One recent August morning, the sun was just rising when I was up and out the door of my apartment, heading to the Oakland estuary. Not everyone would be excited to get up at "oh-god-thirty" to tromp out to the bay's shoreline and strap themselves to a wobbly paddleboard to hunt down piles of garbage. But as an environmental reporter and water nerd, I was pumped.
Word spread through French Island's WhatsApp group before we'd even docked there was a boat made of rubbish heading their way. By the time Samuel McLennan secured his vessel built from marine debris at Tankerton Jetty, a small crowd had formed. Alan Pentland, editor of Off-the-Grid, the island's newsletter, was already waiting to get a photo and eager for a story. A constant stream of people came down over the next two hours to have a chat,
From behind a veil of pea soup-thick fog emerged hundreds of white and green fiberglass and Styrofoam pieces, some as small as a fingernail, some as large as a truck hood. By the following morning, the tide had carried the debris about 12 nautical miles and scattered it across Nantucket Island's beaches. Residents woke to a shoreline covered in trash, fiberglass shards mixed in with seaweed and shells, waves thrusting flotsam onto the sand.