The following events occurred between 9:30 AM and midnight, July 7th, 2015 onboard Sea Dragon.
9:30 AM
Watch team 3 has the noon to 4 PM shift today, meaning that during trawling we have to prepare lunch as well. Dwindling food supplies make cooking a rather adventurous endeavor these days. Starting off as a joke, the Dutch/German cooking team decided to make Pfannekuchen, the European predecessor of globally popular pancakes. Not thinking of the consequences we started at around 9:30 AM with the cooking, giving us 2.5 h to make approx. 40 Pfannekuchen for the 13 hungry sailors. Needless to say, frying Pfannekuchen on a sailboat rolling with the swell and waves is quite a treat. The gimbled gas stove hardly compensates for the 88˚ F in the galley, condensation dripping from the open windows. We managed though and had Pfannekuchen with mushroom sauce, as well as the sweet version with maple syrup.
4 PM
Skipper Eric Loss announces one of the much-needed swimming sessions. Surprisingly, it is quite difficult to go swimming when being in the middle of the Atlantic. Goggle, snorkel, GoPro with floatation device, check! Only slightly scared by over 4 km of water under my feet and Portuguese man-of-wars (poisonous jellyfish), that we see floating by from time to time, I jump off the bow of Sea Dragon and into the refreshing ocean. The recorded video, a manifest of astounding blue waters seemingly void of life large enough to see with the naked eye and childish adults jumping into the deep waters of the Atlantic. Our swimming break is relatively short, though, in order to keep up with our daily goal for traveled mileage.
10 PM to midnight
We are trying to run away from a thunderstorm chasing us from the southwest. Lightning strikes are flashing up on the horizon, a scary wonder of nature in this moment. Stargazing with the help of an app that tells us which heavenly bodies we are looking at makes us realize how small we are in comparison to other life on earth and the universe altogether.
Looking into the waters aft of Sea Dragon, we can see the stars of the ocean. Bioluminescent organisms flashing in the whirlwind waters stirred up by the propeller pushing us forward (the wind is not very steady today). We can’t be a 100% sure what organisms cause the bioluminescence we see at the moment without catching some. What we are sure of though is that we see something even more fascinating than just bioluminescence. In the flashing soup off the stern we observe little lightning-like explosions of bioluminescence that appear once in a while. Almost like little planktonic racecars crashing into each other and exploding in a bright beam of light. Once on land, we have to find out what we observed there.
Postscript: Apart from great personal experiences we found out a lot about plastic pollution in the North Atlantic garbage patch, also more than expected, and have many new research questions to further study the problem.
Last, but not least, a big thanks to all crew onboard Sea Dragon and especially Watch Team 3, who made this an unforgettable journey: “Cage” Katie Jewett, “Dirty Harry” Harm Pieters, “Queso” Kees Bezouw, and “Grumpy” Jan deGruijter. Thanks a lot to Eric Rehm for lending his GoPro camera to me.
Cheers,
“Moe” Moritz Schmid, The Ocean Cleanup Gyre Expedition, Bermuda to Azores, July 10, 2015