LAND-HO!! or A Sight for Sore Eyes

It's true what they say about being able to smell land before you see it. The sweet, pungent earthy smell of dirt and grass drifted out to our boat around dawn well before we made it to the back side of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. 

We were unable to anchor off of town because of a heavy swell that had already closed the harbor off for days when we arrived. I am glad that the weather pushed us around to the other side because our first taste of land was here at Anakena Beach. 

Turns out that Anakena is also where a Polynesian king landed a few hundred years ago. I am also guessing that this gradual, sandy cove proved less dangerous than the pounding surf whittling away the other side of the island when he arrived as well.

An oasis comes to mind when I look back over these pictures. And aren't all islands the same?

 It certainly felt like one to Garen and I as we packed only a few bags, stored the rest under our bunks, and readied ourselves for a soft bed, stable footed shower, and perhaps dinner at a table rather than on our knees. Don't get me wrong, dinner on deck gives you a hell of a view. 

And how about this view? I could hardly believe it!

But what I really couldn't wait for was a chance to get into water that looked like this. I imagined sea turtles cruising through the corals, colorful reef fish darting in and out as I drifted over them, and patches of soft, pale sand dotting through it all.  

One of the great benefits of taking photographs, and then being able to look back on them, is that you see aspects of the places where you traveled that you missed with your naked eye, or that you missed even when you were looking through the frame to set up your shot. 

I hadn't noticed that the sky had been reflecting off of the sea water coating the sand at the water's edge with such an iridescent blue that  can't keep my eyes off of now when I look at the photo. 

Do you spot the lone Moai between the palms? He is facing inland, like most of the carved figures that are scattered over this island. 

The belly-button in the hill.

 Or so I named it.

Garen and I stood with the bags, chatting to a friend of one of our crew mates that had come to meet us at the dock. 

Jeff took dingy trips back and forth between the shore and the Sea Dragon several times, ferrying off all of the luggage and passengers that were eagerly awaiting land. 

Can you spot the fish in the above photograph? 

No? 

Neither can I. 

In fact, when we went snorkeling off of this beach a couple of days later we saw two fish. 

That's right. 

TWO. FISH.

The Sea Dragon is the ship anchored to the right.

We said goodbye to her for a few days and headed across the beach to wait for the car coming back for us that never came until.....two hours later we managed to hire a couple of taxis to drive us the 8 miles of road between us and a bed for the night. And the many adventures that awaited us on our three day stay before the crew turned over, and we climbed back on board for part two.

Almost there....when we get there

It seems impossible that something as mundane as a yellow, plastic bucket would float by the Sea Dragon out of nowhere when there is nothing but water and blue sky in sight. 

And yet, one did. What are the chances? 

I couldn't begin to formulate them in the mathematical sense, but I do find it disturbing that for a boat that is on a quick and dirty transect across the ocean, that a bucket would intersect with our floating home. 

How much detritus is out there? Does it matter? We know that there's a lot of it here whether it shows up in the form of fragmented plastic bits in the manta trawl samples,  or even as one yellow bucket, on one random day in April. 

We could have washed it down, and stored something inside of it straight out of the ocean. 

Our days pass with bucket fetching and.....karate? Yes. Garen has been studying it for 20+ years. Clive found out, (i.e. I told him), and after some wrangling...we had a impromptu karate class on the deck. 

"We'll get there when we get there," is one of the most frequently heard phrases on the boat right about 8 p.m. every night as we all gather around after dinner to listen to the day's debriefing from our skipper Clive. 

Although I'm trying to respect the very Zen-like, and true approach to sailing that Clive so sagely reminds us of, I'm ready to see an island appear in front of the bow. Ready to sleep on land. Ready to feel like good-great-god-almighty-we-freaking-sailed-all-the-f-ing-way to Easter Island.

Another Strange Catch

Garen is not the strange catch, although he is a "catch." I couldn't resist.

We were going along our merry way with nothing but clear blue sea stretching before us. 

When we snagged the most unusual catch! 

He resisted, putting up a valiant fight. This guy is one tough bugger. 

Once out of the ocean, we recognized our dreaded foe. THE BAG MONSTER! 

He was hard to subdue. And unusually far from home....his kind tend to travel close to shore before they get eaten by unsuspecting sea creatures mistaking him for a meal. BUT we hauled him aboard and made him answer for his crimes! Don't worry, he was "humanely handled" and not forced to walk any plank.

However, Chico Bags does need our help! You can go to SUED BY PLASTIC to catch yourself up on the lawsuit facing this stellar reusable bag company. I think Surfrider's E-Newsletter SOUP called the plastic bag manufacturers move "desperate." I'd agree and add one more adjective...dirty.

Go to Chico Bag's FB page and send them a message of support! We need companies like theirs to prevail! Let's make sure this lawsuit doesn't become a nasty precedent. 

We put our trusty British Sailor on watch just to make sure another monster didn't slip through our grasp!

Strange Catch in the Gyre

Ben's on watch and getting his groove on. He stayed there for hours that day. I get it. Headphones are a great way to retreat from the constant presence of other people. Even if you like all of them, if you are used to some alone time, escaping into music is a way to find space. In fact, I listened to my ipod shuffle-nano-thinga-mer-bob every time I wanted to get some zzzzz's.

This is what a puffer fish looks like puffed up. We spotted this little fish over the side, scooped him up for a closer look and a few snaps. 

I was eager to get the puffer back in the water. We did, and I watched as he floated away with its head and gills down, still inflated. Garen said that given a little time, he'd deflate. I hope so.  

My potential Titanic moment. Not the sinking kind, but the Leonardo Di Caprio kind. 

The bright blue water under the nose of the ship is what we saw most of the time. 

It doesn't make catching this in the middle of the night after pulling up a trawl any less disturbing. 

Garen's Research

Garen took measurements to collect his data at least once a day. I assisted him in lowering down various instruments like the Light Meter pictured below. He came out here to find out if the plastic fragments were effecting the number of phytoplankton in the gyre. 

Phytoplankton are micro-organisms that make up the base of the marine food web. It would not be a good sign if their numbers (that have been going down about 40% since the 1950's) were dropping because of the plastic pollutants. 

If you look at my shirt, you will see the TEAM MARINE logo. T.M. are an eco-action club at Santa Monica High School in California where we live. In fact, one of last year's team house/cat-sat for us while we were away. In any case, they are kick ass leaders in the community who have reached out to millions of people over the last few years. 

Garen and I kept thinking that their coach Ben Kay, who also has a masters in Marine Biology, would love being out there with us. 

A HUGE thank you to Team Marine for donating to our trip. I was really touched that they passed the hat to donate to our efforts. 

This is the Light Meter. Although it looks like it would light up itself, it actually measures the levels of light through that bulb. We lowered it to 15 yards, stopping at 10 and 5 yards on the way up to take a reading. 

Here's Garen's explanation for using the Light Meter and a brief list of other controls that he put in place:

"We were measuring the rate of light attenuation (lowering as a function of depth) at different places, to see if any change in phytoplankton concentration occured because of plastic micro-pollutants versus some other factor.  Other controls we considered included temperature, salinity, pH, and various nutrients including Nitrate, Nitrite, Ammonia, Phosphate, and Silicate."

Another finding. This one was useful. Amazing how it floated right by in tact. We actually had to do a little maneuvering, and I think I lost a net trying to reach for it, but it came aboard for the trip after not too much effort. 

One of the high-lights of my entire ocean crossing was jumping into a calm sea that day. 
I asked Garen how deep he thought it was. 


"13,000 feet maybe?"


13,000 FEET! OF WATER!! 


I stared down with my eyes open, not minding the salty sting. I haven't been able to fully wrap my head around being in water that deep, and maybe I never will. It was the true definition of mind blowing. 

Sunset in the South Pacific Gyre

Looking at the expansiveness of the sea and sky for days on end did something to my brainwaves. It's almost anti-stimulation, meaning that my mind was allowed to unwind, take a breather, and felt free to roam. 

Being sea sick was a giant pain in the ass but also a blessing in disguise. It meant that I spent most of my day on the deck of the boat. I took care of what was right in front of me. I focused on the moment without the distractions of reading books or typing on my computer. My life online was on hold and there was nothing I could do about it. 

The fresh perspective that time away gave me is priceless.

Jeff processed many a Manta Trawl sample. 

All of the plastic fragments, bits of blobular-life forms, and other sea creatures gathered in this mesh sock when you pulled the trawl out of the water. 

Another gift of this experience were seeing sunsets night after night. 

There really aren't always adequate words to describe life on the boat as we crossed most of the South Pacific. Just writing that last sentence seems dream-like to me. Inserting the phrase, "a picture tells a thousand words" feels like I've said enough.

The middle-ish of the South Pacific Gyre

Another morning closer to the center of the South Pacific Gyre. Our watch is very musical. Well, Charlie and Ben are talented in that way. We're lucky that they are. 

Our routine is fairly simple. We stand watch, we trawl, we process the sample, we cook, we sleep, we do it again. But wait! What in the world could we all be huddled around to look at?

We pull in an old fishing buoy that has become a floating marine eco-system sustaining crabs, gooseneck barnacles and probably a lot more than we see out of the water on our boat deck.

Sure, there the rope is probably made from nylon (plastic) and the buoy that is buried under all that life is most likely styrofoam, but now it is home to creatures floating through what could be termed the "blue desert" of the ocean. 

So when no one considers chucking it back in because now the flotsam has partially transformed into a very useful object, I feel sorry for the critters. The crabs that get pulled away first float down into the water out of sight . 

I ask Garen, "Can they swim?" 

He says, "Some of them are swimming crabs."

But swim to where? Chile?

Over the next several hours I am aware that the Gooseneck Barnacles are drying out completely. The smaller ones flake off onto the deck to be swept over during someones 8-2pm shift. 

The buoy comes along for the ride. Its final destination - a landfill in either Easter Island or Tahiti. What do we do with all of the modern detritus that looses it's function in the world and "floats" around on land and in the sea? 

Early April sometime...

The sight of Charlie behind the wheel always made me feel better. He was on my watch for the first half of the trip across and was responsible for teaching me how to steer the boat. One of my favorite aspects of this expedition was getting to know people who I would normally not cross paths with in my everyday life. 

For example, Charlie lives in a castle in Scotland, will be joining the Royal Army (who sails more than the British Navy...who knew), and plays the bagpipes. It's possible that I could have met him at another juncture but having this time together on the boat was super fun. As Bill put it, another crew member, Charlie was certainly our MVP. He knows how to sail well and his positive attitude is contagious. 

Oh, and he makes really killer brownies.

Garen is my "MVP" for life. Here he is getting ready to take his measurements. He started collecting data when they started trawling. I wish he was home right now as I write this so that I could give you a complete picture of what he did. I'll have to give it a shot on my own right now but I plan on designating more posts about his specific research in the near future. 

For now, I will say that this is what field science looks like on a cramped sail boat. You make do with what you have. Everyone does. Garen stored most of his instruments in a black plastic basket that used to hold apples until I dumped them into another box. We had yards and yards of line to send down to collect salinity levels, phytoplankton numbers, pH levels, temperature and other data that Garen later downloaded into a laptop in the galley. All of this line needed to be untangled daily no matter how clever we thought we were in sorting and tying it off the time before. Ah the glamour of environmental science. Actually, I know Garen wouldn't trade doing this kind of field work for the world. 

Our work always took the two of us and two more hands. Here is Jeff reading the light meter for us and recording those numbers into Garen's lab notebook.

As the manta trawl stayed out on one side of the boat for an hour every 60 miles (if my memory serves me correctly) we deployed this high-speed trawl out on the other side of the Sea Dragon all of the time. We would process the high-speed trawl sample at the same time as the manta and then send it back in for further collections. 

The wind continued to die down as we trawled closer toward the center of the gyre, forming a glassy, reflective mirror over the South Pacific that seemed to draw the sky and the sea closer together. 

March 31, 2011? or there about...

Welcome to the South Pacific Gyre. It is NOT an "island of trash." Although I think that the image that the "floating island of trash" conjures up in someone's head is useful, it is not the actuality. 

I am sure that there are other gyres (North Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Indian) may look more trashed to the naked eye, but it is my experience that for most of the trip across the South Pacific Gyre, this is what we saw.

And this does not make our findings less disturbing. In fact, it may make it more disturbing that right under the surface of the water in the middle of the largest ocean on the planet there lie flecks of plastic that one can troll for and fish out without much effort. 

Between trolls, Clive kept the musical theme of the crew going as he turned the cheap Chilean guitar that Ben bought before the trip into music. The musical talents of our 13 person crew follows:

Anna plays violin

Ben, Charlie, Clive play guitar

Charlie plays BAGPIPES!

Bill can sing

Every night of the trip after dinner someone presented the evening's entertainment. Many of my fellow crew mates showcased their musical talents. 

We crossed into the gyre and started to troll. We brought in the Manta Troll every 6 hours for weeks.

At first, we found very little or no plastic. Isn't that great? Then we got closer to the middle of the gyre. More photos of our findings in following posts......

But here is an example of one of our early trolls. Tiny jellies, and something called: 

"VELELLA VELELLA"

"Velella is a genus of free-floating Hydrozoans that lives on the surface of the open ocean, worldwide, and is commonly known by the names by-the-wind sailor, purple sail, little sail, or simply Velella. The most common, and perhaps the only species encountered is Velella velella."

Velella are strange little beasties. There were also other unclassified gelatinous blobs floating along that not even Garen could name. I liked the tiny Man-O'-Wars. 

We sailed towards the middle of what could be thought of as the dessert of the ocean. Very little life exists out in the gyre. The water is 13,000 feet deep on average, the winds stagnant, the surface glassy and the research unknown.....