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Plastiki, a 60ft catamaran made from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles is due to set sail from San Francisco to Sydney, early in 2010. The object of the four month voyage is to highlight the Eastern Garbage Patch, a vast floating island of washed up, toxic marine pollution in the centre of the Pacific Ocean. This area, six times the size of the UK, is where currents converge and marine debris - 90% of it plastic - gathers.
The idea is the brainchild of David de Rothschild, founder of Adventure Ecology, and was inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's famed 1947 journey from Peru to Fiji on the balsa raft Kon-Tiki. Plastiki was conceived after the British explorer read a 2006 United Nations study estimating that 46,000 pieces of plastic are floating on every square mile of ocean. When he reaches Sydney, de Rothschild plans to recycle the vessel.
The project is also a showcase for the technology that can be created by recycling.The yacht has solar panels, a composting lavatory, a hydroponic garden to grow food and two exercise bicycles to power communication systems. Read an interview with de Rothschild here and see a video about the making of Plastiki here.
Knut Haugland, the last of the six crewment who crossed the Pacific Ocean on the Kon-Tiki balsawood raft in 1947 has died aged 92. Led by Norwegian anthropologist, Thor Heyerdahl, the expedition aimed to prove the theory that people from South America could have crossed the Pacific on such craft to settle in the Polynesian islands. Heyerdahl came to this conclusion after recognising similar carvings in both locations and observing the steady westwards drift of clouds and ocean currents. Expert opinion stated that the expedition would fail, but after sailing over 4,000 miles, the raft made it from the coast of Peru to the Tuamotu Islands of French Polynesia.
Haugland's role aboard the Kon-Tiki was that of radio operator, keeping the outside world aware of the raft's stately progress during the long drift westwards on the currents off South America. Read more about his action-packed life here.
The expedition caught the popular postwar imagination and set a new benchmark for modern adventurers. In the wake of the Kon-Tiki's success there were numerous recreations of historical voyages. There was Tim Severin's Brendan Voyage, in which he sailed a leather-clad boat across the Atlantic, Hawaii's Hokule'a in which surfing legend Eddie Aikau died, and there was even the Guardian sponsored Vinland voyage. Led by journalist JRL Anderson, this retraced the 4000 mile route supposedly taken by Leif Eriksson from Greenland to an area near modern day Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, at the turn of the first millennium.
Interest in the Kon-Tiki really took off with the publication of the Heyerdahl's book of the voyage and an Oscar-winning film in 1950. The actual completion of the trip saw little more than a few news reports appearing in the Guardian, such as the following from August 12 1947.
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