This is way way way off topic, but some of you mind find it interesting and
I have a very small connection to this adventure.
http://junkraft.blogspot.com/
These guys just arrived in Honolulu after sailing a raft made out of plastic
junk and a Cessna 310 fuselage from Los Angeles. They left on June 1 and
met adverse winds and currents, so they struggled southward trying to not
get blown into the Mexico coast and eventually, after getting about a month
behind schedule, caught the westward trade winds and started jetting towards
Hawaii (at about 1.5 - 2.0 kts).
They brought with them a satellite tracking buoy made by the same company I
do UAV work for. The buoy is designed to float in the open ocean, but they
just carried it on board and it worked just the same. The batteries are
recharged via solar panels, and it wakes up and reports it's gps position
via satellite every 12 hours (which is configurable, but works just fine at
1.5 kts.) You can see their route on the trekme.com web page:
http://trekme.com/junk/trek-262-junk-across-the-pacific
The other reason I identified with their quest and checked their progress
just about every day was that I had a loosely similar experience in Mar/Apr
when I went out for 17 days north of Hawaii in a NOAA.gov research ship. We
ate a bit better and traveled a bit faster, (and went further north into the
debris field where it was much colder) but I experienced first hand the
amount of plastic and debris that is floating around in the north pacific.
I'm not a crazy environmentalist that runs around setting SUV's on fire, but
I do think we could probably work a bit harder to take care of our earth.
Plastic debris in our oceans is a problem that is getting worse and worse
and a rate that at least makes me a bit sad. It's one of those problems
that affects some areas more than others depending on currents and such, so
you might go to your own beach and say what problem? But if you go out to
the north pacific, there is an area the size of Texas where plastic bits and
chunks accumulate due to currents and weather patterns. It is hard to find
any spot in this region where you can't see some bit of debris somewhere
around your ship. It's not like a trash heap where you can step from chunk
to chunk, but the concentration is now getting high enough that you can
always see some bit of something from anywhere in that area if you stop and
look around for a few seconds. On our voyage we would stop every couple
hours to take water samples down to a depth of 500m and as we held position
and the current drifted by us at about 0.5 kts, I would spot a major chunk
of something every 30-60 seconds ... things like a fishing buoy, a tooth
brush, part of a plastic crate, part of a plastic 1 quart oil container,
once I saw a 55 gallon drum, a 5 gallon pail, fragments of fishing net, and
then just endless bits and pieces of non-identifyable stuff that once was
part of something larger and identifyable. The problem is that even though
the plastic breaks up into smaller and smaller bits, the bits themselves
don't really degrade (at least not in a timely fashion) and this stuff ends
up inside fish and wild life, and blah, blah, blah, now I am starting to
sound like a crazy environmentalist. ;-)
My point (if I have one?) is that there is a growing problem. I'm not in a
position to know the severity of the problem in the grand scheme of life on
this earth, but it is a problem and it's growing, and it is at least a
little bit sad when you see it first hand (and this is just one of the areas
in the oceans that are developing major plastic accumulation.) But aside
from that problem, it was fun to follow this crazy raft/sailing adventure
from Los Angeles to Hawaii, and it was even more fun that they used a
tracking device that I've worked a bit with, and even more fun for me to
follow along since after my one ocean trip in my life (which sort of almost
intersected the same area they traveled through), I am now an ocean and
sailing expert and can nod and agree knowingly with stuff they said in their
blog. :-)
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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