I swear we did. We left Hawaii with a basic plan of how to get to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Sail north into the beginning of the High, then motor East into the worst of the garbage, then take a 90′ left turn, calmly exit out of the top of the high, enter the area of Westerly’s above the high and sail easily to Vancouver Island. Now if you compare this to the track taken on www.oceangybe.com, one may wonder what went wrong. It seems like we have been taking a rather round about route.

Well, the North Pacific High is far from a stationary weather system. Sure, it always exists and is generally located between 30’N – 50’N and between 135’W and 165’W – which may not seem that much. Well, those co-ordinates sketch out an area approximately 2000km X 3000km. In Khulula , given perfect sailing conditions, it would take us approximately 10 – 15 days to cross this area just once. So when the High decides to move 2000km in three days, we are powerless to change our course dodge it and will be left powerless (aka wind-less).

So when planning our trip to the ‘Center of the Gyre’, we thought we may get lucky and be able to cross it with just 900km of diesel fuel. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation rapidly set-in once we looked at the weather charts for our passage time. It was not possible for us to venture as far into the High as the ‘center’ due to our limited diesel range. So we headed into the western edge of gyre for three days of slow motoring and garbage trawling. Looking back on our route now, it is very apparent how lucky we were not to venture to the co-ordinates given to us by Charles Moore of the Algulita Foundation (35’N, 145’W).

If we had gone that far, we would have found ourselves in a situation with three poor options:

1) Sail eastwards out of the gyre, and get beaten all the way back south to San Diego. Then we would have to figure out how to get home again from there. Days at sea: Unknown – Probably greater than 40.
2) Motor south into the easterly trades, and sail back towards Hawaii before starting the great circle route home again. Days at sea: 30 – 40.
3) Try to motor North-East until running out of fuel, and hoping for the unlikely event that the high would move off and allow us to sail out the northern edge. Days at Sea: 25 – 60.

None of these are at all attractive propositions, and may give an explanation of our course.

However, we did manage to enter the western edge of the gyre, complete surface manta trawls (to be scientifically analyzed by the Algulita Marine Research Foundation), water quality samples, and visual observations of the amount of plastic along our route.

The first thing to remember is that the image of the gyre as a floating island of plastic is completely false, and is a media generated fantasy rather than a scientific fact. It would be better described as a gigantic plastic soup. For every bit of minute marine life, there are numerous more pieces of small plastic floating in the water. Sitting on the boat pulpit doing visual counts, one sees uncountable thousands of tiny pieces of plastic everywhere and is only able to keep count of the larger pieces. As you start to gaze around, it is very likely that a fishing float, milk crate, plastic bottle, net or other forms of flotsam will impede you view towards the horizon. And remember the swath of ocean we see is extremely small when considering how large the gyre and Pacific Ocean are.

We are amazed that we are finding significant amounts of plastic in every trawl we have completed along our route thus far, regardless of whether it was in the “Gyre” or not. Which indicates that a much larger portion of the ocean is filled with these tiny pieces than we previously thought. I would not be too surprised if I was told that if one was to do a manta trawl in any part of the worlds’ oceans, they would find a piece of plastic within 15 mins ! It is not inconceivable. The thought that the entire watery surface of our planet could be polluted with these plastic pieces is both realistic and incredibly disturbing. Remember too that we are only trawling the top 15 cm of the ocean, think about all the other levels in the water column, not to mention the seafloor !

Interestingly enough, we have seen far fewer pop bottles than assumed. The currently accepted theory on-board is that they are more effective transported by wind, rather than current, they are blown out from the edges of the gyre and hence why we find so many on beaches all over the world.

These are just initial observations and once we have the reports from our trawls, we will be posting them all on www.oceangybe.com. 17 days down, 4 days to go (hopefully – fingers crossed) until we hit solid terra firma again. Oh, it is going to be so good !