are huddled over our computers, reading books, cooking, and trying to stay entertained to avoid getting punchy. We’re on a starboard tack, so napping is out of the question – the boat leans precipitously. Marcus and I have found the only way to sleep on this tack is with one foot jammed against the wall, to avoid getting dumped out of our bunk.  On slow, rainy days like today, it's easy to forget why we're here. But one quick look at the mounting collection of gyre samples in our lab is an instant reminder. We now have 14 jars filled with a slurry of zooplankton, Myctophid fish, and pelagic crabs preserved in formalin, topped by the inevitable layer of floating plastic particles. Yesterday, we threw the suitcase trawl in for 7 minutes, and quickly decided conditions were too rough to leave it in. Just before we pulled it out, we watched a colorful tangle of synthetic fishing lines float by. "Hey! I think it just might go in..." shouted Mike. Sure enough, we all watched, cheering as the nets made a bee line for our trawl. Today is also a good chance to read through the collection of scientific papers on plastic we have on board. Several of these describe aspects of the problem that we’re here to investigate through Chelsea’s research – mainly the potential for plastic to transport chemicals from the marine environment to organisms, to larger marine predators, to us. We also found an interesting paper on plastic in the South Atlantic published in 1980. The paper describes finding tar balls and plastic pellets in surface trawls near Cape Town, South Africa, using similar equipment to what we have on board. This is one of only two papers we’ve seen on plastic in the South Atlantic, both from several decades ago. Has anyone out there seen others? Our research should offer a fascinating chance to see how things have changed in the last 30 years.  Winds have been picking up, tossing crew around the boat like popcorn. This makes everyday tasks – showering, cooking, cleaning, and simply staggering about the boat a major challenge. Still, Stiv manages to prepare one of his expedition specialties: French Onion Soup. The boat fills with the aroma of onions simmering in butter, wafting upstairs and out onto the stormy deck. In an hour, we’ll all gather for dinner, and the evening presentation – tonight Jody Lemmon will be sharing some of his photos and videos shot during his recent travels around the world.  AHHH!!!! We just changed tacks, and the boat is now in prime nap position. Off for a quick lie down while I can actually stay horizontal in our bunk!