The crew have settled well into the rhythm of life on board, with watchkeeping, rest, trawling, cooking, cleaning, and keeping Sea Dragon running smoothly. We have continued our twice daily trawls off the stern, and our scientist Adam is pleased with the results. He’s collecting enough data to keep him busy in the laboratory at Exeter University over the long winter months.
Read MoreThe latest estimate of plastics afloat in our seas and oceans is put at 5.25 trillion pieces, weighing in at 250,000 tonnes. That, coupled with the fact that over 260 marine related species are known to be ingesting plastics from our oceans, and well documented evidence on the impacts of this ingestion on a wide variety of marine animals including zooplankton, makes man’s legacy a dirty one. However, it is not too late! We can change things.
Read MoreSea Dragon slipped her mooring lines at 1230 this afternoon to start the latest Pangaea expedition, the Gyre to Gaia II, from Horta to Lanzarote in the Canaries. The distance is about 980 miles and should take us about 7 days.
Read MoreNothing more shocking than feeling as if you are in the most remote part of the planet, and yet, seeing evidence of our footprint float by every day.
Read MoreAfter a great day of sailing and our last supper of our haute cuisine, we got – as a final touch – a little bird playing around in the last lights of the sunset. Now the sun made place again for the twilight that will slowly take us to our last ocean night with stars above us, leading the way, and lights underneath us in the water, carrying the boat back to land to Horta, Azores, Portugal.
Read MoreToday, due to the lack of wind and calm seas, we had a late afternoon swim call.
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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.
Read MoreBefore starting this trip I had close to zero sailing experience and my sea voyages were a few ferry rides. After 2 weeks at sea I have learned and experienced so much it is hard to sum it all up.
Read MoreLast day of trawling today, and now we point straight for the Azores! 33 successful trawls under our belt.
Read MorePlastic pollution is more much important that I could ever imagine in deep waters. The trawlings today happened without any problem. Everybody seems confident for the utility of the research, so am I. We already have 297 samples for TOC to study. We are at the beginning of something big!
Read MoreIn addition to our trawl sampling, we are accumulating quite the collection of larger plastic debris! So far on our journey we have retrieved crates, jugs, buoys, fenders, hausers, and floats.
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We were soon back to routine sailing until about 1720 hours when Captain Eric spotted something large and white floating about 100M off the port bow. In addition to the trawl’s catch, we had been seeing mezzo-plastics (several cm-long), some larger, floating by all day but this object was big, coiled on itself like a great white serpent. Eric called out and immediately turned the boat toward the “thing” – we did not know what it was.
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