âWhat happens is, the nets keep catching animals, and then the animals die, and then after a while, the nets get old, and they roll up on a coral reef, and the waves roll it alongââhe pauses, leans forward, continues in a stage whisperââlike a big avalanche ball, killing everything in its path.â Then his bushy white eyebrows will spring up above his glasses and stay there while he looks at you, wide-eyed with autodumbfoundment.
And killer drift-net balls are genuinely dumbfounding, like something from a B horror movieâso dumbfounding that, smelling a hyperbole, I later checked Ebbesmeyerâs facts. A ghost net may not kill everything that crosses its path, but it sure can kill a lot. News reports describe nets dripping with putrefying wildlife. Just three months before I showed up on Ebbesmeyerâs doorstep, NOAA scientists scanning the ocean with a digital imaging system from the air had spotted a flock of a hundred or so ghost nets drifting through the North Pacific Garbage Patch. When they returned to fetch them, they found balls of net measuring thirty feet across. âThere is a lot more trash out there than I expected,â one of the researchers, James Churnside, told the Associated Press. A few years earlier, Coast Guard divers had spent a month picking 25.5 tons of netting and debrisâincluding two four-thousand-pound, fifteen-mile-long high-seas drift netsâout of reefs around Lisianski Island in the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago. They estimated that there were six thousand more tons of netting and debris still tangled in the reefs when they left.
In Ebbesmeyerâs opinion ghost nets may pose a still greater danger once they disintegrate. While we were conversing on his patio, he handed me the oldest of the drift-net floats. âHold this a minute,â he said. It weighed almost nothing. âNow put it down and look.â On the palm of my hand, the float had left a sprinkling of yellow dust, plastic particles as small as pollen grains in which, Ebbesmeyer believed, the destiny of both the Floatees and of the ocean could be read.
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Sitting on his patio, I mentioned to Ebbesmeyer my dream of following the trail of the toys from beginning to end.
âItâs an expensive thing to do the kind of traveling you want,â he said.
I told him Iâd travel on a shoestring, roughing it, freeloading, hitchhiking, crewing on boats, whatever. I was convinced it could be done. Perhaps a shipping line would let me earn my passage to China as a cabin boy. Perhaps a magazine would send me to the Arctic on assignment.
Still skeptical, Ebbesmeyer nevertheless gave me a lead. âProbably youâll want to go with Charlie out on his boat,â he said.
Charlie was Charles Moore, captain of a fifty-one-foot catamaran, the oceanographic research vessel Alguita. In August of 1997, after competing in the Transpac, an annual Los Angeles-to-Hawaii sailboat race, Moore had for no particular reason motored north into the Subtropical Convergence Zone, known to sailors as the doldrums. In a 2003 article for Natural History magazine, Moore described what he discovered during his detour. Approximately eight hundred miles from California, the wind speed fell below ten knots, the water turned glassy calm, and drifts of garbage began to appear. âAs I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean,â Moore wrote, âI was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.â
A year later, Moore, a furniture repairman turned organic farmer turned charter boat captain turned self-trained oceanographer, turned himself into a plastic hunter, sailing back out to the
And killer drift-net balls are genuinely dumbfounding, like something from a B horror movieâso dumbfounding that, smelling a hyperbole, I later checked Ebbesmeyerâs facts. A ghost net may not kill everything that crosses its path, but it sure can kill a lot. News reports describe nets dripping with putrefying wildlife. Just three months before I showed up on Ebbesmeyerâs doorstep, NOAA scientists scanning the ocean with a digital imaging system from the air had spotted a flock of a hundred or so ghost nets drifting through the North Pacific Garbage Patch. When they returned to fetch them, they found balls of net measuring thirty feet across. âThere is a lot more trash out there than I expected,â one of the researchers, James Churnside, told the Associated Press. A few years earlier, Coast Guard divers had spent a month picking 25.5 tons of netting and debrisâincluding two four-thousand-pound, fifteen-mile-long high-seas drift netsâout of reefs around Lisianski Island in the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago. They estimated that there were six thousand more tons of netting and debris still tangled in the reefs when they left.
In Ebbesmeyerâs opinion ghost nets may pose a still greater danger once they disintegrate. While we were conversing on his patio, he handed me the oldest of the drift-net floats. âHold this a minute,â he said. It weighed almost nothing. âNow put it down and look.â On the palm of my hand, the float had left a sprinkling of yellow dust, plastic particles as small as pollen grains in which, Ebbesmeyer believed, the destiny of both the Floatees and of the ocean could be read.
Â
Â
Sitting on his patio, I mentioned to Ebbesmeyer my dream of following the trail of the toys from beginning to end.
âItâs an expensive thing to do the kind of traveling you want,â he said.
I told him Iâd travel on a shoestring, roughing it, freeloading, hitchhiking, crewing on boats, whatever. I was convinced it could be done. Perhaps a shipping line would let me earn my passage to China as a cabin boy. Perhaps a magazine would send me to the Arctic on assignment.
Still skeptical, Ebbesmeyer nevertheless gave me a lead. âProbably youâll want to go with Charlie out on his boat,â he said.
Charlie was Charles Moore, captain of a fifty-one-foot catamaran, the oceanographic research vessel Alguita. In August of 1997, after competing in the Transpac, an annual Los Angeles-to-Hawaii sailboat race, Moore had for no particular reason motored north into the Subtropical Convergence Zone, known to sailors as the doldrums. In a 2003 article for Natural History magazine, Moore described what he discovered during his detour. Approximately eight hundred miles from California, the wind speed fell below ten knots, the water turned glassy calm, and drifts of garbage began to appear. âAs I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean,â Moore wrote, âI was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.â
A year later, Moore, a furniture repairman turned organic farmer turned charter boat captain turned self-trained oceanographer, turned himself into a plastic hunter, sailing back out to the
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