I put together this short video of yesterday’s departure of Junk Raft. An amazing fellow showed up for the festivities–Redondo Beach resident Don McFarland who in 1958 sailed a similar sized raft along the same course from LA to Hawaii with three other men. Two of them were mormons and did it to prove their idea that Hawaii could have been colonized from America. He said anthropologists at the Bishop Museum had recently said there was simply no way indigenous people from North America could have crossed the distance. It took them 69 days at sea, but they proved them wrong (and he said the anthropologists were really pissed at them for doing it).
You can see a little bit of Don in this video and he mentioned a sad shifting baseline example–that they saw no plastic trash during their journey 50 years ago. I’m sure trash in the ocean wasn’t even on their minds. It just wasn’t an issue back then. But it certainly is now and these guys are committed to giving it a higher profile. You can follow their journey at their blog.
“The human face of plastic pollution in the sea”: what it’s all about