ExclusiveThe voyage into the heart of the Atlantic gyre continues.

To make landfall in Uruguay, we’re dependent on our engine to propel our vessel through the windless areas of the open sea. But today, as we followed a line of garbage where we pulled out milk crates, buckets, and nondescript plastic garbage, we heard something terrible. The engine seized. Assessing, we determined that the gearbox had broken, rendering the engine useless. To fix this problem we’d need a machine shop, something one doesn’t have 1200 miles from land. The gearbox shaft extends to the propeller. When the propeller doesn’t spin, the boat doesn’t move forward. End of story.

So here I am, spinning slowly between swells on a becalmed sea with sails hanging, adrift in the South Atlantic with new thoughts on the definition of “the middle of nowhere.” Until wind, we wait, we sweat and we swim. The sea is so placid right now, we can watch small fragments of plastic on the surface floating by.

As Skip Dale donned Scuba gear to sort out the propeller shaft below Sea Dragon, I filmed from the water – the interaction between sea life and a fairly substantial ghost net (net bolus, net ball) we had happened upon just before the gearbox broke. Still under power when we discovered it, we had nearly missed it, and would have if it not for Simon’s spear. Yes, our South African artist crewmate, Simon, had brought a handcrafted, hand-fabricated spear on the expedition, the purpose of which had eluded me until now. Seeing it on the dock in Cape Town, I simply thought: hey, he’s an artist; this object is useless at sea, but it’s cool for photos. I could not have been more wrong. As I watched the bolus drift pass, Simon reared up, and like a Zulu warrior took a short running start and launched the spear from the stern. As if he’d done this a million times before, he hooked the net straight away (the design featured a barb so that it sticks whatever it speared), and he pulled it to the boat with a retrieval line, tied a line to it and then let it drift behind us.

A ghost net is a tangled mess of ropes and fishing nets that floats on the surface, kind of like an iceberg. From surface observations it appears small, but underwater it’s a massive ball that extends downward. Rope and fishing tackle are no longer made of natural fibers, having been replaced within the past 30 years by the non-biodegradable counterpart, polypropylene.

As I swam with the bolus, about 50-100 small fish took shelter under it. Three large Dorado orbited the smaller fish under the bolus and at one point I was able to get within a couple feet of them. Beautiful.

What’s bizarre about ghost nets is how many different kinds of ropes and netting materials comprise them. The ropes don’t necessarily come from the same source vessel, harbor, or watershed, but still somehow, in a great cosmic-drift-grind, they find each other out here, in the open ocean. Drifting through time and space, they conspire only to tangle together, tangle marine life, and slowly disintegrate in the sun, sending pollutant infused plastic fragments adrift in the ocean.

Simply touching this net-ball made a cloud of polypropylene dust explode into the water. I watched as the tiny fish just breathed right through it, unaware. As I hovered there, with Sea Dragon’s belly in the azure distance, I began to shudder to think about where I was, what I was doing and what I was seeing.

With a chill, I realized I was the first person on earth to shoot underwater video footage of a naturally occurring net bolus in the middle of the South Atlantic Gyre. It’s not a realization that fuels the ego, but one that stirs the senses as they rub up against the definitions of words like massive, horrific, unseen, random and sublime.

With modern technology, it’s often easy to forget you’re in the middle of the ocean – indeed a blue desert that encompasses 70 percent of the earth’s surface (only five percent of which has been explored). Yet here I was, having no idea that when I woke up this morning what awaited me in 15,000 feet of water.

Here I swam, untethered to anything, alone, observing bits of manufactured goods that once started out as oil in the ground. That oil was extruded from different sources, then refined at different refineries and shipped to different rope factories all over the world, sold, bought, lost only to one day collect here and be happened upon, quite by accident by our crew. And at this strange moment, in this nondescript patch of pure blue, I observe this entanglement as a sinister, toxic shelter for sea life drifting in a cerulean nether land. It’s like, as one crewmate said of our samples, finding a Twinkie in outer space.

Unfortunately, what we’ve confirmed now, in two separate expeditions, is that the Twinkies are everywhere.

Editor’s Note: This is part 13 in a special series. Voyage with Stiv and catch the exclusive each week here at EcoSalon during his months-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre and beyond.

Images: Stiv Wilson

The post Twinkies In Outer Space appeared first on EcoSalon.

ExclusiveTouring St. Helena and beyond.

“He died of stomach cancer,” are nearly the first words that come out of our tour guide’s mouth. The guide, a diminutive woman of no more than four and a half feet, is adamant on this point. We’re standing in the drawing room of Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile house on one of the remotest islands in the South Atlantic. After the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was captured by the English and was exiled to St. Helena, one of only three inhabited islands in The South Atlantic Ocean. The Saints, as they are called, maintain that Napoleon’s death at age 51 was of natural causes – not of arsenic poisoning which many of the French believe – in parting, our guide might as well have said, “we really, really, really didn’t kill him…really!”

St. Helena is home to about 5,000 residents most of which live in a small town called Jamestown. This island is rarely visited by tourists, as there is no airport. Leaving or visiting the island means boarding a ship. Supplies come every six weeks by ship from South Africa.

A British Protectorate, St. Helena served as an important resupplying point for The East India Trading company in days of yore. The streets are cobblestone and the architecture British colonial. Just off the key, a mote stands in front of a castle gate that extends across the valley floor to the steep cliff sides that rise on either side of the town. Along the cliffs are decrepit bunkers and batteries used for defending Jamestown from attack. Dying of natural causes or murdered didn’t matter, Napoleon wasn’t going anywhere.

Our crew was on a stop over enroute from Walvis Bay, Namibia on our way across the Atlantic to Montevideo, Uruguay. St. Helena sits about 400 nautical miles directly north of the northeast border of The South Atlantic Gyre, the area where my crew is sailing through to study plastic pollution.

Arriving in the morning, we swam from our ship waiting for customs and immigration to clear us. From the deck I spotted a massive Whale Shark cruising the anchorage. Standing on the bow-sprit of our sailing vessel, Sea Dragon, I could see her speckles, her leviathan, ponderous bulk, wallowing in the clear cerulean water below. Witnessing such creatures in a place known to few on the planet is to enter another dimension, one more like the place a child’s mind manifests when in enthralled in a fantastical storybook.

It’s at these moments nature makes me present, illuminating for me the phantasmagorical industry that she really is, that she wants to be, if we just let her. A degree of respect pays for itself in aesthetic truth and bounty preserved. Conservation itself is an investment in the bank of wonder. For me, everyday on the sea conjures such revelations. It’s truly a gift to be 37-years-old and feel my baseline notion of purity deepening, when many believe the world is or already has gone to shit. 24-hour news cycles be damned. Give me mother ocean, a stiff breeze, dawn and dusk. I will navigate my own way.

I was off to the landfill and to the one beach to look at washed up plastic. Yes, our taxi driver was surprised. There are few taxis on the island and typically they’re only used for tours. There is nowhere else to go than Jamestown. To me, seeing waste from a community of 5,000 people who consume products of the modern world in a limited space is a fascinating enterprise. It’s akin to geneticists studying pure bloodlines of indigenous peoples. Self-reliance and limited space can often make proper waste management not a moral responsibility but a practical need.

The dump was better than many I’ve seen. One of the things I look at as a plastic pollution researcher is how the stuff enters the ocean. Often, island landfills will be situated just adjacent the sea where winds will blow a river of plastic trash out at the same break-neck speed with which humans consume it. St. Helena’s was no different than other islands with regard to how its landfill was sited, but I could tell by how the tree line leaned that the dominant wind was onshore and constant under-tilling of the earth stopped the vast majority of blow-trash from entering the ocean. However, the location was atop of what would be a watershed when the rains came.

It’s a funny concept, burying trash that doesn’t biodegrade. It’s not really going anywhere. There is no “away” in “throwaway” as they say. Living on a small island reminds you of that immediately. The plastic buried here are the dinosaur bones of tomorrow. And to tomorrow the anchor comes up and the quest continues. South America, here I come. How dirty are you?

Editor’s Note: This is part 12 in a special series. Voyage with Stiv and catch the exclusive each week here at EcoSalon during his months-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre and beyond.
Images: Stiv Wilson

The post Garbage, Saints and Whale Sharks of The South Atlantic appeared first on EcoSalon.