Junk Raft: One Month Down, Two to Go!

They're making progress. Check out the map. They're halfway down Baja and a couple hundred miles out to sea. As you're reading this right now, Dr. Marcus Ericksen and Joel Paschal are bobbing on the surface, eating their beans, corn and fish, and calling attention to the sad situation of plastics in the sea. It's been a month since they left Long Beach harbor, however, they spent more than the first week hiding out at San Nicholas Island waiting for a storm to blow by. Now they're well on their way. As Marcus keeps emphasizing, quoting Captain Charles Moore, sailboats don't have ETAs, they only have destinations. For now, it's looking like late August is a reasonable guess for when they'll arrive in Hawaii. But lots of miles to go before then. Keep following their journey at their blog.

Amazing journey these guys are conducting. They have my complete admiration.

i-ff4eea443dfffac90dc264d91be3048a-Plasticmap.png
They're finally making some serious westward progress.

More like this

My phone rang at 8 this morning and the caller I.D. said, "Out of Area." That was an understatement. It was Marcus Eriksen, calling on the satellite phone on board Junk Raft, from 5 miles south of Guadalupe Island, which is about halfway down the Baja Penninsula. We talked for about 15 minutes…
A six-week drift to Hawaii will call attention to plastics in the sea Yesterday Dr. Marcus Eriksen, his expedition partner Joel Paschal, and their land-based support coordinator (and fiancee of Dr. Eriksen) Anna Cummins took the newly built "Junk Raft" on a trial run to Catalina and back. All…
Now it's time to share the truth. Back in the first week of June the Junk Raft expedition faced some very dark days. When they were first towed out to the Channel Islands one of the pontoons broke apart, forcing them to stop and gather the plastic bottles that came loose. Then, a day later they…
How bad is the situation with plastics in the ocean? Bad enough that the staff of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation are building "Junkraft," a raft made of 20,000 discarded plastic bottles for sailing the 2100 miles from California to Hawaii to call attention to it. I stopped by to check…