The Junk Raft

I met Marcus Eriksen at a FoLAR event (Friends of the LA River), and he invited me to come down and see the raft he was building out of 15,000 plastic bottles, an airplane fuselage, discarded fishing nets and a solar generator. He was planning a journey with his partner Joel Paschal, from Long Beach, 2100 miles to Hawaii to bring attention to the plastic marine debris (nicknamed the plastic soup) accumulating in the North Pacific Gyre.

I came down to Long Beach not really sure of what I was going to see, and got there in time to see the raft placed in the water for the first time. Soon after the fuselage was plunked on top of it and that was the beginning. I joined them for the first test voyage across the channel to Catalina Island and then sailed on the towboat, the ORV Alguita, captained by Charlie Moore, the man credited for first discovering the plastic soup in the Gyre over 12 years ago, for the first four days of the voyage to Hawaii. The trip was to take over 10 weeks, and drew worldwide attention to the plastic marine debris problem including many articles, TV appearances and a 60 minutes segment in Australia.

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