After six days of sailing and five days of trawling, we seem to be getting the hang of it! Every morning by 7:30, captain Eric chooses a new joyful melody and starts chanting the word “science”. The crew in the bunks all know what this means: time to wake up and put the trawl in the water to collect some new samples. Everyone finds his or her position and together we lift our metal toy from the front deck into the water. The process is reversed and repeated every hour until by lunch time the third bunch of samples is on board. It seems to go smoother every day.
While our cheerful scientists Julia and Francesco process the samples or do maintenance on the trawl, Harrie and I work on a new smartphone app to record ocean plastic data. Yesterday, this became a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. The trick seems to be to replace the problem with one that matters less every time.
With native speakers of six different languages on board, some of the four-hour watch duties spontaneously evolve into language classes. Eric’s dutch vocabulary now includes “paalsteek” (bowline) and “zweepslag” (crack of a whip), but don’t worry, so far he only brings the former into practice. Julia helps Tim and me brush up on our Portuguese a little. The English conversations during the common meals are regularly decorated with French, German and Italian words.
The vastness and apparent emptiness of the ocean has become more and more intense. We haven’t seen another boat for several days. We sail and we sail, passing only sargassum, and the horizon remains just as far. The moon and stars turn slowly around us, lining the clouds, sprinkling the waves with a hundred reflections. Flying fish rush over the waves. First mate Shanley has spotted bioluminescence. We felt like we could almost touch the dolphins that briefly played around the boat. The emptiness is an illusion, that much is clear. There’s not just plastic in there, there’s life, there’s beauty. And this is what I think we came here for – life and beauty, to experience, and preserve.
– Bart Sturm, The Ocean Cleanup Gyre Expedition #5, Bermuda to Azores, July 3, 2015
Pictured top row, left to right: Kees Bezouw, Harm Pieters, Julia Reisser, Pierre Maufret, Moritz Schmid, Bart Sturm, and Jan de Gruijter
Bottom row, left to right: Thomas Ventresco, Captain Eric Loss, First Mate Shanley McEntee, Tim de Rooij, and Francesco Ferrari
Not pictured: Deckhand Katie Jewett (taking photo!)