Saw the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from a boat and laughed out loud

Last month I took a sailing trip off the coast of Hawaii, about 12 miles out, and we drifted right through a patch of floating debris. I spotted a single Croc, a soda bottle from 2009, and a fishing net tangled around a buoy that looked like a sad modern art piece. The captain shrugged and said, 'It's a lawn, but nobody mows it,' which cracked me up in that hollow way you laugh when a joke lands too close to home. I spent the next hour counting plastic pieces in a 10-foot radius, got to 87 before I gave up. Has anyone else had a moment where the scale of the mess just felt absurd instead of scary? Or am I the only weirdo who found it oddly calming to finally see it with my own eyes?

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tara64220d ago

Is it really that serious though? I mean, you counted 87 pieces in a 10-foot circle, but the ocean is like, 139 million square miles. That's a lot of zeros. Maybe we're just better at noticing the junk when it's all clustered together, and the actual density per gallon of water is still pretty low. Honestly, I've seen worse, like that time a storm washed a whole dock up on a beach in Oregon, and people were taking selfies on it. At least your captain made a joke. Sometimes the absurdity is just your brain's way of saying "well, this isn't going anywhere fast, so might as well laugh.