Junk Rigged Boats

"We saw this catamaran — made from 1-liter pop bottles, PVC tubing and a Hobie Cat trampoline with an oar as a rudder — at South Beach Harbor on Saturday morning," wrote Timo Bruck in an email. "It was towed out a while later, but never returned. Do you know anything about it?"

Sorry, Timo, we have no clue (though we do have a call in to the owner), but it’s reminiscent of a raft called Junk that’s been drifting across the Pacific in an effort to raise awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Junk is a conglomeration of 15,000 plastic soda bottles, the fuselage of a Cesna 310 and a mess of good intentions that left Long Beach on June 1 bound for Honolulu. Self-described "eco-mariners" Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal are expected to arrive at the Ala Wai sometime Wednesday morning. Check out their blog for details.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is purported to be an enormous — some estimates say twice the size of Texas — raft of, well, junk that’s caught in the North Pacific Gyre. Sensational news reports make it sound as if the Patch is dense enough for a person to walk across but that has yet to be proved. What can’t be denied is that plastic is a growing problem in the world’s oceans that really can no longer be ignored. Several returning Solo TransPac and Pacific Cup boats have reported a disturbing amount of plastic floating around mid-Pacific. "We’re seeing some kind of plastic going by every 30 seconds or so," reported Solo TransPac racer Rob Tryon. "About half of it is fishing related — netting, floats, etc. — but the other half is definitely land-based garbage: bottles, toys, baby dolls." Those kind of firsthand accounts really bring home the need to rethink our ‘disposable’ ways.