Seattle-based crew completes Around the Americas odyssey
Jun 17 2010 in Environment by Deborah Bach
During their circumnavigation of North and South America, Mark Schrader and his crew of sailors encountered stretches of ocean in worse shape than they could have imagined and something that gave them great hope – children.
“The kids renewed us,” said Schrader. “They immediately get that we haven’t taken good care of our oceans. Just from the questions they asked, we felt like there was hope.”
Schrader and crew members David Logan, Herb McCormick and David Thoresen are scheduled to arrive in Seattle today for a public welcoming ceremony starting at 11:30 a.m. at Shilshole Bay Marina — the same place they set out from last May 30 on the “Around the Americas” expedition.
The 27,486-mile journey on the 64-foot steel boat Ocean Watch took the crew clockwise through the Northwest Passage, down the east coast, around Cape Horn and back to Seattle in an effort to raise awareness about the troubling state of ocean health and mobilize people to help. The project is a collaboration between Pacific Science Center, the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory and Sailors for the Sea, a Boston-based nonprofit founded by David Rockefeller, Jr.
The expedition took the crew through the fabled Northwest Passage.
The 13-month expedition took Schrader and the crew to about a dozen countries, where they met with schoolchildren and teachers who’d been studying marine curriculum developed by the Pacific Science Center. The children would tour the boat, ask questions and learn about the expedition. And while their level of knowledge and enthusiasm gave Schrader hope, the marine degradation he witnessed on the expedition dismayed him.
In southern Chile, widespread unemployment and devastated communities are the result of overcrowding and diseased fish farms. Beaches in Peru are piled high with mountains of plastic garbage. Coral reefs in parts of Ecuador, Costa Rica and Mexico are badly damaged, and receding glaciers in Alaksa and Chile drove home the expedition’s message that North and South America are essentially one island surrounded by a single ocean.
“It was pretty sad in the south,” he said. “There’s a lot more pollution from fish farms and a lot more plastic pollution than we had expected to see. That was a bad surprise.”
A large component of the journey involved research projects undertaken by various scientists who joined the expedition along the way. Instruments atop the mast recorded weather conditions, and a probe dropped 120 feet underwater took twice daily water samples.
Tortoises in the Galapagos Islands
A camera mounted on the boat snapped 52,000 images daily, providing a constantly updated picture of conditions on the ocean’s surface. Scientists took DNA samples from jellyfish, considered an indicator species for the health of the ocean, and did cloud observations for NASA. The information will be studied by scientists to help determine the condition of the ocean.
The trip through the Northwest Passage has been made by only about 100 ships, though the melting Arctic ice pack has opened up the route to increasing numbers of vessels. Schrader said though he’d read about and extensively discussed the passage with crew member David Thoreson, who traveled through it two years ago, it was much different than he’d expected.
“It was so vast, so much bigger, that it sort of took us by surprise,” said Schrader, who has twice before sailed around the world alone. “And everything was brown. Everywhere you look is brown.”
But up close, Schrader said, the landscape revealed a surprisingly diverse – and fragile – ecosystem. “There were little tiny flowers and trees that grew flat on the ground, not vertically, and bear tracks and evidence of all kinds of animals,” he said. “It is an incredibly fragile ecosystem. What the little plans have to do in order to grow a little bit is extraordinary. What the animals have to do there to survive is extraordinary.”
Seeing that firsthand, Schrader said, drove home the devastation of the BP oil spill. “It is such a tragedy of such enormous proportion, I can’t get my mind around it,” he said.
Its spinnaker flying, Ocean Watch sails through San Francisco Bay.
The crew escaped a different tragedy — the magnitude 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile Feb. 27. One of the strongest earthquakes every recorded, it killed hundreds of people and displaced an estimated 1.5 million. Running a few days behind schedule, Schrader and the crew had left the Chilean port town of Valparaiso about 24 hours earlier and were far offshore when the earthquake struck.
“The marina we were in was badly damaged,” Schradersaid. “We were at sea when the tsunami went under us. We didn’t feel a thing. We were in absolutely the best place we could have possibly been. That was very, very lucky.”
The crew was equally lucky when it rounded Cape Horn, traveling from east to west, or what’s commonly referred to as “the wrong way,” since it requires traveling against prevailing winds and currents.
Believing they had a weather window, the crew headed for the cape on Jan. 23. As they got closer, a fierce system moved through, with sustained winds of 80 knots and gusts of 105. They pulled into a cove, secured the boat to a Navy buoy and waited about 30 hours until the winds died down. As a lull settled over the cape, they headed out again – flying a white spinnaker emblazoned with a blue representation of the continents of North and South America. It was, Schrader said, an emotional moment.
“There we were at the end of the world, flying a spinnaker. We were all in tears. It was just a relief and a realization that we’d come a long way and we’d probably make it home.”
And they did, arriving in Port Townsend around noon yesterday before heading back to Seattle for today’s welcoming ceremony at Shilshole Bay Marina. Though the expedition is over, the project isn’t. Schrader has plans for a couple of books about the journey, and will soon start fundraising to complete a documentary.
But for now, he’s savoring the experience.
“The ocean is still a beautiful, beautiful place,” he said. “Just being there was a highlight. It’s the most magnificent highway in the world. What an opportunity we’ve had to spend that many days on it. It was wonderful.”
Read the crew’s logs and see expedition photos here.
Dennis @ Discount Marine Electronics said on June 18, 2010
What a great way to bring attention to an unfortunate reality. The children are our hope for the future so these guys did a great thing by going ashore where they could and meeting with School children when possible to educate them about our oceans and the state that they are in.