by Stuart H. Coleman
After 87 days at sea Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal pulled into Honolulu on August 27 having traveled 2,600 miles from Long Beach, California, on nothing but junk. The two sailed on the Junk Raft, a makeshift sailboat constructed from 15,000 plastic bottles fastened together with discarded fishing nets, old masts, and a cabin crafted from the cockpit of a Cessna 310. Eriksen and Paschal took the journey to call attention to the Pacific Gyre, a mass of debris roughly twice the size of Texas that’s swirling clockwise in the North Pacific. “It’s like a toilet bowl that never flushes,” says Eriksen, who served as a U.S. Marine in the first Gulf war. On a boat with a top speed of just 3.2 knots (less than 4 mph), the two kept busy blogging and catching fish, some of which had stomachs full of plastic. Says Paschal: “Plastic is forever, and it’s everywhere.”
This article originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.
Read more about the Junk Raft here.
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