Chapter One A SURPRISE AT SEA Captain Charles Moore felt the wind across the north Pacific Ocean die to a whisper A few weeks earlier it had filled the sails of the Alguita pushing the white 50-foot-long 15-meter long sailboat west from California to Hawaii in the 1997 TransPacific Yacht Race He carried a trophy for third place and was enjoying brisk winds pushing him and his crew back home to California until now Moore had scanned weather reports and turned the Alguita’s bow southeast It had entered an expanse of ocean that was as still as a painting Sailors usually try to avoid the north Pacific Ocean The weather there is not too stormy or unpredictable but too calm Legends tell of desperate sailors waiting so long for wind that they had to conserve drinking water by drowning their cargo of livestock Sailors and scientists now understand that this quiet expanse of ocean is the center of a gyre pronounced JI-er a whirlpool that is thousands of miles wide Powerful currents flow around the outer edges like rivers through the ocean Driven by the wind and Earth’s rotation the currents sweep
west across the Pacific Ocean and up the coast of Asia Then they move east across the ocean down the west coast of North America and west to begin the cycle again Captain Charles Moore and his research sailboat the Alguita The water encircled by the currents turns clockwise sluggishly Moore’s modern sailboat was equipped with diesel engines a system to make seawater drinkable and a radio to call for help Even so a detour across these calm waters would haunt him It would convince him that the ocean held a danger
so great that it threatened the survival not only of his crew but of organisms all over the globe On August 8 while standing on deck Moore saw something unexpected Here and there odd bits and flakes speckle the ocean’s surface 1 he later wrote in the book Plastic Ocean How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans He was disturbed because the objects were plastic He said it looked as if a giant salt shaker has sprinkled bits of plastic onto the surface of the ocean 2 Each day he scanned the water and found that No matter the time of day or how many times a day I look it’s never more than a few minutes before I sight a plastic morsel bobbing by A bottle here a bottle cap there scraps of plastic film fragments of rope or fishing net broken-down bits of former things 3 For seven days the Alguita traveled more than a thousand miles with Moore noticing that They were always there plastic shards fluttering like lost moths in the surface waters of the deep remote ocean 4 Moore returned to Alamitos Bay California where he had spent his youth swimming surfing and sailing in the Pacific Ocean By the 1980s he wrote pollution of many kinds made residents think twice about eating a fish they caught off the pier 5 Now he wrote that he could not stop thinking about all
those miles and days of plastic Over the decades we’d gotten used to the sight of trash on the beach by the roadsides and in riverbeds of shopping bags fluttering on fences and branches But something seemed very wrong about this plastic trash in the mid-Pacific 6 He wanted to know why it was there A National Aeronautics and Space Administration map of ocean currents depicts warm surface currents in red and deep ocean currents in blue Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer offered Moore an explanation Since the 1990s Ebbesmeyer had studied how plastic trash moves through the ocean He depended on a network of volunteers to report what trash washed up on shores When containers of manufactured goods slipped off ships Ebbesmeyer mapped the travels of their buoyant plastic contents to beaches around the world In 1992 an accidental spill of thousands of plastic bath toys into the Pacific Ocean sent yellow ducks washing up along the U S West Coast and Hawaii We
