Mary Crowley is a friend of my wife and very active in the environmental movement. Here is a partial reprint of an article about her in Surfline and a picture of her ship used in the expedition. If you are interested, please click on the link and read it all. Find a way to help, even if you just pick up plastic on your way in from each surf session. Thanks.
PLASTICS: FROM BOTTLE TO BARREL
How our plastic use is coming back at us in waves
By: Dean LaTourrette
September 2, 2009
10651 views | 26 comments
Sailing out through the Golden Gate and into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, Mary Crowley took one last look at the City by the Bay as it went by. A cannon salute bellowed from the nearby St. Francis Yacht Club, while colleague George Orbelian paddled his 9'2" George Downing big-wave gun out to wish the vessel farewell.
The boat she was crewing on, a 150-foot research brigantine named Kaisei ("ocean planet" in Japanese), made its way out into open ocean and set its course towards the North Pacific Gyre, roughly a thousand miles off the California coast. Crowley was more than just crew, however. As the founder of Ocean Voyages Institute and co-founder of Project Kaisei (www.projectkaisei.org) along with Orbelian and Doug Woodring, she played a large role in pulling the entire voyage together -- a one-month, 3000-plus-mile research journey several years in the making. All this, in the name of plastic.
Well, not quite just plastic. Crowley and team were headed to study the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and plastic debris was the focal point. Along the way the band of scientists, environmentalists and yes, surfers, were to examine the North Pacific Gyre region, and the marine debris that has collected there. "The more accurately we can describe the problem, the better we can design the solution," says Orbelian, a San Francisco surfer who, among other things, served as SURFER Magazine's surfboard design editor in the late 1980s.
But let's back up a moment. For those who haven't yet heard the news, there's a giant garbage dump floating smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that, according to various researchers, has been quietly growing at a rapid rate. It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, comprised of two sub-areas called the Western Garbage Patch and the Eastern Garbage Patch, and despite lots of wishful thinking, the problem isn't going away -- it's getting worse.
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