Rowboat in a Hurricane by Julie Angus

clear any hidden debris before firmly reinserting it. Nothing. Although the unit was brand new, the connection had started to cause problems a few days before, and the short was occurring with increased frequency. Now, no amount of cleaning or fiddling would bring it back to life.
    I pulled out our small emergency GPS . It was vastly inferior because it was independently powered and thus could not be left on permanently. Instead, we would turn it on periodically to check that we were still on course. This meant we couldn’t continually monitor our speed, which was important for setting the ideal course to accommodate for the variable currents.
    The row had been tough so far. We’d lost our drogue, our main GPS had malfunctioned, a tanker almost introduced us to Davy Jones, and we still felt seasick. The experience was very different than my preconceptions, but I wasn’t complaining. It seemed a miracle that we were still afloat and still healthy. We were now making good speed, and it appeared our silver lining had finally arrived. The weather continued to improve throughout the day. The winds subsided entirely, but we had a strong, favourable current.
    Two birds slightly larger than seagulls soared above us for much of the day. They were white with black shadows near their wingtips and heads. Their flight seemed effortless. With outstretched wings they glided on air currents, a “shearing” flight technique that earned these pelagic birds their name—shearwaters. We now saw only seabirds, and then only two types. The other was the storm petrel, a small black bird with white markings that flew slower and lower to the water than the shearwater.
    It was incredible to imagine that these birds spent most of their lives flying above ocean waters. Shearwaters could easily fly a million kilometres in a lifetime. The only thing they couldn’t do on the water was breed. For that they would have to travel to a remote island, maybe in the Azores or the Canaries, where the female would lay a single egg in a burrow or rock crevice. But now the two birds I was watching had other priorities: their only concern was the fish they periodically dove into the water for.
    THE NEXT FOUR days slipped by quickly while we carried out our routines with pseudo-military precision. If it wasn’t for my journal, I could barely distinguish one day from the next, and even these entries were quite brief. The main thing that differentiated the days was what we ate and any sighting for our “I Spy” game.
    Colin had started “I Spy.” The rule was that you could choose any object on the ocean or in the sky, but nothing on the boat. It may sound lame, but when you’re in an unchanging world, the slightest intrusion is exciting. Shearwaters or storm petrels, and sometimes a jumping tuna, were the usual objects. Occasionally it would be a freighter in the distance or a jet contrail. And more often than we liked, we saw a piece of trash float by.
    It seemed strange to see garbage so far from land, in such a massive ocean. Where did it come from, where did it go, and who cleaned it up?
    According to the 2006 Greenpeace report Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans, an estimated 8 million pieces of litter enter the oceans each day. That’s 6 . 4 million tonnes of trash a year. An estimated 20 per cent of that garbage comes from the cargo of ships accidentally lost in storms. The remainder comes from land—trash washed into rivers and storm drains, or offloaded by cities that use the ocean as a de facto landfill site.
    We saw at least a piece of trash a day, almost always plastic—a bottle, wrapper, or some other unidentifiable chunk of man-made polymer—which, sadly, was unsurprising, as 9 0 per cent of the trash floating in the ocean is plastic, according to the 2006 Greenpeace estimate.
    This is not good news, because unlike trash in the past, which eventually decomposes, plastic endures. It takes 450 years for a plastic bottle to break down, and